Actually IT as a category of jobs requires constant knowledge and skill improvements. If you aren't reading HN and/or other tech news sites very regularly you're going to become obsolete very quickly.

If you're doing the same thing in IT for more than a few years chances are you're digging a hole for yourself. Just ask any Silverlight developer.

Yeah, that's the excuse I'm going to use when my boss finally realizes what that site with the orange bar at the top is ;).

You don’t pay engineers to write code, you pay them to understand subtleties and edges of the problem. The code is incidental. —Ted Dziuba

Which is an argument that applies just as effectively to executive management as it does to engineers.