Re: Appointment of a Transport Area Director

[Stewart Bryant <[e-mail]>]

On 03/03/2013 14:25, Brian E Carpenter wrote:


>> Clearly the NomCom felt it was between a rock and a hard place; I just
>> want to assert the principle that balancing both managerial and technical
>> abilities is within NomCom's remit.

Brian

There is a subtly in the manager vs technical expert debate that is
worth noting.

There are some technical managers who could do the job by leveraging
the use of experts and coming up to speed on the key issues very quickly.
However I would suggest that they are at least as rare and certainly at
least as valuable to their employers as  technical experts pool that
we normally draw on.

The level of competence needed would put such managers on a xVP
or C* trajectory, and it seems to me that they are likely to be even
more reluctant to take a career  gap than the academic community.

So it's not that the managers concept does not work, it's that it is
even harder to identify them with some degree of certainly and
then recruit the ones that the IETF would need.

- Stewart