If your aim for the C-Suite is mainly to prove that geeks can become executives too, then you may be in for the short-haul and smarter techheads may be ousting you soon or you may just dissolve into oblivion and irrelevance. No enterprise need code spitting, network analysing, system designing, techies. But, a service oriented, process driven, result based, power contributor to the bottom line (directly if a technology business, and indirectly if not). It is no gainsaying, that no serious enterprise of any size can survive beyond the ideation stage today, without the use of technology. But, there are also many examples of IT not making quantifiable/meaningful contributions to the bottom line – for many reasons including the erroneous perception and acceptance by many key stakeholders, of IT as a support add-on to the enterprise as opposed to being seen and accepted as a key player in the enterprise’s value creation and consumption chains. Sometimes, the embers of this negative perception are fanned into flames by the absolute confusion created by IT (deliberately or inadvertently) about the inner workings of IT – don’t get it twisted, IT may be quite a difficulty to understand or explain, what with all the buzz words thrown around by marketers (today everything is either big data or cloud computing), the general confusion that IT is one and only thing, changing/restrictive/non-universal legislation, increasingly complex IT and business models, information security/vulnerability etc. As such, it is important that the CIO (or an aspirant), speak the language of his