'CIOs don't have the right skills to become CEO,' says website co-owner who sacked former Net-a-Porter CIO

Isabel Rutland wouldn't hire another CIO as a CEO at Discover&Deliver after letting Richard Lloyd-Williams go

CIOs and CTOs don't have the right skills to make the transition to CEO, according to the co-founder of luxury lifestyle website Discover&Deliver, Isabel Rutland.

Rutland had hired former Net-a-Porter CIO Richard Lloyd-Williams as the company's CEO back in 2014, but along with her business partner Stephanie Mahl, decided to let Lloyd-Williams go last month, claiming that he was unable to make the transition to becoming a CEO. He follows former Tesco CEO Philip Clarke as another CIO who didn't make their mark as a CEO.

Rutland told Computing that the split was amicable, and that she can see Lloyd-Williams doing very well as a CTO in a big organisation, but that a CEO role at a smaller business is not for him.

She explained that prior to hiring Lloyd-Williams she had also hired another senior technology expert in another part of the business, and found similar issues.

"I think that CIOs tend to be by nature introverted people, that's not to say introversion is a bad thing, but they are people who tend to like working in very small groups or on their own; you become a coder because you like to work by yourself, it's not a team sport," she said.

"I think I probably wouldn't find [CIOs or CTOs] with the right human characteristics and dynamism that you need, especially in a small business. [Staff] have to love you, they have to follow you - and you have to have a tremendous amount of leadership character to be able to do that," she added.

Rutland said that she and Mahl would take over the CEO duties for the meantime, as they try to figure out their next step.

She said CIOs in larger businesses can often be "corporatised" and lose the technical knowledge that they may have once had.

"If you can't evaluate decisions that you're making because you don't understand the [technical] language anymore, I don't see how that's really useful to any organisation," she said.

"We thought we could get someone to run the operations and that would allow us to go out and meet with designers and people in the industry, which is quite important - so far we haven't found that person.

"[An alternative] is to hire a good operations director who has worked within the logistics industry because that's quite a key part of what we do - and not have a CEO," she said.