A Unifying Platfor
December 30, 2007
Most IT organizations are amazingly complex and have individual initiatives that are like independent countries, each with its own business applications, technologies, culture, data definitions, and orientation. Project costs soar because individual teams are isolated rather than harnessed together, and few teams reuse each other’s components – a condition exacerbated by a plethora of consultants and competitive technologies. And when a company is runnin hundreds of heterogeneous hardware and software systems, costs run rampant.
Consider the cost of such complexity at Delta Air Lines. In 1997, Delta’s fleet consisted of 600 airplanes and a rainbow of models, ranging from 727s, 737s, 757s, to 767s, from MD 80s and 90s to L1011s. (By contrast, Southwest Airlines operates only one kind of airplane.) Each plane carried different instrumentation from different eras; as a result, the company needed to train pilots and crew members to operate the different models. Keeping track of aircraft, people, parts inventory, qualified mechanics, handling equipment, and catering carts all added to the structural cost of the airline. Delta’s new CEO,Leo Mullin, and his executive team understood that if they reduced the number of plane types they operated, they could lower annual costs by hundreds of millions of dollars.
What the executives didn’t understand was that they had an even worse problem in their IT organization. The company was running more than 30 major IT platforms, with 60 million lines of code, none of which were integrated with each other. Each platform required approxi approximately 100 IT support specialists to keep the systems up and running. That arrangement cost the company about $700 million per year in capital and operating expenses. The problem within IT made the air fleet look like a model of simplicity.Running the airline was nearly impossible. Gate changes by the tower systems were not received in time by the people who needed them: the crews, caterers, reservation agents, ticket counter agents, mechanics, baggage handlers, and customers. The gate-change data were locked inside individual and often conflicting systems.
Read more
Posted by Maximillian | Filed Under Insight
A Long-Term IT Plan
December 27, 2007
Because the rate of technological change is so rapid, and the job tenure of CIOs generally brief, most people see IT through the narrow lens of short-term, silver-bullet solutions. Heaven knows, vendors want you to believe that their important new technologies will blow away what has come before. You can’t blame a salesperson for trying to sell, or CIOs for having a queasy buy-or-lose feeling, but this attitude is precisely the opposite of the one companies should be taking. We would argue that because the winds of change buffet IT more than any other area of the organization, IT benefits most from a long-term, disciplined, strategic view, and a square focus on achieving the company’s most fundamental goals.
For example, Frito-Lay’s strategic goal has always been to make,move, and sell tasty, fresh snack foods as rapidly and efficiently as possible. That goal hasn’t changed since the 1930s, when founder Herman Lay ran his business from his Atlanta kitchen and delivery truck. He bought and cooked the potatoes. He delivered the chips to stores. He collected the money and knew all his customers. He balanced the books and did his own quality assurance. Herman Lay knew how to conduct the perfect “sense and respond”e-business before such a thing ever existed, for he held real-time customer, accounting, and inventory information all in one place – his head.
After years of spectacular growth, the company grew more and more distracted from this simple business model. By the early 1980s, the company’s sales force had swelled to 10,000, and information grew harder and harder to manage. The company’s old batch-based data processing systems were all driven by paper forms that took 12 weeks to print and distribute to the sales force. All sales transactions were recorded by hand; reams of disparate data were transferred to the company’s mainframe computers. Much was lost in the process of setting up a dozen different functional organizations and a variety of databases, none of which communicated with each other.
Read more
Posted by Maximillian | Filed Under Insight
Getting IT Right
December 23, 2007
by Charlie S. Feld and Donna B. Stoddard
Of all the members of the executive committee, the CIO is the least understood–mostly because his profession is still so young. Over the centuries, the fields of manufacturing, finance, sales, marketing, and engineering have evolved into a set of commonly understood practices, with established vocabularies and operating principles comprehended by every member of the senior team. By contrast, the field of information technology – born only 40 years ago with the advent of the IBM 360 in 1964 – is prepubescent.
This generation gap means that, in most organizations, the corporate parent – caught in the linguistic chasm between tech-speak and business-speak – has no idea what its youngest child is up to. Management too often shrugs its shoulders, hands the kid a fat allowance, and looks the other way. Later on, the company finds it’s paid an outrageous price for the latest technological fad. Instead of addressing the problem, many companies just kick the kid out of the house.
The result in many major corporations is that IT is an expensive mess.Orders are lost.Customers call help desks that aren’t helpful. Tracking systems don’t track. Indeed, the average business fritters away 20% of its corporate IT budget on purchases that fail to achieve their objectives, according to Gartner Research. This adds up to approximately $500 billion wasted worldwide.
Read more
Posted by Maximillian | Filed Under Insight
You and Me Against the World, Sucker
December 20, 2007
Insulators and reflectors may lack the self-knowledge to serve the CEO well, but they are not unethical. The same cannot be said of our third confidant type, the usurper. Usurpers are dangerous not only to the CEO but also to the organization as a whole. They are sociopaths who should be shown the door as soon as possible. It’s important, though, to do this in a way that saves face for the exploited CEO,who may, like Rasputin’s czar, come crashing down along with his dangerous confidant.
Usurpers are deliberately scheming and ambitious. Whether at work or in their personal lives, usurpers only last long enough in relationships to get their needs met. When they feel that people are no longer gratifying their desires, usurpers will abruptly end the relationship. Usurpers clearly treat others badly, and they are frequently self-destructive as well. Not surprisingly, they often have long histories of impulsivity, as well as substance abuse or illegal behavior. And although women do act as usurpers, these extremes of behavior are more commonly associated with males. The majority of usurping confidants I have observed have been men.
Unlike the insulator, the successful usurper does not want to empower anyone else: He wants the power for himself.Quite often, the usurper actually aspires to be the CEO. One of the best literary examples of a usurper is Shakespeare’s Iago, who masterfully manipulated Othello to kill Othello’s own beloved Desdemona.As Shakespeare understood so well, leaders often fall prey to these wicked confidants because the usurper is usually a brilliant observer and, therefore, manipulator of the CEO’s personality. Usurpers have an uncanny ability to find a leader’s Achilles’ heel and to exploit it ruthlessly. In clinical terms, usurpers show varying degrees of sociopathic behavior, which – while not commonplace – certainly occurs in business and in society at large. Of course, to make it up to an organization’s highest levels, usurping confidants must also be talented, productive, and charismatic.When they are, their bad behavior can go unnoticed for quite a while, so long as they have their boss’s protection.
Read more
Posted by Maximillian | Filed Under Insight
You Need Me, and Don’t Forget It!
December 17, 2007
While the reflector inadvertently joins with the CEO in creating a shared, distorted view of reality, the insulator tries to serve as a mediator between an ill-suited CEO and his organization. CEOs who need insulators tend to be abrasive or abusive leaders. These arrogant leaders often deny the negative impact of their personality on those around them. They thoughtlessly push away their best people, make impulsive business decisions, alienate large constituencies within the company, and poison morale. These leaders quickly find themselves at odds with their subordinates, senior executives, and boards because of their lack of emotional intelligence. And whether they are quietly off-putting or openly hostile, these leaders rarely feel concerned about, or able to, change their interpersonal style.
To compensate, these abrasive CEOs seek insulators, people whom they believe can translate their poorly communicated ideas into language their organizations can understand. They need people willing to intercede when they make self-destructive moves. Like the mother of a child abused by his father, the insulator is constantly apologizing to the organization on the CEO’s behalf: “He didn’t mean it.” The insulator is also much like the enabler – to borrow the language of Alcoholics Anonymous– who makes excuses for the alcoholic.
Insulators have some special characteristics. Many have passive personalities and need to be rescuers.Women in senior management positions are certainly not all insulators, but, for reasons that still have not been sufficiently researched, most insulators turn out to be women. And although they typically harbor no ambitions to be CEOs themselves, insulators crave control over both the leader and the organization. That contrasts with reflectors, who unconsciously try to control leaders by pleasing them. Thus, while insulators can be quite manipulative, they position their behavior to appear as though they are doing an altruistic service for their bosses and companies.
Read more
Posted by Maximillian | Filed Under Insight
Mirror,Mirror on the Wall
December 14, 2007
CEOs are narcissistic – if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be leaders. Moreover, without that quality, they couldn’t grow their business or provide the organization with the vision it needs. In my experience, CEOs with the best confidant relationships have a healthy dose of narcissism, and their confidants provide positive and negative feedback, they bolster CEOs’ flagging spirits, and they encourage CEOs to achieve balance and creativity.
But some CEOs constantly need to be told wonderful things about themselves. Typically, these leaders are both grandiose and extremely vulnerable to slights, and they often have a hard time hearing bad news or facing harsh realities.They surround themselves with yes-men who are unwilling to tell them the truth; these leaders also tend to have failed marriages, trophy wives, or extramarital affairs with women who feed their egos. Some narcissistic CEOs, such as Richard Scrushy of HealthSouth or Dennis Kozlowski of Tyco, turn their organizations into elaborate monuments to themselves. Unfortunately, these leaders are also prone to selecting confidants who cater to their fragile self-esteem. These are the reflecting confidants.
The reflector intuitively knows how to make a narcissistic CEO feel good. Although all confidants may do this to some extent, reflectors are driven by their own neurotic need to please authority. That’s usually because they’ve grown up with narcissistic parents who demanded that their children mirror them to an inappropriate extent. These kids feel that they exist to take care of their parents, rather than the reverse. For example, children with depressed mothers typically feel responsible for their mothers’happiness. In such an environment, a child’s self- esteem becomes contingent on giving the parents what they want, rather than on developing an autonomous personality. Read more
Posted by Maximillian | Filed Under Insight
Worse Than Enemies
December 11, 2007
The CEO’s Destructive Confidant
by Kerry J. Sulkowicz
The CEO is often the most isolated and protected employee in the organization. No one gives him unfiltered information. Many people dissemble or conceal things from him. Few leaders, even veteran CEOs, can do the job without talking to someone about their experiences, which is why most develop a close relationship with a trusted colleague – a person with whom they feel free to share their thoughts and fears. Few leaders speak out about these relationships, perhaps because they don’t like acknowledging their dependency on others. But in business and politics, most leaders rely on the advice and opinions of a trusted insider: a confidant.
The need for a close confidant is rooted in childhood. Every child wants to feel close to someone, to feel understood, cared for, and loved. While parents ordinarily satisfy such childhood yearnings, these needs are never completely satisfied. In adolescence, we typically resolve them by developing a best friend from among our peer group, and we usually pick individuals of the same sex. When we find ourselves in demanding situations later in life,we seek similar refuge with a fellow adult. Read more
Posted by Maximillian | Filed Under Insight
Can Organizations Develop Leaders?
December 8, 2007
A myth about how people learn and develop that seems to have taken hold in American culture also dominates thinking in business. The myth is that people learn best from their peers.Supposedly, the threat of evaluation and even humiliation recedes in peer relations because of the tendency for mutual identification and the social restraints on authoritarian behavior among equals. Peer training in organizations occurs in various forms. The use, for example, of task forces made up of peers from several interested occupational groups (sales,production, research,and finance) supposedly removes the restraints of authority on the individual’s willingness to assert and exchange ideas. As a result, so the theory goes, people interact more freely, listen more objectively to criticism and other points of view, and, finally, learn from this healthy interchange.
Another application of peer training exists in some large corporations, such as Philips N.V. in Holland, where organizational structure is built on the principle of joint responsibility of two peers, one representing the commercial end of the business and the other the technical.
Formally, both hold equal responsibility for geographic operations or product groups, as the case may be. As a practical matter, it may turn out that one or the other of the peers dominates the management. Nevertheless, the main interaction is between two or more equals.
Read more
Posted by Maximillian | Filed Under Insight
Development of Leadership
December 5, 2007
Every person’s development begins with family. Each person experiences the traumas associated with separating from his or her parents, as well as the pain that follows such a wrench. In the same vein, all individuals face the difficulties of achieving self-regulation and self-control. But for some, perhaps a majority, the fortunes of childhood provide adequate gratification and sufficient opportunities to find substitutes for rewards no longer available. Such individuals, the “once-borns,” make moderate identifications with parents and find a harmony between what they expect and what they are able to realize from life.
But suppose the pains of separation are amplified by a combination of parental demands and individual needs to the degree that a sense of isolation, of being special, or of wariness disrupts the bonds that attach children to parents and other authority figures? Given a special aptitude under such conditions, the person becomes deeply involved in his or her inner world at the expense of interest in the outer world. For such a person, self-esteem no longer depends solely on positive attachments and real rewards. A form of self-reliance takes hold along with expectations of performance and achievement, and perhaps even the desire to do great works.
Such self-perceptions can come to nothing if the individual’s talents are negligible. Even with strong talents, there are no guarantees that achievement will follow, let alone that the end result will be for good rather than evil.
Read more
Posted by Maximillian | Filed Under Insight
Senses of Self
December 2, 2007
In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James describes two basic personality types, “once- born” and “twiceborn.” People of the former personality type are those for whom adjustments to life have been straightforward and whose lives have been more or less a peaceful flow since birth. Twice-borns, on the other hand, have not had an easy time of it. Their lives are marked by a continual struggle to attain some sense of order. Unlike once-borns, they cannot take things for granted. According to James, these personalities have equally different worldviews. For a once-born personality, the sense of self as a guide to conduct and attitude derives from a feeling of being at home and in harmony with one’s environment. For a twice-born, the sense of self derives from a feeling of profound separateness.
A sense of belonging or of being separate has a practical significance for the kinds of investments managers and leaders make in their careers. Managers see themselves as conservators and regulators of an existing order of affairs with which they personally identify and from which they gain rewards. A manager’s sense of self-worth is enhanced by perpetuating and strengthening existing institutions: He or she is performing in a role that is in harmony with the ideals of duty and responsibility. William James had this harmony in mind– this sense of self as flowing easily to and from the outer world – in defining a once-born personality.
Leaders tend to be twice-born personalities, people who feel separate from their environment.They may work in organizations, but they never belong to them. Their sense of who they are does not depend on memberships,work roles, or other social indicators of identity. And that perception of identity may form the theoretical basis for explaining why certain individuals seek opportunities for change. The methods to bring about change may be technological, political, or ideological, but the object is the same: to profoundly alter human, economic, and political relationships.
Read more
Posted by Maximillian | Filed Under Insight
