Is It Better To Be A Technologist Or A Politician?

From the Department of Eternal Questions: Is it better to be a good politician or a good technologist?

I once asked someone in the medical education field which was more important for a surgeon: good technical skills or good people skills? The answer was: both.

Let's consider your situation as a CISO or CTO/CIO. Remember that time you got hired into this job? You had more skills than the competition. You may also have had a good reputation but realistically it was skills: certifications, experience managing a team and a budget, worked in a comparable organization/industry, good recommendations, went to the right 'elite' university, and interviewed well. 

In brief you were a stellar technologist.

Put a different way, you seemed the best "fit."

Typical recruiters love to look for a back-fill for the previous person who just, um, left that job who is as close as possible to the previous incumbent. There are a lot of reasons why that is so but the biggest reason is it's easy. People love easy.

So, Day 0 and then Day 1, being a good technologist was the most important thing.

Funny enough, by Day 90 your goose is cooked. The former B-School professor and author Michael Watkins has a fantastic and under-appreciated book, The First 90 Days, that goes into the importance of having a business plan, if you like, for your first 90 days on the new job.

I mean, you had a business plan, right? And...you executed it...right?

As a Day 0 stellar technologist your political skills didn't matter. As we say a lot at Pythia, you were hired for your skills. Then by Day 90 it turns out that oops you were fired for your personality because you couldn't lead a team, couldn't align your priorities with your boss' priorities, couldn't manage relative to your peers, and so on.

So you think to yourself, Gee, it must be more important to be a good politician than a good technologist because I'm flailing around and I'm a good technologist ergo must be all about political skills.

Well, that maybe was the answer in cybersecurity until early-2025.

In the world of applied psychology we study predictors of job performance carefully. I'll boil it down for you. The best general purpose predictor of task performance (coding, budgeting, etc.) is technical skill. In fact it is nearly linear in that more skill leads to more technical job performance. There is no "good enough" in this association: more is more. Thus -- hired for your skills.

But a significant part of the world of work, especially for a leader, is people management skills: down (your subordinates), across and over (peers), and up (supervisors, Board, investors). Once again, more is more, but people management skills are more visible and harder to practice -- you can't get a certificate in being a "good leader." Your boss doesn't care that you're an awesome technologist, you need to provide results, and when results mean "nothing bad happened" that takes political skill. If you don't have that -- fired for your personality.

At many levels this is all still true -- except at the very leading edge in late 2025 and beyond (a.k.a. into 2026): the age of agentic AI.

Now we're back at technology skills being a differentiator. Sweet, eh? But...are your skills up to date? Can you describe the difference between RAG and an Agent? Can you put together a project plan with no- or low-code teams? Where is the AI Engineer in this -- if you even need one? Are you able to review vendor proposals for outyear costs? 

If you work in a company that is not utilizing the leading edge of agentic AI cybersecurity, and that's about 80% of all organizations, then you need both adequate political skills and good technologist skills.You also need to understand basic business skills. No question.

Be ready for when the company needs to switch to AI-based cybersecurity because it's going to be a bumpy ride. And be careful here: your definition of your level of "political skill" is probably inflated and you must get better at that while maintaining your technical skill -- and that technical skill set as a leader includes businessperson skills.

Let's answer the question posed here: Is it better to be a good politician or a good technologist?

Neither.

In 2026, you will need to be a better technologist than you are in 2025. You will need to be at least as good a politician in 2026 as you are in 2025. But due to disruptive technology in AI, you will need to be a significantly better businessperson in 2026 compared to 2025. By 2027 I estimate that 80% of companies will have an AI-based cybersecurity process -- not one like now, but one that's more like a video game (no- or low-code platform; counter-AI). By that point the technology built into the platform may overwhelm your technologist skill advantage. 

Sure, at the extreme top of the pyramid at maybe 30-50 companies there will be 7- or 8-figure salaries because salary roughly reflects value to the organization.

As for everyone else...

So ask yourself this question if you want to make that much: if in 2027 you'll be paid for your business skills, are you preparing for that?

Be a skilled business leader on Day 1, Day 90, and then as long as you can make it work.

Ask us how we can help you balance technology, politics, and business skills to become a 7-figure leader.