Disaster or Recovery? December 5, 2008
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.Tags: Leadership, Relationships
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What is the biggest impediment to a successful disaster recovery plan? Server availability? Network redundancy? Available hosted services? Price?
The answer: none of these. The biggest impediment to a successful disaster recovery plan is spouses.
Almost all disaster recovery plans have a step, early in the process, that says “Critical personnel meet at the recovery site.” This looks great on paper and even works during tests, when travel is planned in advance.
Real disasters usually involve big events: hurricanes, tornadoes, ice storms, floods, wildfires. Whatever is forcing you to declare a disaster is most likely affecting your staff and their families. At some point, your key systems administrator is going to look at his wife and announce that he has to fly far away, for an indefinite period of time, to recover the company data center.
She is going to look at him, surrounded by kids, in a house without power or heat or some other crucial necessity, and give him the unspoken ultimatum: them or us? And every smart man will put down the suitcase and resume his hunt for power or heat or other crucial necessity for his family.
That’s a smart choice: family always comes before work. But that doesn’t do much for getting your company back online.
Good disaster recovery plans presume that no one, not a soul, will be available for an extended period of time immediately after the disaster. Once their families are secure, your staff will be able to travel and help with a clear mind, focused on the business issues. You don’t want them restoring your databases while they are distracted with thoughts of wives and kids who need them at home.
Build a plan that respects your staff and their families, and you’ll have a plan that will actually work in the real world. Your staff will appreciate it and if that day ever comes, so will your senior management team and shareholders.
Honesty And Sales December 1, 2008
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.Tags: Relationships, Sales, Trust
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Selling is hard. The uncertainty and day-to-day stress are more than I could handle on a regular basis. Yet I have friends in sales who love every minute of it, from the first cold call to closing the big deal.
I once had a chance to be in sales, sort of, when I spent about 18 months as a consultant. Since I was a C-level consultant, I got pulled in to help close the sale and provide some pre-sales services in an effort to win the business. I was working with some great people who taught me a lot about selling, but they could never eliminate my insecurity about each and every pitch.
That experience further cemented my deep respect for salespeople and deepened my desire to treat them accordingly. I view vendor relationships as long-term commitments that build over the years as a mutually beneficial arrangement. I don’t ping-pong between vendors, and I’ll work hard to stick with a vendor when times get tough or the situation starts to deteriorate. In return, I expect the same level of commitment in return, including good advice, solid support, and reasonable pricing.
I don’t like to waste salespeople’s time. As you can imagine, I get dozens of sales calls a week. Most get screened; a few get through. When I do take a call with a new salesperson, I always begin the conversation the same way: I describe my vision of the perfect sales relationship and immediately set expectations with the new person.
For many initial sales calls, I am still learning about a company or a product. In some cases, I don’t foresee an actual need for a product for a year or more, but I want to learn about it now so I can factor it into my planning. If that’s the case, I’ll state that up front. The bottom line is that I don’t want to waste time, either mine or the salesperson’s.
Salespeople waste a lot of time working with potential accounts who misrepresent their short- and long-term buying intent. It is frustrating to work hard to win some business only to discover that the customer had no intent of buying all along. That time would have been better spent with a more qualified account that would have yielded a real deal.
Conversely, I waste a lot of time dealing with salespeople who do not have a prayer of closing a deal with me but insist on not giving up. Trust me: if I tell you there is no deal in the works for a certain time frame, I am telling you the truth for your own good. Go pursue more promising accounts and come back later when we might be able to do business.
My best sales relationships last for years and result in success on both sides of the table. My company gets good products with great support at a fair price. The vendor gets my continued business and a customer who will turn to them first when a need arises. What more could you want?
Know Who Knows November 24, 2008
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership, Networking.Tags: Best Of 2008, Leadership, Networking
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Early in my career, I worked with two mathematicians who had been in computing since the very beginning. They had all these great stories about using Fortran for the first time, and drum memory, and mercury delay lines. They were brilliant and eccentric and were both named George. George Haynam was called “George” and George Petznick was called “GP” just to avoid confusion.
The neat thing about either George was that they did not immediately know the answer to most mathematical questions. Instead, they knew how to derive the answer from first principles. Once, I asked GP for the formula for standard deviation. He stood up at his blackboard (a real blackboard with chalk and dust) and, recalling that the standard deviation is just the square root of the variance integrated about the center of mass of the sample space, quickly derived the discrete formula. Simple! The running joke in the department was that the Georges could figure out anything, starting with f=ma.
This all came back to me recently as I was discussing aspects of successful leaders. I pointed out that, in most cases, I don’t need to know the answer to something. I just need to know who knows, so I can get the answer from them. If my network is robust and current, and I surround myself with people smarter than me (very easy to do), the “know who knows” model always works.
This is true for everyone, of course, but I don’t think we coach our teams to value and use this trick. Instead, we have lots of people on our teams who try to be cowboys, singlehandedly trying to know everything and solve everything. As they move up the management chain and realize they can’t know everything, they begin to adopt the “know who knows” approach. Unfortunately, it takes a while to learn this lesson. Some people never do.
People at every level can dramatically increase their value by developing their network of “people who know things” along with their collection of “things they know themselves.” The sum of both parts is substantially larger than everything they can hope to know, but that lesson isn’t learned right away.
As effective leaders, we need to explicitly teach this lesson to our people and offer opportunities for them to build their networks of “people who know.” Social tools help, of course, but so do real social interactions with experts: training, conferences, seminars, etc. Force your people to engage others as they solve problems, and show them how to fall back on their networks early in the problem-solving process, not as a last resort. That lesson, learned early, can make a huge difference in the course of a career.
Managing In Difficult Times November 14, 2008
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.Tags: Leadership, Project Management
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Difficult times call for exceptional leaders. It’s easy to lead when times are good. Plentiful budgets, lots of staff, willing business partners: who couldn’t be a good CIO in that kind of climate?
It’s when times get tough that real leadership shows itself. For lesser CIOs, the easy way out is to simply buckle down, cut back on everything, and ride out the storm. You manage to a reduced budget, defer all your projects, and hope to regain ground when the business climate improves. When the business complains, you can shrug and point to the economy, promising solutions when the managing gets easy again.
Alas, the easy way out is the wrong way. When times get tough, a good CIO focuses on how to keep moving ahead in spite of limited resources. In good times or bad, new challenges will constantly confront your company. You must respond to them, deliver solutions, and find ways to help your company succeed.
Instead of pulling back on everything, review each and every project in your portfolio. There will be a small group of projects that are mandatory, without which your company will fail or suffer dramatic setbacks. You must fight for these projects and ensure you have the resources to deliver them. In most cases, it is easy to make your case: corporate failure usually gets the attention of senior management. Some level of funding or support should follow; you’ll need to make do with what you are allotted.
Beyond the mandatory parts of your portfolio, there is a second set of projects that are not mandatory but that will deliver significant immediate value. These are the projects that you must embrace and fight for. Often, they fall by the wayside as budgets are reduced, lost in the clutter of projects that really can be delayed or canceled. In fact, these high-value initiatives are the ones that will help your company succeed in difficult times.
A good CIO will find a way to sell these projects on their merits, justify the investment, and deliver on the results. Especially in tough times, those new tools and processes that reduce headcount, improve efficiency, and drive value to the bottom line are critical to your, and your company’s, success.
Proactive portfolio management is the key to delivering this kind of value. Even when times get better, be aware of those projects that are the real winners. You’ll be able to respond to business needs faster and react to changing conditions more effectively. And that makes you and your organization more valuable in good times and bad.
There Are None So Blind November 12, 2008
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.Tags: Best Of 2008, Process Improvement, Users
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Sometimes the hardest part of solving a problem is getting the user to see your solution.
Many years ago, when I lived in Florida, a new mom-and-pop video store opened nearby. This was before the consolidation by big chains like Blockbuster and Hollywood Video, and little video stores were fairly commonplace.
Their inventory management system was simple: when you rented a movie, they wrote out a receipt on three-part NCR paper. One copy was your receipt, one copy was their receipt, and a third copy went into the “out on rental” stack. This stack was used to account for movies as they were returned.
The first time I returned a movie, the girl behind the counter walked over to the rental stack and began to flip through the stack of slips. After a long while, she located my rental slip and marked my movie as having been returned.
Always alert to process improvement opportunities (even then!), I was compelled to offer a better solution.
“You know, if you alphabetize that stack of rental slips, you’ll be able to find a customer’s slip much faster when they return their movie.”
She looked up at me, and then back at the slips. She thought a bit, looked back at me, and replied, “But the customers don’t come in the store in alphabetical order.”
No. No they don’t.
I didn’t say anything else. There wasn’t much else to be said.
The Effective CIO 