Yeah, I think one of the biggest shocks about the role is how little documentation there is on being a CTO. (Contrast that with the CEO role, where you can read Andy Grove, Ben Horowitz, Fred Wilson, etc..) I'd love to see other people talking about their experiences: I think many of us are going through the same struggles.
But yes, there is a dearth of information on how to be a good CTO (or VP Sales, CFO, VP Design, or really any other function). I think that's because a lot of the advice out there is effectively content marketing for VC firms, whose primary customer is CEOs. :)
I am convinced we are entering an age of 'software literacy' similar to the literacy explosion after Gutenberg. And that era generated organisations that learnt to follow written policy - this time around the policy will be executable. So it's not a major stretch to imagine a younger version of you downloading the equivalent of Grove or Welch's GitHub and running their recruitment process with the same code - sort of like an executives dot-emacs.
Ok maybe it is a stretch, but at some point our companies processes will be programmable - and that means shareable.
