Early Adopters: The Visionaries

"Visionaries are that rare breed of people who have the insight to match an emerging technology to a strategic opportunity, the temperament(気質) to translate that insight into a high-visibility, high-risk project, and the charisma to get the rest of their organization to buy into the project.They are the early adopters of high-tech products.

……when Sheldon Laube at Price Waterhouse committed to purchase and install ten thousand copies of Lotus’s new and totally unproven product, Notes, he was acting as a visionary, When Pete Solvik, CIO at Cisco, drove all the customer service and order processing systems to the Internet, abandoning client-server computing even before it had reached its peak, he was acting as a visionary, When Jim Barksdale at Federal Express opened up their customer service systems to self-service, first via a PC then via the Web, he was acting as a visionary."

-- from CROSSING THE CHASM page 33