It has nothing to do with age. Notice, I adorned OLD with quotation marks. It's rather related to obstinateness, which frequently becomes a distinct mark of business ownership. Many CEOs deliberately focus themselves on certain commanding tasks and stunt the expansion of their knowledge in any other areas. For example, your CEO could be a 30-year-old venture capital hot shot, or a 55-year-old veteran entrepreneur; most likely both possess mere basic computer skills.
Of course, they love electronic chotchkies, especially those that bring their huge mailboxes wherever they go. Then again, it's mostly just reading and writing emails, but not necessarily organizing. Most of them can use Word and Excel. Some can even create their own documents, but formatting, formulas, data manipulation, graphs and somesuch fancies are usually beyond them. Leave alone PowerPoint, Visio, Publisher and so on. God forbid they need to look up a customer's contact information in your ERP system – brace yourself for barrage of slander against "your choice" of software.
Obviously, the founders of high-tech startups don't count – everything "computer" comes natural to them. But I had a CEO only a few years ago who called his secretary into the office every time he needed to insert a column in a chart. And the funniest thing happens to these people every time you send them a spreadsheet set for printing on a legal-size paper. It's like a fucking stumbling block – they will spend at least 30 minutes trying to reset the printing area to fit the letter size before crying out for help.
For those employees who don't deal with execs on a regular basis this is somewhat perplexing, considering that most of entrepreneurs are quite capable, and sometimes even brilliant, people. But for those of us who daily interact with these semi-savants, the situation is absolutely clear. The limitations have nothing to do with their natural abilities. Their responsibilities lie in developing the business and creating jobs to fill them with people, who can produce pretty reports and fancy presentations. They don't need to occupy themselves with learning new tricks.
And that's absolutely fine. In fact, if I have to choose I'd prefer them perpetuating the business than learning how to create a pivot table. Yet, some situations are simply maddening.
I've been working on a fairly complicated customer-commitment program with one of my client's owner. Now, all steps developed and all kinks worked out, the project is supposed to culminate in an Agreement document. I drafted the first version and sent it out in the Word format for the boss's review.
An email comes back – no attachment. Instead, in the body of the message, there are multiple paragraphs of my document copied and pasted in black followed by his version of the same paragraphs in blue. The crazy thing is that on the first glance they look exactly the same, but somewhere in the middle there are several words altered. And it's like a half of the document is there. Basically, I have to visually compare both versions of each paragraph line by line to find the damn changes.
I was like, "What the fuck?!" and picked up the phone, "Adam, what are you doing? It seems like you've adjusted only a handful of minor points, but it will take hours to fish them out. Why didn't you make those adjustments directly in the document?" He is perplexed (probably thinks that I've gone momentarily stupid),"How would you know what I've changed then? You would have to comb through the entire document." The truth dawned on me, "You've never used Track Changes or Compare Documents functions before?" "I've never even heard of them."
Maybe I should've been ready for this after so many years of dealing with these people. I was somewhat stunned, nevertheless, and, in stupor, offered a training session free of charge. "Great," he said, "I am very excited. I will let you know when."
I am still waiting.
The Frustrated CFO 