from the editor's desk : management

Some uncommon good sense about political candidates

Lee_Teschler — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 11:13:00 GMT

Bob Lewis puts out a free newsletter on management. His is one of my favorites because the comments therein are often insightful. I think he hit the mark uncommonly well with his latest effort, so I am reproducing the whole thing below. Information about how to sign up for his newsletter is at the bottom of this post.

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Keep the Joint Running

by Bob Lewis

ManagementSpeak: We were fortunate to have several qualified candidates apply for the position. It was, however, offered to another candidate.

Translation: Qualified candidates make our current employees nervous.

This week's anonymous contributor took the nerve-wracking step of submitting this fine example of management euphemizing.

What were they thinking?

To appear forward-looking, Obama spoke between two Grecian columns. McCain, in contrast, proved he understood advanced technology by speaking in front of a huge digital flag instead of the more traditional cloth one.

Ridiculing the candidates is, of course, the American way. If it isn't, all four candidates and their surrogates are un-American.

But enough fun. Take out the money, ads, speechwriters, and commentariat, and what we have are two candidates interviewing for an executive job. Think of their VP choices as their succession plans.

Imagine you could interview them. Both candidates have mostly ignored the advice my friend Nick Corcodilos frequently gives. They're supposed to "Do the job in the interview." Instead, in varying proportions, they're giving you vague generalities and attacks on the other candidate.

In a real interview you would, of course, unceremoniously send home any interviewee who acted like this. We can only wish: The only attack ad worth your attention this entire campaign season was provided by Paris Hilton.

It's your interview. What do you ask each candidate?

"Why are you interested in this job?" is a good question to ask any executive. There's more than one appropriate answer, and you'll learn something from their response: Some leaders find their gratification developing people; others in building effective organizations. There are those whose focus is accomplishing something important and those who are turnaround specialists.

And there are some who just want the job for the title, prestige and money, and haven't, amazingly enough, prepared a decent answer.

"Tell me about the best hire you ever made, and the worst one. What made you decide to hire the best one? What made the person so good? And what did you do about the mistake?"

You ... we ... are hiring someone to run a huge organization. The most important decisions this person will make will be choosing the executive team. For the best hire you would probably want to hear about competence; also about choosing someone who was stretching but had ability and potential. The habits of success and collaboration belong in the answer as well.

You wouldn't want to hear about loyalty as an important criterion, nor would you want to hear that a candidate likes to hire people who think the same way he or she does.

For the worst hire you might want to hear about trying the person in a different role; definitely about replacing someone who just didn't work out.

You'll want to ask some "how would you handle" questions, too -- reality based ones that deal with current challenges. "I think we're overstaffed right now, and our budget is tight. What would you do about it if I hired you?"

If a candidate talks about experience cutting costs you should send that candidate home. If he/she talks about experience cutting costs while maintaining the ability to deliver ... about improving efficiency, performance and effectiveness ... you have someone who understands what's needed to run a real organization.

"Okay ... we finish this process, I hire you, you get your ID badge. What do you do first, second and third? How do you get started?"

I've never regretted asking this question. Some candidates know how to map out a program, one that starts with listening and building relationships, and building an effective organization. The candidates you don't want to hire are the ones who will start making changes immediately and unilaterally.

Running for office is a bit different, of course: Presidents have almost three months to do this before taking the oath of office, and are expected to change out the entire executive team. Still, most of the principles are the same.

All through the interviews you'd listen hard to get a sense of how each candidate thinks about the line employees who do all the real work. I'm going to pick on McCain here, because he pushed one of my buttons in his speech when he said that Obama's healthcare plan would, "... put a bureaucrat between you and your doctor."

First of all, private health insurance puts a bureaucrat between me and my doctor right now. And second, what is it about running for president that causes candidates to insult the men and women who will be reporting to them and looking to them for leadership?

Here's something you wouldn't do: Waste interview time asking about character and integrity. That's what reference checks are for.

And anyway, what might a candidate say on these subjects that isn't simple bragging?

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Bob Lewis is president of IT Catalysts, Inc. ( www.itcatalysts.com ) an independent consultancy specializing in IT effectiveness and strategic alignment. Contact him at rdlewis@issurvivor.com.

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Keep the Joint Running is now a free podcast, thanks to my partner in audio, Joe Baxter (info@josephbaxter.com). If you'd rather listen than read, just go to the iTunes store, click on Podcasts, and search for "Keep the Joint Running." Or, use this URL for the download site: http://www.avmypodcast.com/file/KJR/273.xml

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IT does matter

Lee_Teschler — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 23:07:00 GMT

You may recall that several years ago there was a piece published in the Harvard Business Review titled, "IT Doesn't Matter." The premise was that everybody had access to the same IT technology, so, therefore, IT could no longer be used as a strategic edge or competitive advantage.

I thought this was bunk when it was first published. To see why, apply the same logic to racing: All teams in NASCAR have access to the same technology. Therefore, the only source of a competitive edge is the driver. Do you believe that? Well, the same goes for IT.

This recent piece by Bob Lewis reminded me of the old 'IT doesn't matter' baloney. As always, he makes a good point.

And if you want to subscribe to his free newsletter, visit http://www.issurvivor.com/registerKJR.asp

Keep the Joint Running

by Bob Lewis

"Computers let you make more mistakes faster than any other invention in human history, with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila." -- Mitch Ratcliffe

Nicholas Carr has a new theory -- that internal IT is reaching the end of the line, because information technology will follow the same commoditization curve that electrical utilities followed a century ago.

Okay, it isn't really a new theory, although from the attention Carr is getting for his new book, which should have been titled The Joys of Griddish but instead is called The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google (W. W. Norton, 2008), you'd think he had come up with it all by himself.

Carr, you'll recall, previously theorized that IT doesn't matter ("We ain't there quite yet," Keep the Joint Running, 6/16/2003). His reasoning: Every business has access to the same information technology, so IT can't provide a sustainable strategic advantage.

That his old theory was fatally flawed is easily demonstrated: Every business has access to the same everything as every other business -- the same technology, ideas, people, processes, capital, real estate, and silly articles published in the Harvard Business Review because their authors were once on its editorial staff.

Were we to accept Carr's past logic and apply it equally to all subjects, we would despairingly conclude that nothing matters. Now, not content with turning us all into depressed nihilists, Carr has discovered (and we should be pleased for him) the Internet and the possibility of outsourcing all of the computing cycles of every business to it.

What Carr has visionarily discovered, while tossing in terms like grid and utility computing to prove he is Fully Buzzword Compliant, is IT infrastructure outsourcing, a mere three decades after it began. Meanwhile, many very large corporations that outsourced their IT infrastructure have found that economies of scale reach a point of diminishing returns -- enterprises reach a size where running their own data center costs less and provides more value than contracting with an outsourcer.

But never mind this little quibble. After all, many businesses aren't that big and data center outsourcing does make sense for them. It's nothing new and makes no difference. It's business as usual right now, and companies still need an IT organization, because ...

Applications and the information they process are where the IT rubber meets the business road. Computer programs are not indistinguishable from one another. The information in the data repositories they control is unique, valuable, and (assuming corporations are careful about information security) private.

Carr hasn't entirely ignored this reality in "his" theory of utility computing. He merely waves it off as trivial -- something easily solved through a combination of Software as a Service (SaaS, which if you've been asleep for awhile means hosted solutions) and ... here's an exact quote ... "the ability to write your own code but use utility suppliers to run it and to store it. Companies will continue to have the ability to write proprietary code and to run it as a service to get the efficiencies and the flexibility it provides."

With unparalleled perspicuity, Carr has figured out that companies can write their own code and then run it in an outsourced data center. Hokey smokes!

Carr's New Insight is that responsibility for applications will move "into the business" which is why IT will eventually go away. He endorses the notion that businesses can easily integrate disparate SaaS-provided applications and databases across the Internet using a few easy-to-use interfaces.

What nonsense. Most internal IT organizations long ago changed their focus. They seldom develop. Mostly they configure and integrate purchased applications.

Nothing about this is easy. Integrating multiple applications and their databases takes complex engineering, not facile hand-waving. Moving responsibility "into the business" means nothing more than managing multiple, smaller, poorly cooperating IT departments instead of single, larger centralized ones. Ho hum.

Nor can integrating multiple SaaS systems work in a high-volume production environment. That's because of a concept network engineers but not self-appointed "experts" understand: latency.

Imagine a financial services company. Customer management is SaaS in California. loan operations is SaaS in Massachusetts. You have to update 10 million customer accounts every day with interest computations. The minimum latency imposed by the laws of physics on an ordinary two-table join adds more than 45 hours to this little batch run.

Well-integrated computing environments come from serious engineering. Phrases like utility computing and grid might obscure this fact behind a fog of vagueness. They don't eliminate it.

I have my own vision for the future of IT. In it, only people who have written code, designed databases, administered servers or engineered networks at some time in their careers will get to write about IT's past, present and future.

The rest can include themselves out.