One Zero One: Mark Ridley, CTO of Ridley Industries
In the latest episode of Version 1’s One Zero One Podcast, we spoke to Mark Ridley, Director at CTO Advisory Firm Ridley Industries. Mark is an entrepreneur and technologist working with startups and corporations to ensure that technology is used creatively and effectively to support their strategy.
Mark was the technical co-founder of reed.co.uk, the largest job site in the UK, where he served as technology director during its growth from four people to over 350. Since then, Mark has had stints at Accenture in Dublin and was Group CTO of venture builder Blenheim Chalcot, where he looked after a portfolio of CTOs.
As his latest venture, Mark has started an advisory practice aimed at CEOs and CTOs, where he goes into businesses and helps them understand technology. The practice helps scale-ups and start-ups looking to become more mature, and experienced businesses that are looking to become more agile and nimble.
Democratising Ideas
In this episode, Mark speaks about the challenge of working against the opinion of highly paid executives who have good ideas but have the wrong belief that their idea should be and can be executed. As a result, Mark tries to democratise ideas and implements a methodology and process to ensure ideas can be validated through a discovery process, to ensure ideas are successful.
Ideas really aren’t valuable, its the execution that is.
To ensure ideas are successful, Mark highlights the importance of cross-functional teams. Including someone ‘on the hook’ for actually selling the idea (such as marketing or sales) is critical to the team, with this highlighted as one of the key learning points from Mark’s time at Reed.
Budgeting for Innovation
Mark believes that organisations are starting to resemble how they fund themselves, for example, if an organisation funds in projects, they may tend to be more siloed, whereas if they fund in capabilities, they may be more cross-functional.
Most organisations will tend to be conservative and fund things that they understand well, such as product line features. It is easy to build a business case for situations like this, whereas real disruptive innovation will require different questions to be asked. “Investment gating” should go hand in hand with driving down uncertainty within organisations through improving organisational knowledge.
When setting up an “Innovation Lab” or some sort, disciplined steps need to be taken to establish a culture of innovation that sits outside the lab’s normal activities. Organisations should aim to be about 50% successful in innovative experiments, and 50% unsuccessful, because if they are always succeeding to prove the experiment or hypothesis set up, then they’re not being brave enough. On the other hand, if experiments are failing all the time, there’s a problem to look at there as well.
The Role of the CTO
Mark touches on the lack of mentoring available for lead engineers acting as CTOs in start-ups, as the CEO of startups may possibly be the worst person to mentor engineers. This is as they most likely will not have worked with any scaled CTOs in the past or have the experience required. We often speak of SaaS on the podcast, but interestingly on this episode, we spoke to Mark about TLaaS — Technology Leadership as a Service.
Becoming a CTO is not a badge that says this person is the best at technology, in fact, its the opposite. It’s a career change, a step sideways rather than up.
Listen to the full podcast here or click the embed above to hear more about our conversation with Mark.
Find out more, stream and download any of Version 1’s One Zero One Podcast episodes from our website or any of your favourite streaming platforms.
