The Digital Age Storms the Corner Office

Jane Blankenship learned long ago that she had better understand technology if she wanted to get to the top and stay there. As chief operating officer at Forum Corp. in the mid-1980s -- before the personal computer was as common as a phone -- she was flung into the equivalent of a Marxism-vs.-capitalism debate when she had to decide whether to outfit the company with Apple Macs or IBM-style PCs. The CEO and board of the executive-education company -- all techno-innocents -- were considering going with Apple after being lobbied heavily by Mac evangelists who liked its user-friendliness.

Blankenship did her homework, however, and discovered that most of Boston-based Forum's customers were going the IBM route, since IBM stressed a platform and software that were best for corporate uses. "This wasn't about kids in school," says Blankenship, who is now chief executive of InsightShare, which sells customer relationship management (CRM) software and services. "We needed a business-computing platform." In the end, Forum avoided what Blankenship says would have been a costly investment in Macs that it would eventually have had to replace with PCs.