Imagine two people. One is not particularly educated. One is highly educated but not strong on emotional intelligence. Imagine these two people have been forced to live with each other.Outcomes from such a coupling might include: One accusing the other of arrogance. One accusing the other of being ignorant. An inability to pull together if […]
Very few organisations are likely to survive if they stick to a top down command and control business model. Today we need distributed leadership with tools to support real-time situational awareness. One only has to observe wars taking place around the world. Resource-rich armies are being out manoeuvred by resource-weak (in relative terms) terrorists. The […]
Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers talks of meaningful work, ie work that motivates the worker. Such work has three elements: There is a clear link between work and rewards. The work is challenging. The worker has autonomy over how the work is done. If we apply this to the IT department: There is rarely […]
A couple of questions: Is there a physical assembly line at the centre of your organisation? Are your business processes aligned along predefined information flows? If the answer to either of these is yes then you work in a factory. The difference being whether you hear whirring or key-clicks in the background. You will have […]
Why would you trust anybody who: Doesn’t deliver when expected. Reverts to ‘speaking in tongues’ when probed. Rarely talks about or to the business. Who has no real insights on core business. Who believes Rapport is just a seventies database product from Logica. If these apply to you as a CIO or your CIO, then […]
How many CIOs see brand promise as a key element of their professional armoury? How many IT degrees have a module on brand promise? I suspect the answer to both questions is very few.Therein lies the problem of why the IT function often struggles to win the trust of the user community.Am I wrong? Please […]
Ask yourself the following questions: Do your people repeat mistakes across different countries? Do your customers lament that they have to deal with different business units in different geographies, along with your different local partners? Are your global account managers actually global account managers or are they really the local account manager based in the […]
There are three types of CIO: Those that do not make any effort to forge relationships with anyone, including their boss. Those that see the political wisdom in forming alliances with the powerful. Those that really care about the needs of users and so engage with them at every level of the organisation. It appears […]
If the plan is to move from being the only manager in the organisation with a CxO title to being a boardroom-present digital leader, then there is a little bit of brand surgery to be done. Paraphrasing some of the advice given in a recent HBR article: Define what the new public you will look […]