CIO Leadership: Qualities, Quotes, and Quandaries Expert insight and input from the top CIOs
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CIO Leadership: Qualities, Quotes, and Quandaries
Contents
The leadership qualities of a CIO veteran
Technology leadership quotes from the 'CIO Decisions' e-zine
To be a better leader be a team player: CIO leadership lessons from a pro
Leadership qualities of CIOs who do big things
No two CIOs are the exactly the same but that doesn't mean the good ones don't bear some striking similarities in terms of leadership style. Discover what the most successful CIOs have in common and obtain the lessons they learned along their way to becoming impactful leaders. Find out how they look at their changing roles across their respective industries, what they report as their biggest challenges, and how each manages to avoid potential technology tragedies that could interfere with innovation.
The leadership qualities of a CIO veteran 2014 By: Christina Torode
According to World BPO/ITO Forum event chairman Jim Noble, the days of
megadeals and monolithic contracts and years-long IT projects are gone; in
their place is the need to be agile and accountable for business outcomes.
"Today, if you said, 'The business result is years away so I can't take
accountability,' [the business] would laugh at you. The result needs to be six
months away," Noble said.
And guess what? You are accountable. As a result, CIO users of outsourcing
services are taking on much more of the systems integration and service
integration responsibilities.
You could spend hours picking Noble's brain on the BPO landscape, or any
other tech topic, really, but what I wanted to know was what Noble would
have done differently in his previous roles and what advice he has for CIOs
today. He himself has been credited with sea changes while he held the CIO
position at General Motors Co., British Petroleum and Talisman Energy Inc.,
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CIO Leadership: Qualities, Quotes, and Quandaries
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The leadership qualities of a CIO veteran
Technology leadership quotes from the 'CIO Decisions' e-zine
To be a better leader be a team player: CIO leadership lessons from a pro
Leadership qualities of CIOs who do big things
where he launched in-house IT academies and used technology as an
enabler of business outcomes.
Even over the phone, it was clear why so many global companies (AOL Time
Warner, General Electric Co. and Kraft Foods Inc.) have reached out to tap
his leadership qualities. He did not assume that I knew what he was talking
about, taking me back to the days of telcos and grids to explain the origins of
cloud computing and service-oriented architecture, for example. He was
quick to point out the things he would have done differently, including his
focusing too much on cost versus business results.
Among the many leadership qualities that came through:
1. His ability to think on his feet no matter what question I threw at him;
2. His ability to see things in new ways, such as the need for big
service providers to move toward industrial strength (versus
commodity) services and commit to business outcomes, such as
gain share or risk/reward payment models, with their clients; and
3. His willingness to take risks. He was once a military test pilot and
racecar driver, although you would never guess it from his calm,
somewhat academic demeanor.
Above all, as I learned from his patient explanations, Jim Noble is a coach --
for the major leagues. Here are three leadership qualities he believes lead to
CIO success:
Discover what the single most important issue is for your CEO or
Executive committee; become a technology enabler for that issue and
bring your street smarts into play.
"If you're in a manufacturing company, the key issue can be quality, as it was
for me in General Motors. If you're in a process company, the key issue
could be unplanned business outage. If you are with an energy company, the
issue could be safety, as it was for me at BP and Talisman," Noble said.
"Once you're convinced that you've latched on to the winning idea, then you
use all your street smarts to get one [line of business] to pilot the idea and
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CIO Leadership: Qualities, Quotes, and Quandaries
Contents
The leadership qualities of a CIO veteran
Technology leadership quotes from the 'CIO Decisions' e-zine
To be a better leader be a team player: CIO leadership lessons from a pro
Leadership qualities of CIOs who do big things
make the another [line of] business envious of that success and have them
want to jump on the bandwagon. You can trick them by allowing the early
adopters to go to the head of the line with equipment refreshes or the most
modern smartphones. You give them the goodies and they willingly embrace
the idea -- that's what I mean by being street smart. You coax one of your
lines of business to be the exemplar and then the others watch and want to
follow."
Focus on real-time, fact-based decision support
On the question of what technology he believes will revolutionize business as
we know it, Noble said:
"Across every industry sector I've worked in, there's been one thing and
that's been fact-based decision support. You might want to call it analytics or
big data, structured or unstructured data, real-time data, predictive analytics
or in-memory processing, but if the IT people can give the business people
the facts, then the business people will run the business better.
"The connection between good quality data delivered in a timely fashion and
a business that prospers --that connection is indisputable."
Take accountability for business outcomes
"CIOs generally tended to be order takers. We tended to focus on silently
running, smoother operations. We tended to automate the business process
and sometimes we made bad things happen faster. ... I wish we had stood
up and taken responsibility for business results with all of these initiatives,"
Noble said.
"Historically, we found a lot of excuses not to do things. It's a business
initiative, not an IT initiative, and, therefore, we said the business people
were the only ones who can take accountability for success. That was more
of a smokescreen than a reality. We should have adopted the two-in-a-box
model, where the business and IT leader oversee the execution of the
initiative and accountability of it and are rewarded in compensation for the
result. In the olden days, we used to say, 'But the result is years away,' and
that was our biggest mistake. It was years away, and things changed. People
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CIO Leadership: Qualities, Quotes, and Quandaries
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The leadership qualities of a CIO veteran
Technology leadership quotes from the 'CIO Decisions' e-zine
To be a better leader be a team player: CIO leadership lessons from a pro
Leadership qualities of CIOs who do big things
moved on; the business climate changed; the macroeconomic situation
changed.
"Today, if you said, 'The business result is years away, so I can't take
accountability,' they would laugh at you. The result needs to be six months
away, and in six months, if you can't stand up and be counted, then more
fool you. Even when CIOs were aligning IT to business initiatives -- running
IT as a business -- IT was run on cost. Now, we should be running IT as a
business on business-outcome grounds."
Technology leadership quotes from the 'CIO Decisions' e-zine By: Rachel Lebeaux
A recent cover story in our CIO Decisions e-zine came with something of a
Shakespearean admonishment: Know thy users -- especially those who use
the cloud. And, yes, if anyone could have imagined a distant future in which
information worldwide is accessed via a "floating" structure, it would have
been the Bard, he who penned the line, "There are more things in heaven
and earth, Horatio/Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
The cloud certainly opens up vast new IT opportunities, but also presents
some striking governance challenges. It's a theme that runs through the
October issue, as our CIO interviewees grappled with such technology hang-
ups as ERP deployment, social collaboration and even the future of the CIO
role. The technology leadership quotes we've culled shine a light on these
and myriad other issues IT executives face -- and also offer some advice on
how to avoid a technology tragedy.
"If at any point in time, if there were even one of our executives that pushed
against the project or what the project was to accomplish -- luckily that did
not happen -- we would have seen catastrophic issues in that area of the
company."
--John Bowden, CIO, Lifetime Products Inc.
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CIO Leadership: Qualities, Quotes, and Quandaries
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The leadership qualities of a CIO veteran
Technology leadership quotes from the 'CIO Decisions' e-zine
To be a better leader be a team player: CIO leadership lessons from a pro
Leadership qualities of CIOs who do big things
"On the technology side, you can afford a little more innovation, a little more
risk, so to speak. Because you're constantly innovating, you're constantly
pushing the envelope and testing products and testing yourself against those
limits. Engineers are more willing to do that, take corrective action, iterate
through and move forward."
--Bill Miller, CIO, Broadcom Corp.
"We're trying to create a culture where, whether it's an hourly-paid associate
on the food and beverage line or the CIO or [chief marketing officer] or CEO,
it's everybody's job to come up with new ideas on how we can make things
better."
--Tom LaPlante, CIO, TopGolf
"What we are experiencing today, I truly don't believe we've ever had
anything quite like it. There aren't that many people who really understand
the individual technologies; to manage to have them integrated is extremely
complicated."
--Jerry Luftman, former CIO, professor emeritus of the Stevens Institute of
Technology, managing director of the Global Institute for IT Management
"We've all been taught by McDonald's how to order McDonald's -- pick a
number. [Users] will get used to it if it works; they'll start to understand the
key functions they need to perform, how they think it should work and
eventually say, 'I just hit this button and the magic happens.'"
--Ian Clayton, senior vice president of operations, G2G3
"When we bring that to an internal private cloud perspective, if we can give
users that same level of choice and present them with [a few options], that's
probably going to be good enough. They feel like they've got a choice, but
they're not getting into the deep, deep weeds."
--Chris Ward, CTO, GreenPages Technology Solutions
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CIO Leadership: Qualities, Quotes, and Quandaries
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The leadership qualities of a CIO veteran
Technology leadership quotes from the 'CIO Decisions' e-zine
To be a better leader be a team player: CIO leadership lessons from a pro
Leadership qualities of CIOs who do big things
To be a better leader be a team player: CIO leadership lessons from a pro By: Karen Goulart
Suggest to Carl Wilson the CIO role is going to be absorbed by the business,
and the former CIO and executive vice president of Marriott International has
a response you're not likely to hear elsewhere these days.
"It's more likely the business might be absorbed into the CIO role as IT takes
on a bigger role within the enterprise," Wilson said.
No career is over quips here.
Wilson, of course, is not your ordinary CIO. He led the IT team that enabled
Marriott to revolutionize the hospitality industry for the digital age by being
the first to implement online reservation services and to offer high-speed
Internet in its guest rooms.
With an accolade-filled career spanning four decades, Wilson knows his way
around an IT organization, the C-suite and the boardroom. It's his familiarity
with the boardroom, in particular, that helped set him apart as a leader and
laid the foundation for his new avocation: CIO coach. Now a hands-on
mentor to four Fortune 500 CIOs, a consultant and a board member himself
at several companies, he contends that true CIO leadership --the quality that
will ensure CIOs endure -- paradoxically comes from being a team player.
Becoming part of the business
According to Wilson, the CIO role will continue to grow in importance if CIOs
are willing to work with and within the business. For Wilson this lesson was
self-taught. In the early days of his career, when he was still a computer
operator, he took careful note of what was happening around him. Typically,
business users would agree to the specs of an IT project, IT would go off and
work on it and develop something users didn't ask for -- or didn't think they
did. Disconnects abounded.
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CIO Leadership: Qualities, Quotes, and Quandaries
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The leadership qualities of a CIO veteran
Technology leadership quotes from the 'CIO Decisions' e-zine
To be a better leader be a team player: CIO leadership lessons from a pro
Leadership qualities of CIOs who do big things
"A lot of technologists at the time tried to get the business to understand IT,
and I saw it was more important for IT to understand the business and meet
them where they were," Wilson said. "I worked that into my leadership
approach, making sure that all the IT leaders were business technologists,
not just technologists."
Throughout his career, which included engagements as a turnaround CIO at
The Pillsbury Company, Grand Metropolitan, PLC and Georgia-Pacific LLC,
he practiced what he preached. By the time he arrived at Marriott
International in 1997, his approach to CIO leadership was nearly perfected.
At Marriott, his philosophy of forging a tight collaboration between IT and the
business was quickly embraced by his IT team and business peers. He put in
place the processes and procedures to ensure that happened. One inviolable
standard: that every major IT project the company took on would have a
business owner and an IT owner, each equally accountable for achieving
business benefits.
"We forged that type of thinking in the organization, along with collaborative
MBOs [Management by Objectives] where everyone was rewarded for the
success of participating, whether you were in the business or IT
organization," Wilson said, referring to the managerial practice of aligning
objectives with organizational goals. "A lot of common goals and interests
developed."
Changing an industry, easier than it sounds
Wilson quickly brushes aside any insinuation that he deserves the credit for
revolutionizing the hospitality industry with one-stop Internet reservations and
in-room high-speed Internet access. It was a total team effort --which itself,
he stresses, was an integral part of the Marriott way of working.
"It was the IT leadership team, plus very engaged C-level executives,
especially in marketing and sales area," Wilson said. "It wasn't as hard as it
may sound, simply because everybody worked together. That's part of the
characteristics and culture of Marriott, which I think it comes from the
company being in the hospitality sector."
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CIO Leadership: Qualities, Quotes, and Quandaries
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The leadership qualities of a CIO veteran
Technology leadership quotes from the 'CIO Decisions' e-zine
To be a better leader be a team player: CIO leadership lessons from a pro
Leadership qualities of CIOs who do big things
The combination of knowing its customers and an awareness of the potential
of the Internet as a reliable technology for commercial use -- in other words,
a blend of business and IT knowledge -- turned out to be a productive
partnership. The newly minted Marriott.com held the potential to not only
greatly reduce the cost of how rooms were sold but also personalize the
guest experience. Marriott.com is now a $6 billion-plus, lowest cost
distribution channel for Marriott.
"It just made good business sense," Wilson said. "There was a reliable
emerging technology coming on board in the Internet, and we took
advantage of that."
The Marriott team also recognized another business reality before it became
apparent to the rest of the world: namely, how important Internet connectivity
was becoming to its extensive clientele of business travelers. They were
starting to arrive with PCs in tow, looking to work or stay connected during
their visits.
"The number one thing they needed was high-speed Internet access so they
could work in their rooms, and we provided that to meet their needs," Wilson
said. "We just happened to be the first company who really endorsed it and
aggressively went after it because we saw that need --we kept our eye on
guest expectations."
Governance for industry breakthroughs
Keeping an eye on customer expectations might sound all too easy, but
providing Internet access to business travelers once again relied on a close
relationship between all business functions and the information resources
function, Wilson said.
Indeed, IT and the business were not simply aligned, they were fully
integrated under Wilson's watch. Every senior-level executive in information
resources was assigned to work directly with a C-level business partner, from
e-commerce to finance to marketing and sales, participating in their staff
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CIO Leadership: Qualities, Quotes, and Quandaries
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The leadership qualities of a CIO veteran
Technology leadership quotes from the 'CIO Decisions' e-zine
To be a better leader be a team player: CIO leadership lessons from a pro
Leadership qualities of CIOs who do big things
meetings and strategy sessions like any other part of that particular
management team.
"Although they may have reported solid line into the IT organization, they
were actually perceived and behaved as if they were part of the management
team they were working with."
One of the greatest compliments of Wilson's tenure came from the chief
operating officer who remarked that, in meetings, if he didn't know them, he
wouldn't be able to distinguish the IT people from their business partners.
"IT people knew the business processes and understood the business area
they were accountable for, and their partners were learning the technology
because we worked so closely. That's why we were successful," Wilson said.
And yet this cultural structure and approach, with all its proven benefits, still
eludes many companies. To those CIOs, Wilson suggests they start by
following the money.
"The language of business is finance, so we made it a point to ensure all our
senior IT leaders had a good grasp of the finances of the company, how the
company made money," Wilson said. "Without that, you could never engage
at the level they needed to with their business counterparts."
Change management, the biggest challenge for any CIO
Technologically speaking, everything wasn't perfect when Marriott decided to
implement online reservations in Marriott.com. Systems needed to be
modified to support the reservation application. But the modification couldn't
be a one-off change --the technical changes had to anticipate future
requirements. From this challenge a three-year technology roadmap
developed, dictating that any time system adjustments were made because
of a business change, the underlying technology would also be upgraded to
serve future business needs.
While building a technology roadmap was a challenge, the bigger problem by
far was figuring out how fast the company could learn and change, Wilson
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To be a better leader be a team player: CIO leadership lessons from a pro
Leadership qualities of CIOs who do big things
said. He's seen one big technology initiative after another misfire because an
idea makes sense on paper but is a poor cultural fit.
"These companies didn't appropriately assess whether the organization will
be able to assimilate that technology and take advantage of it," Wilson said.
"If you overestimate how quickly your company can learn and change, you
run the risk of putting in a system people won't be able to use, and you may
end up worse off."
On the flip side, underestimate your organization's abilities and you could be
creating a competitive disadvantage. These cultural assessments, Wilson
said, are one of the greatest challenges of CIO leadership. So how did he do
it?
"It's more of an art than a science; you spend a lot of time engaging with
people who will be your internal customers and partners to find out where
their heads are," Wilson said.
To this, CIOs -- and their companies -- a well-planned, forward-looking
recognition, reward and compensation program.
"There's a saying I heard years ago: 'Tell me how a person is recognized,
rewarded and compensated, and I'll tell you how they behave on the job,'"
Wilson said. "If you want to bring about organizational learning and change,
and you want to motivate people to get there with you, make sure your
reward, recognition and compensation programs reflect where you want
them to go, not where you are today."
Leadership qualities of CIOs who do big things By: Linda Tucci
CIO Jim Whalen has been a people-pleaser for as long as he can remember.
More often associated with the female gender -- and frequently called out as
a trait that needs fixing -- people-pleasing, I'd wager, rarely tops the list of the
leadership qualities of powerful business executives. That doesn't seem to
have slowed down Whalen, who oversees IT strategy at Boston Properties
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To be a better leader be a team player: CIO leadership lessons from a pro
Leadership qualities of CIOs who do big things
Inc., the $30 billion Boston real estate investment trust, or REIT, that was
founded by mogul Mortimer Zuckerman and specializes in the kind of
marquee office buildings that ooze machismo.
As reported last week by SearchCIO.com's Karen Goulart, Whalen told a
gathering of Boston CIOs that his intrinsic nature to please, far from being a
roadblock, informed a commitment to customer service that helped propel his
30-year career in IT. Nature cast its die, but nurture mattered too in shaping
his path to becoming a leader, he said. He started helping out in the family
plumbing business when he was 5 years old, developing a strong work ethic
while still in elementary school. His analytical skills were developed over
summers playing All Star Baseball, the popular board game that was a mid-
century precursor of today's stat-driven online sports games. "I just turned
50, but my leadership style is still evolving. I'm always picking things up as I
move forward," he added.
Whalen's story -- and his personal accounting of his path to leadership --
prompted me to go back and take a look at a study, published last year by
University of California, Berkeley Professor James Spitze, on the "invisible
factors of extraordinary success" possessed by transformative CIOs. Not that
long ago, CIOs functioned mainly as supervisors of the computers that ran
the payroll, general ledger and other business systems, Spitze noted. The
role was largely technical, and if things went wrong, the impact was fairly
limited. Today, as overseers of a company's information flows, CIOs play a
major role in a business's results, and IT failures often make front-page
news. Given the breadth of the CIO role, Spitze and co-researcher Judith
Lee set out to answer why some CIOs exert a powerful influence on their
companies -- actually changing how whole industries do business -- while so
many others (an estimated 95%) "are viewed as simply managing a
necessary but often annoyingly expensive service," they wrote.
Focus on the customer and other leadership qualities of 'Renaissance
CIOs'
A selection committee identified 14 "Renaissance" CIOs (see the list below)
for Spitze's and Lee's study. (Along with Spitze, the selection committee
included Max Hopper, the author of American Airlines' SABRE system; Bruce
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CIO Leadership: Qualities, Quotes, and Quandaries
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The leadership qualities of a CIO veteran
Technology leadership quotes from the 'CIO Decisions' e-zine
To be a better leader be a team player: CIO leadership lessons from a pro
Leadership qualities of CIOs who do big things
Rogow, ex-executive vice president of Gartner Inc.; Harvey Koeppel,
executive director of the Center for CIO Leadership; and Naomi Seligman,
co-founder of The Research Board.) In addition to being "wicked smart," the
CIOs all had made "a massive and enduring positive impact on their
employer … and on their industry." Twelve questions, sent to each of the
super-CIOs in advance of their in-depth interviews, elicited the following
broad traits:
Personal attributes: All 14 CIOs could be described as "industrious, self-
reliant/confident, honest/trustworthy, practical, a risk-taker (but a prudent
one), a quick learner and an excellent communicator." Of the six
management styles the authors applied -- coercive, authoritative, affilliative,
democratic, pacesetting and coaching -- the authoritative style predominated.
Birth year: Most of the CIOs achieved their first major success in mid-
career, between the ages of 36 and 48 -- an important data point, according
to the authors. Their initial major successes came before they had become
so entrenched in their careers to have become risk-averse or resistant to
change.
Education: Although two-thirds of the CIOs hold advanced degrees, the
authors found that lifelong learning proved a stronger factor than formal
education in the success these super-CIOs had achieved.
Parental influence: Virtually the entire Renaissance cohort recalled their
parents as early role models of the importance of a strong work ethic and as
believers in education. Almost all the CIOs had "meaningful part-time jobs in
their youth -- and many had fond recollections of those as foundational to
their careers," Spitze and Lee state.
Relationships: In a new and rapidly changing field, interpersonal
relationships are critical to success. All 14 CIOs had been able to attract
mentors and had served as mentors themselves. They had long lists of
people who had helped them along the way. They enjoyed "valued,"
longstanding professional relationships and made a point of surrounding
themselves with "good/excellent people." The cohort all possessed
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The leadership qualities of a CIO veteran
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To be a better leader be a team player: CIO leadership lessons from a pro
Leadership qualities of CIOs who do big things
"emotional intelligence." Their ability to work with a variety of people and to
"marshal the collective intelligence" of the enterprise was identified in the
study as critical to their success as CIOs.
Motivators: All the Renaissance CIOs were self-motivated. All could be
described as "compulsive completers" with a "strong bias for action,"
according to the authors. When obstacles arose at "many points in their
careers," they had found a way to work around them. They liked "large
challenges" and worked "with energy and intellect" to meet them. Most cited
both positive and negative feedback as having a valuable impact on their
career.
Career actions and outside influences: Virtually all the Renaissance CIOs
seemed to possess short learning curves in matters that mattered to their
careers. They accepted missteps and learned from them. They proactively
managed their careers, were unafraid to make a move when things dead-
ended and were primed to capitalize on opportunities -- including broad "IT
inflection points" -- that came along. Luck played a part as well: Most cited
being in the right place at the right time – their company was growing, their
CEO was supportive -- as a factor in their success. All the Renaissance CIOs
completed a major project that was recognized as a "game-changer." And in
all cases, the game-changing project had a direct and positive impact on the
end customer.
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To be a better leader be a team player: CIO leadership lessons from a pro
Leadership qualities of CIOs who do big things
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