Insight for Current and Future Business Leaders
From the category archives:
I’ll let you in on a secret: Most companies have used the bad economy as an excuse for laying off people who the company wanted to get rid of anyway. Now I’m not saying that these companies haven’t had financial issues — most companies have experienced a loss of revenue as a result of [...]
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You’ve got a bad boss. Maybe it was a surprise — he seemed nice during the interview. Or maybe it was a gift from higher-up in the organization — she was brought in to replace your previous boss. Whatever the reason, now you’re stuck with a bad boss, and you have to [...]
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I’ve previously written about why you might want to be a manager and the 13 skills needed by a manager. This article explains the seven biggest challenges faced by a manager.
1. Achieving a Stretch Goal
The organization you’re managing is responsible for something — whether it’s performing a business process, supporting some other organization, developing [...]
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Last week I posted an article about whether younger “digital natives” or older “digital immigrants” are better at IT. In responses I saw on Reddit or that I received directly, I noticed a pattern:
1. A lot of people were disappointed (to put it mildly) that I didn’t draw a conclusion in favor of one [...]
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I was asked this question at a recent speaking engagement in Utah, and I’ve thought about it a bit more since then. “Digital natives” are people who grew up using digital technology; they used computers as children and so they never lived in a non-computer world. “Digital immigrants” grew up in a world [...]
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In my previous post I talked about the problem of determining the truth in current events (and in other areas) when we’re faced with conflicting views from thousands of media and Internet sources. In this post I’ll offer some advice for dealing with the problem:
1. Become more conscious of the assumptions that you’ve been [...]
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I grew up in the 1950’s and 1960’s when there were just three TV channels, two local daily newspapers, a few local radio stations, and no cable or satellite TV. There were no personal computers — let alone the Internet — and so our news sources were pretty limited. We each picked our [...]
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You’re trying to get a new project approved, and you’re having trouble. Or you’re trying to get an employee to do things your way, and the employee keeps fighting you. Both these situations are disagreements, and the process to deal with them is similar.
Why Do We Disagree?
Let’s start with individual disagreements. When [...]
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I Believe …
The best businesses are honest with their customers and their employees.
The best companies have a win-win relationship with their customers and with their employees.
Management is about focusing the work of the employees by assigning tasks which best align the company’s interests with the employees’ interests.
Executive management is about focusing the work of the [...]
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I’ve promoted scores of people into first-time manager positions. Some did well and some didn’t. Here are a few of their stories, with names changed and a few relevant facts altered to protect the individuals involved.
Fred
This was early in my career, and I didn’t have any experience in promoting people into management. [...]
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In a recent article I wrote about why you might want to be a manager. If that’s what you want, here’s my list of the 13 skills you’ll need:
1. Communication
There’s a lot of communication when you’re a manager. You have to communicate with each of your employees. You have to communicate “sideways” [...]
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There are a lot of bad stereotypes associated with management — the TV show “The Office” illustrates many of the stereotypes on a weekly basis. But there are advantages to being in management, so I thought I would write a bit about management for those of you who are still in individual contributor roles. [...]
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We all have a tendency to define ourselves by the roles we play. The first part of almost every new conversation between strangers is asking the question, “What do you do?” We then use the answer to that question to apply a stereotype to the person. If the person answers, “I’m a [...]
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How a New CEO Affects the CIO
A few weeks ago I ran into a CIO I hadn’t seen in a few months. The last time I had seen him we talked about his job situation. The CEO he worked for had just been replaced, and the CIO and the new CEO were butting heads.
This situation [...]
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I went to my grandson’s piano recital last weekend. He’s just seven (almost eight) and he’s really good for his age. His part of the recital was only a few minutes, but the entire recital lasted two hours so we listened to a lot of other kids before and after my grandson.
What struck me in [...]
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I was having dinner with a CIO who had retired after a long and distinguished career. The conversation had been mostly small talk, but suddenly a thought occurred to him, and he sat up straight in his chair.
“Why is it,” he asked vehemently, “that CIO’s have to work so much harder than every other executive [...]
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1. Tests
I’ve always been pretty good at taking tests; I guess you could say I have a gift for “quizmanship.” But on a 1 – 10 scale, I would probably rate myself a 6 or 7 on the geek-o-meter. I’m not up there with some of the kids I once went to school with, who, [...]
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Last month I got a lot of positive feedback about the timeliness of my newsletter topic, “The Right Span of Control Isn’t a Number,” so this month I’ve written another newsletter article dealing with today’s problems. In our current economy there is a high likelihood that you’ve been asked to “tighten your belt” and cut [...]
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In my June, 2007 newsletter article I talked about how to organize IT, but I didn’t address one of the questions that keeps coming up during a bad economic climate: how do we deal with executives who want to cut the number of IT managers by increasing the span of control for each manager? Span of [...]
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I’ve written other newsletter articles about careers (see the links throughout this article as well as at the end of the article), but until now I’ve never specifically written an article about career mistakes. I think the subject has been too personal – I’ve made a lot of these career mistakes myself, and it’s hard [...]
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Success in IT is a lot like success in the stock market. People who don’t understand the stock market sometimes think that there’s a “right” price for a stock based on some elaborate and mystical formula. Similarly, people who don’t understand IT sometimes think there’s an objective way to measure an IT organization that will [...]
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Every IT organization needs skilled architects who are experienced in designing systems, databases, networks and user interfaces. In this article I’ll give you 10 reasons.
1. Architecture is critically important to IT.
Let’s start with a definition. In my book, Boiling the IT Frog, I explain the IT use of the word “architecture” this way:
For a building like [...]
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In 2004 I wrote a tongue-in-cheek essay called “Harwell’s Unfortunate Laws of Human Organizational Behavior.” I put it on my web site, but I just sent the link to a few close friends. Frankly, I thought the content of the essay was too different from my normal, more up-beat type of article. But I was [...]
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If I’ve learned anything in life, it’s that being “well-rounded” is a sure path to mediocrity. You’re much more likely to achieve career success if you get really good in one area than if you achieve moderate mastery in a number of different areas. That’s true even for managers and executives. You may not think [...]
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A few weeks ago BusinessWeek had an interesting article on firing people, pointing out the legal risks associated with terminating employees. Here are the things you need to know about firing that BusinessWeek didn’t mention.
5 Kinds of Firings
Let’s start at the beginning. In my experience, there are five kinds of firings:
Firing someone due to poor [...]
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Success in any job is measured by the alignment of expectations and performance. If the company expects “X” and you deliver “Y” then you fail, no matter whether or not “X” is achievable and no matter whether or not “Y” is actually better for the company. If it’s impossible to deliver “X” in the desired [...]
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The first part of January is time for the annual introspection exercise known as resolution making. Many of us will take a hard look at ourselves and try to focus on ways in which we can improve our lives. Some of us will take a particularly hard look at our jobs: Are we happy in [...]
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I’m writing this on November 7, 2006. That’s election day in the United States. During the last few months we’ve been besieged with television and radio advertising for candidates, and even recorded messages sent to our telephones. Now it’s time for all of the campaigning to end as we go to the polls to vote.
It’s [...]
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There are some jobs where achievement is the absence – or maybe the avoidance – of failure. Driving a bus is one of those jobs; if you make it through the day without an accident, without hurting or annoying anyone, and without falling behind your schedule, then you’re successful. There are other jobs where carrying [...]
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I got a call last month from a newsletter reader in India who wanted help in making a career decision. He was a bit vague about the details, but it seems that he impetuously quit his previous job over a difference of opinion with his manager. Now he wasn’t sure whether to try to patch [...]
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Ok, admit it. You’re reading this because you want to know the 5 reasons. That means that you’re probably like most IT people and you love lists yourself. Of course it’s not just IT people who love lists; it’s almost anyone who falls into the Myers-Briggs category called “Judging” which describes people who need structure [...]
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A recent article in ComputerWorld by Curt Monash reminded me of the poem about the Blind Men and the Elephant. The Computerworld article talked about different points of view from leading technology vendors. According to the article, Oracle and IBM view IT as data-centric, Microsoft views IT as people-centric, and SAP views IT as business-process-centric. [...]
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I don’t usually like to talk about stereotypes, but it occurred to me that the stereotype about men not asking for directions applies equally well to CIO’s of both genders. So let me talk about why men don’t ask for directions, and I think we’ll find some lessons that will apply to senior executives as [...]
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I don’t do job interviews well, at least not as an interviewee. But I do a great job when I’m on the interviewer side of the desk. And it’s partly because I’ve learned from my mistakes as an interviewee.
What a lot of people don’t seem to realize is that interviewee performance is not at all [...]
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I’m a bit concerned that aspiring CIOs are looking for a “silver bullet,” a magic solution that they can easily apply and thereby instantly qualify to be a highly paid CIO. The real world isn’t like that. Many years ago I had an employee who wanted to be promoted to a higher level position, and [...]
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I saw a shooting star the other day, a meteor streaking across the sky as it burned up in the atmosphere. A lot of IT projects are like that meteor: they briefly get a lot of attention, they brighten the lives of the people who observe them, but then they fade into oblivion when they’re [...]
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More than half of the subscribers who receive this newsletter won’t even open the email. I can understand why: you’ve only got a limited amount of time, and you have to be selective about how you use it. But let’s be honest; are you really being selective? Or are you just randomly reading some things [...]
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There are two basic approaches to hiring:
Hiring like a jigsaw puzzle, and
Hiring like an assembly line.
Hiring like an assembly line is more common. When you work on an assembly line you have very little variation in what you do. One particular task might be to put a bolt into a hole and then tighten the [...]
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The world is full of cycles. There are stock market highs and lows, periods of good weather and bad weather, even apparent cycles of good luck and bad luck. Many of the people-related cycles are caused by basic human nature. The bad part of a cycle starts when we hear bad things about a particular [...]
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When we come into this world as babies, we believe that the earth revolves around us, and from the way that most parents treat their newborns, I guess that’s true to some extent. As we grow out of babyhood, we gradually become aware of other people, and our concept of existence evolves into a view [...]
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I’ve heard that we go through a progression of stages as we learn a new topic. Before starting to learn a topic, we’re so oblivious to the subject matter that we’re not even aware of what it’s about. We’re in Stage 1: we don’t know what we don’t know. Gradually, we become aware of [...]
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A few months ago I was a speaker in front of a group of CIO’s, discussing some of the issues facing IT organizations. One of the CIO’s asked me what he could do to better communicate his problems to his business users, who seemed to have trouble understanding the difficulties associated with making changes to [...]
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What do the three things in the title of this article have in common?
Julia Roberts
In the movie Mona Lisa Smile, there’s a scene in which a Wellesley instructor played by Julia Roberts shows the class a painting, and asks them whether or not it’s any good. Up until this point all of the art they’ve [...]
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Last month I had the unique opportunity to help a large university plan its future curricula for its undergraduate and graduate degrees in computer information systems. The university recognizes that Information Technology is changing, and wants to make sure that its students are being prepared for the real world. To this end the university has [...]
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A friend of mine struggled with bad weather and worse traffic to make his way across town, arriving just in time for a scheduled lunch meeting. Unfortunately, he had misunderstood his calendar, and he was at the wrong restaurant.
When he told me about it the next day, it struck me how his predicament is an [...]
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I remember the first time I was in a management role, more than 25 years ago at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). I was a bit anxious because I had been put in charge of people who had been my peers. Then I surprised my new direct reports by asking them questions no one in management [...]
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