As a Chief Technology Officer, as much as dealing and leading the technical and technology focus and support of a company, you’ve also got to communicate. I was in the upper 10% of Verbal SAT scores in the *engineering* college at Cornell. (my math scores were higher, but most verbal scores in engineering aren’t as high as math scores).
I’m a literate engineer.
A CTO needs to express themselves, and this is quite often done with writing.
I have two published articles on leadership for “The Cursor”, the former magazine of the Independent Game Developers.
The first article was “My Minions are Idiots” … which talked about leadership (as opposed to management) and how with proper leadership your team will do the right thing (in other words, the article pointed out if your people were not performing, it’s YOUR issue to fix and likely that you had not applied proper leadership traits and principals).
The second article was “My Boss is an idiot”. As with the first article, the point was really about how to be a good staffer by making sure you keep your boss informed, up to date, and support them as needed.
I’ve also written extensive white papers, sales collateral, business plans, IT “run books” (I don’t like this phrase for various reasons – it implies proper IT support is as simple as following a script. An IT service book is really much better), and other professional documents.
In my off hours, I also write fiction. I mostly wrote long form fiction and screenplays, although I have a few short stories.
My work tends to have multiple protagonists with one strong central protagonist with several side stories – sometimes, even spanning multiple time periods. It all ties together in the end.
I write hard science fiction and space opera, as well as fantasy fiction
I have several screenplays, both ‘magical realism’ inspired, a romantic comedy, and science fiction.