390- Don't Be a Tech Nerd w/John Doherty

You've Been Heard

Philip Howard

Tech News, Technology, Business, Management, News

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🗓️ 22 January 2026

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

John Doherty is CIO at Columbia Forest Products, but he started in marketing. That accidental path gave him something most IT leaders don't have - he speaks business first, technology second.The problem he keeps running into isn't technical. It's structural. IT gets called in after the business has already decided what they need. Someone shows up and says "we need SAP" and by then it's too late. The solution's chosen. IT's job is to execute, not influence.We get into his mill ambassador program (people looked at him like he had three heads), why steering committees come before PMO, and the "yes, but" approach that turns IT from blockers into problem solvers. Plus his prediction on what part of IT will be fully automated in 18 months.John's final message hits different: "Don't be a tech nerd. Find how to be a business person. Meet your peers where they're at. Speak their language, and you're going to break the stereotype that we're just a bunch of techies."

Transcript

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0:00.0	We're live.
0:10.8	Everybody.
0:11.2	Talk with John Doherty.
0:13.2	CIO, Columbia Forest Products.
0:16.5	Welcome to you've been heard.
0:18.1	You actually have a really cool company that you work from.
0:20.7	So talk to me, man. How did you get starts in this technology thing? Like everyone else,
0:24.0	he went to school for CIO leadership and technology? Nope. Funny is I went to school for marketing.
0:30.5	So I'm a marketing major. And I always had a tech skill, I guess. I played with technology computers growing up. And when I had to
0:39.0	choose electives in college, I said, well, that's silly. I'm not going to take an art or music
0:43.2	class. What else could I do? So I did take some IT classes. I tried it was like database management
0:49.0	and some classes in computer science. And I was set to be a, I thought, oh, I'll be a tech sales guy. And then when I graduate, I said, oh, IT pays more than entry level sales. Let me just try that. So I did that. And my plan was always to pivot back and have been in it for 20 years. Progress. So it's kind of ironic because I don't think there's many IT guys out there
1:11.0	there would be like, I was dying to get into sales and didn't work out for me,
1:14.7	signed it up in IT. I think it gives you a good, it gives you a different perspective. I think
1:22.0	because there's often this kind of dynamic in the technology leadership to CEO, CFO world, where there's a
1:32.5	difficulty in translating complex technology terms into business. And if you've got a sales
1:41.2	and marketing background, how do you think that's helps you in speaking to the C-suite?
1:46.6	Yeah, I think it gives you an advantage to understand what is your audience looking for?
1:52.9	Like what you think about solutions selling, right? If you're selling solutions to someone,
1:56.7	you need to know what problem you're solving versus just pushing the product or peddling the product.
2:01.5	And I think that it gave me that early on of why is this good for whoever I'm asking for money from or resources from or even translating what your team works on day to day into why does it matter to the business?
2:14.4	Because a lot of what IT does is just it's like the duck.
	...

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