A CTO's three core jobs: keep learning and reading to stay sharp, build or buy tools that make your team more efficient, and teach them constantly. These three things compound your organization's value.
Learn, tool, and teach. A world-class technology leader has 3 jobs relative to their organization. And it's going to be the way they keep that engine going. The first is that they need to be continuously learning. They should be reading. They should be growing. They should be expanding the knowledge they have in their minds going beyond that which is day within the firm. That is the job of the rest of the engineering staff or technology staff. The job of the leader is to be creating growth and the growth comes from learning. Second is a need to be tooling. I think there is a job for individual contributor work by technology leaders, stuff that's not just about management. And that's going to be putting in place either through purchase or sometimes through building the tooling that will allow their staff to have greater leverage on what they are, on what they're trying to accomplish. And with that comes the third imperative, which is teach. Their job is to make the rest of our team greater. They are a stat buff on the rest that will increase equity value for the enterprise.
