Insight for Current and Future Business Leaders
From the category archives:
The naive CIO believes all the articles telling you that it’s your duty as a CIO to prevent devices like iPhones, Android devices and tablets of all types from coming into your workplace. The naive CIO may actually believe that there is a workplace these days, even though more and more business is being conducted [...]
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My friend Derek Cheshire made an interesting observation yesterday: Tell me if I’m being stupid but after reading about the Greek austerity measures I do wonder why we have to try and make hundreds of public sector employees redundant. Why not just trim pay by say 10%? At least there would be more people with [...]
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Listening is one of the most important traits of a good manager. Good managers spend most of their time listening: listening to their employees describe the problems they’ve encountered, listening to what their bosses tell them to do, listening to what customers have to say about products and services. Beginning managers listen It’s easy to [...]
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There’s a naive belief among many new managers that employee personal problems should be irrelevant to job performance and therefore something that managers can ignore. We like to believe that when employees walk through the office door, all of their personal problems are left behind. To managers with this belief, employees are like robots: treat [...]
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People who have worked with me know that two of my biggest project principles are “No Surprises” and “No Rushing.” No Surprises Surprises are a sure sign of inadequate planning. When you do a project you have to anticipate what might go wrong as well as what might go right. Some of the things that [...]
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There’s been a lot of talk about cloud computing, and mobility has been in the news for years. But apps and an enterprise app store are going to bring it all together to remake the face of IT. Cloud Computing Cloud computing is a method for delivering computing resource. Its principal attributes are outsourced management, [...]
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I’ve talked about the changing nature of IT in a previous article, but it’s amazing to me how fast some of the changes are taking place. Ten or twenty years ago the key skills for someone in IT were systems analysis and programming — mostly technical skills. But more recently the need for those skills [...]
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Business literature is full of distinctions that some very smart people make between a manager and a leader: “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” – Peter Drucker “…Leaders are concerned with what things mean to people. Managers are concerned about how things get done.” – Abraham Zaleznik “Leaders are the [...]
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Know what the biggest difference is between an adequate project manager and a great project manager? The great project manager always learns from every project and applies that learning to the next project. Here’s a simple technique to help you learn from every project too. After each project completion, before you send the project team [...]
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One of the biggest surprises to new managers is the intense pressure to keep people working productively. This is especially true in a project environment like IT where employees aren’t doing the same thing day after day. Managing an organization is like being in a taxi with the meter running and only a few dollars [...]
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In my last article I talked about why IT magic is never good. Well, I guess I should have known better than to use the word “never.” In his “Thoughts by Techxplorer” blog, one of my readers came up with a pretty good exception: a situation where the thought of IT magic — but not [...]
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I recently spoke at a conference attended by senior business and IT people from accounting firms. I described my usual view on IT Magic: that when Information Technology gets too complex, it’s perceived as magic; then there are lots of problems for IT because business people develop unrealistic expectations. In the Q&A with attendees, one [...]
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Here’s the way most people justify automation of a manual process: they replace a high variable labor cost with a relatively fixed system cost. I’ll illustrate using graphs, then show how cloud computing fits into the picture. Before: A Manual Labor-Intensive Process Before any automation, the financials for a manual process look like this: With [...]
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Back in 1979 I put together a model of job performance to help with some process improvements we were doing at Digital Equipment Corporation. Here’s the model: I ran across the model when was going through some old papers, and I thought you’d like to see it. Here’s the explanation of the model that accompanied [...]
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I’ve talked a lot about human nature in my articles. I believe that human nature is the biggest challenge to most successful management, and especially the biggest challenge for IT managers. Information technology is all very logical. Software does exactly what you tell it to do. Computers — for the most part — behave the [...]
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IT governance has been getting a lot of attention lately in the press. Frankly, it bothers me, since I think that a focus on IT governance is misguided. Four years ago I wrote an article about the difference between management and leadership. In the article I said that: “… management is like pushing a rope; [...]
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The question about the pros and cons of using a business/IT liaison person came up at a meeting I attended last week. I’ve got to admit some bias on this issue. Long ago I tried using a business/IT liaison person for one of my software development groups, and I wasn’t happy with the result. The [...]
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A lot of people tend to confuse these two words. We work hard, focus on our goals, and figure that happiness will come once we achieve success. Don’t fall for this deception. Happiness Happiness is a feeling. It can be triggered by external factors — a friend, a lover, a place, an event, a food [...]
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People who complain fall into two categories: those who complain because they want help in resolving a problem, and those who complain because they want sympathy. Often the complainers themselves don’t understand why they’re complaining, so it’s up to you to figure it out for yourself. The Complainer as Problem Solver The first category of [...]
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How do you deal with someone who complains — whether it’s a customer of your company, a customer of your department, or even an employee or family member? How do you turn the complainer into a supporter? Here are some steps to take: 1. Listen If you’re going to make the complaint go away, then [...]
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Want to deceive people? Here’s how the professionals do it: 1. Do a survey and use a biased sample population People focus on the survey result and seldom pay attention to information about your sample population. So feel free to bias your result by surveying people you know will answer the way you want. Want [...]
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A lot of people think that the creation of business strategy is a mysterious process — something that’s secretly practiced behind closed doors in the boardroom. There’s a lot of mysticism around strategy setting, and so we avoid it for fear that we’ll do it wrong. But there’s no magic in strategy — just as [...]
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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 a [...]
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Have you ever watched a nature documentary showing penguins entering the Antarctic ocean? They gather at the edge of the water, hesitating until more penguins arrive. They look at each other as if saying, “Do you want to go first?” or “Are we ready yet?” Then finally the hesitation will end and a large number [...]
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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 do something. There [...]
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I wrote a book on this subject but it focused on the management and leadership aspects of IT — not the technical stuff. Now I’m looking at doing a two-day class on IT for business executives. I’ll include the stuff from my book, but I’m trying to identify the technical topics that I should also [...]
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My wife and I have decided to move. We originally picked our home location because it was equidistant between my work and my wife’s work. But I work from home now and my wife is retiring, so there’s no longer a good reason to stay here. Instead, we’re going to be looking for a house [...]
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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, [...]
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I lived in Boston during the height of the Bobby Orr days, and I got caught up in the enthusiasm that Boston felt for their Bruins. I had never seen ice hockey before I moved to Boston, and I learned the game by watching the Bruins win the Stanley Cup. One of the intriguing tactics [...]
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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 that didn’t [...]
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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 standard of [...]
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Many years ago my sister Mary taught me a valuable lesson. At the time she and her husband lived in a very small apartment. But each time I visited her I was amazed by how neat everything was. There were no overflowing bookshelves, no overstuffed closets and pantries, and none of the usual clutter of [...]
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Note: This article is intended for a business audience. For a technical explanation of cloud computing, see the sidebar below the business article. To the non-technical among us, “cloud computing” may sound like something vague and amorphous. After all, it’s a cloud, right? So that means it’s something that’s insubstantial, floating in the sky. If [...]
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A runaway project is like a married couple on the brink of divorce. There are two opposing points of view, both sides are usually angry, each side blames the other, legal action is imminent, and a lot of time and money is being wasted. So why do projects go into a runaway mode? It’s usually [...]
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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 two [...]
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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 [...]
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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. But [...]
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The word “scalable” has been used in IT for over forty years. IBM used the word when they first talked about their 360 series of mainframe computers in the 1960′s. Since that time scalability has been a consideration in every aspect of computing: mainframes, minis, personal computers, servers, networks, proprietary systems, open systems, even smartphones. [...]
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A lot of companies routinely use ROI (Return on Investment) to compare multiple projects competing for limited investment resource. But what do these same companies use during a bad economy when they’re trying to figure out where to make cuts? How do you compare multiple opportunities for cost cutting? Recently I moderated a group discussion [...]
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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” with [...]
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In March of 2009 I was the speaker at a SIM Meeting in Dallas. In the Q&A at the end, a young security manager asked me a question. He said that he has succeeded in making his company’s infrastructure good enough that they have no problems with security breaches, data leaks, viruses, or any of [...]
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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. And [...]
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I see and hear these words and phrases all the time, but it has gotten to the point where they’ve lost their meaning for me — maybe for you as well. Let’s start with some oldies but goodies then work up to something more current. Synergy This used to be the consultant’s ultimate goal. Synergy [...]
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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 doctor,” then we [...]
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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 [...]
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Have you ever played Jenga, a game marketed by Hasbro? In the game you have 54 wood blocks and you start by stacking them in rows of three at alternating right angles to build an 18-level tower (for more details and illustrations, click here) . Then you take turns removing a block from a lower [...]
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Suppose your IT organization is in the market for a new IT product (or service, but I’ll use the word “product” here to simplify the discussion). It could be a computer, network device or other hardware item, or it could be a software package or SaaS (software as a service). Regardless of what you’re looking [...]
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It happened a while ago – before GPS devices, and before Google Maps or Mapquest. I was trying to drive to an address in a small town and I did what reasonable people did back then: I asked someone at a gas station for directions. One detail from the directions stands out in my memory: [...]
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