Computer skills taught in secret to maintain authority

Shh! Bosses learning

She often plies her trade at nights and on weekends, when no one is around to witness the 32-year-old blonde’s secret visits to powerful executives.

By Michael P. Regan, Associated Press The Daily Camera

Some of her clients insist the mysterious Jennifer Shaheen call them only on their cell phones, fearing messages left with secretaries could spark brush fires of gossip.

Yet there is nothing unsavory about Shaheen’s line of work.

She is a computer tutor to corporate big shots, giving pointers in the fine arts of opening e-mail attachments, navigating Excel spreadsheet and performing other PC chores the executives’ minions probably can do in their sleep.

"You’d be surprised by what they don’t know," Shaheen says. "And they’re not comfortable asking the IT person in their company because then they show weakness to their staff."

Now that the computer revolution is over — and it’s clear the computers won — some senior executives are in the embarrassing position of being perched atop the corporate ladder without knowing their apps from their elbows.

"It used to be a badge of honor to say, ‘Everyone knows how to use the computer, but I don’t know how to turn it on.’ Now they say, ‘I need help,’" says Gerald Cullen, a Gainesville, Fla., consultant who offers confidential, $50-an-hour technology training to executives.

Much of the ineptitude is blamed on doting secretaries who handle e-mail and other computer chores for their bosses, computer trainers say. And executives often are too embarrassed and intimidated to attend computer classes with clerks and secretaries.

"These secretaries were typing with 15 fingers and the poor executives were looking for the ‘X’ key and the ‘Y’ key," recalls Hossein Bidgoli, a California State University-Bakersfield professor who also teaches computers to executives.

IBM Corp. has even poked fun at this type of technophobia with a TV commercial featuring the "executivus obsoletus" — a dark-suited manager who worries he’s became extinct by not keeping up with technology. He’s shown on exhibit in a museum with dinosaurs and woolly mammoths.

Ian Colley, a spokesman for IBM’s consulting arm, says top executives often make ease-of-use a priority in products they seek for themselves.

When a company has many units involved in different types of business, all functioning on a variety of computer platforms, top executives can be overwhelmed. They want what Colley calls a simple "corporate dashboard" — showing at a glance how their business is operating in real time.

But some need more remedial help.

Shaheen says one client literally didn’t know how to turn on his laptop. So when training her clients, she starts with the basics, physically opening and closing a filing cabinet to explain how computer files are organized within Windows.

Though not all clients require that sort of training, it’s exactly this type of non-techie approach that attracts executives to personal technology coaches.

Michael Gallin, a partner in the New York construction company John Gallin & Son, Inc., is one of Shaheen’s few clients willing to publicly admit to needing her services. He says he was only taking advantage of about 10 percent of programs like Excel, Microsoft Outlook and Timberline project management software.

"There are people here who know the system, but they’re busy," Gallin says. "They run over and solve the problem, rather than show you how to do it. They hit eight buttons before you know what they did."

http://www.dailycamera.com/bdc/tech_plus/article/0,1713,BDC_2463_2338768,00.html