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Leaving A Mark May 2, 2008

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.
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Frequent readers know I am working my way through Team Of Rivals, a great account of Abraham Lincoln’s political career.  As I read it, I am struck by the detailed information available to us 150 years after these events unfolded.  For the most part, the book is drawn from newspaper accounts of the era and personal letters from the various people involved.  Even today, these archives are well-preserved and readily accessible to any interested parties.

I think it will be impossible write such a book about our current world 150 years from now.  While we are recording more data in more ways than ever before, we are recording it in ways that are transient and unstable.  I haven’t written a real letter, on real paper, in 25 years.  I haven’t saved a letter I have received in the past 25 years.  No one will ever rummage through my attic, long after I am gone, and turn up a trove of letters, bound with ribbon and unlocking the secrets of my time.

What you might find would be utterly useless, even today.  I have a reel of 9-track tape that holds all the code I wrote at my first job, between 1982 and 1985.  I have floppy disks with old files, both 5.25″ and 3.5″, that are completely inaccessible to me now.  On my laptop are copies of my address book from a previous job, cleverly stored in the Novell Address Book format.  Lots of data, stories to be told, lost to the ages.  Over my career, I’ve posted thousands of articles to dozens of Usenet newsgroups, and posted a weekly movie ratings report to rec.arts.movies for five years.  Perhaps two dozen of these posts still survive in remote corners of the Usenet archives on the web.  I ran a web site for six years, and wrote weekly columns for three other sites for almost ten years.  Again, all gone, deleted without a second thought when those sites were shuttered.  Even these blog entries will be gone without a trace in twenty years.

My father has half-a-dozen original photos of my ancestors in Italy, taken between 1880 and 1905.  They have survived over 100 years, passed from generation to generation as precious heirlooms, given the appropriate care that such a rare artifact deserves.  In my children’s hands, they will survive another 70 years before being turned over to the next generation with a similar admonishment to take care of them.  I also have over 5,000 photos taken over the past ten years, stored as JPEG images on my laptop and carefully archived using Adobe Photo Album.  Does anyone really believe that these photos will be accorded the same care?  Will someone copy them from media to media every few years, converting them to some new format as needed?  When my son takes out the photo of his great-great-great-grandmother in 50 years, will he be able to look at those photos from our church retreat last weekend just as easily?  I doubt it.

I worry that we are not leaving a mark, a tangible reminder of our thoughts and dreams and lives.  Lincoln’s letters (and those of his contemporaries) are filled with deep thoughts, emotions, and dreams.  They are transcribed conversations that reflect what people were doing across a period of years.  What are we leaving behind?  Facebook pages?  YouTube videos?  A thousand unrelated tweets on Twitter?  Lots of data, very little content, all in a format that is exceedingly perishable.  In the end, the most connected generation may leave behind the smallest useful footprint of our daily lives.

I don’t have a solution to this.  Should we all start writing letters?  It makes my hand hurt just to think about it.  Convert everything to paper hard copy?  I don’t have the space to store it all, and I wonder how long the ink would last before fading away.

I think it is important to leave a mark, large or small, one way or another.  Perhaps the mark we leave, like that of Lincoln, transcends the paper and photos and is truly captured by the lives we touch and affect for all the years to come.  In that regard, we should all live our lives in the hope that we could touch even a fraction of those impacted by Lincoln and that 100 years from now, someone would still know our name.

Cars, Computers, and Trust April 23, 2008

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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I dread getting any sort of work done on my car. Although I am fascinated by automotive technology, I am utterly incapable of working on cars or diagnosing their problems. I’ve always worked with guys who knew cars inside and out; they would tear down engines, replace crucial parts, and rebuild things with careless abandon.  I envy their skills and confidence.  My limited experience with cars usually resulted in expensive trips to a real mechanic to correct my errors.

As I write this, my car is having new tires installed.  I don’t mind this, since I understand the value of tires in helping me get from here to there.  What I do mind is the inevitable visit from the mechanic during the process:

We gave your car a courtesy check while we had it up on the lift.  Honestly, we don’t know how you even drove here this morning!  Your brakes are completely shot.  The suspension is worn out.  It looks like the electrical system is about to burst into flames, and we think you’re actually missing a piston.  We’re afraid to even drive your car out of the garage bay.  You want to get all that fixed while you’re here?  If not, the law requires that you sign this waiver so we can let you leave the lot.

Argghhh!  I have no idea if any of this is true, or expected, or even possible.  The car has been running fine.  Does disaster loom around the corner?  Will I be left helpless on the side of the road?  I am totally at their mercy, with absolutely no information to help.

Such poetic justice!  This is exactly how our users feel, every day.  For anyone not in the secret computing geek club, computers are mysterious, magical, confusing devices.  When they work, they get the job done, but when they break, the average user is completely clueless.

Our explanations are equally arcane and absolutely inscrutable.  Here are the actual fixes I made to my wife’s laptop last night to (hopefully) correct a Vista network printing problem:

The Linksys router firmware is out of date and needs to be upgraded from version 1.00.9 to 1.02.5.  According to some web postings, I need to disable the IPv6 dual stack support on both network adapters. Finally, according to some other postings, the Dell BIOS settings are incorrect: we need to disable the flash cache support and switch the SATA controller from AHCI to ATA mode.    All this might fix the problem, but it might also require a complete reformat and reinstall of Vista, resulting in a loss of all your data and settings.  You want to get all that work done?

And we wonder why people have a love/hate relationship with computers?

Things are no different in the corporate world.  The rest of the company has no idea what we really do with all those blinking lights and wires in the data center.  They don’t know what it really does, or really costs, or if they really need it at all.  They place their faith, their wallets, and increasingly, the fate of their company in our hands and hope for the best.

Everyone in IT is responsible for earning and keeping the trust of our users.  We have to police ourselves, making sure that we give good advice and provide accurate service.  We cannot spend money foolishly or buy technology because it is cool.  By scrupulously managing ourselves, we’ll give our users good solutions that meet their needs, further the business, and don’t break the bank.  If we fail in this, we’ll lose their trust and lose the privilege of serving them.  As CIOs, we must instill this attitude in every person at every level in our organization.  Our success, and our company’s success, rides on it.

Snips and Snails and Puppydog Tails April 16, 2008

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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Apparently, little boys (and little girls, for that matter) were figured out long ago, content-wise.  CIOs, in contrast, seem to be in a state of constant flux.

As you climb the management ladder in IT, you remove yourself from the technology that attracted you to the field in the first place.  Your time is increasingly occupied with issues that allow your company to use information technology to further its business.  By the time you reach the top of the chain, your staff wouldn’t let you near a machine with a ten foot pole.  I have a notorious reputation as a Breaker Of Things; my staff visibly tenses up when I make the occasional foray into the data center to reconnect with blinking lights and cold air.

Given this career transition, what are CIOs made of?  My recipe: 40% accountant, 40% attorney, and 20% psychologist.  Here’s why:

  • Accountant: Good CIOs focus on business value.  Each company may have different ways to measure business value, but in the end it is a financial metric, not a technical one.  Moreover, the language of business is financial.  To have a credible leadership presence in your company, you must be able to translate technology into financial terms.  Sometimes those terms are in hard-dollar returns; in other cases it may be in terms of business advantage, time to market, process enhancement, or other fundamentally financial metrics.  If terms like EBITDA, GAAP, and SOX aren’t part of your vocabulary, or you can’t explain when to use expense versus capital dollars, you may be falling short in this area.
  • Attorney: Good CIOs know how to negotiate and close a deal.  Vendor management largely revolves around good contractual management.  You need the basic legal skills to understand contractual terms, assess liability, and understand how to build solutions that protect your company from a legal perspective.  So much of what IT confronts these days is about compliance, exposure, and risk management.  You must be able to work in this world comfortably.  CIOs may also be called upon to be deposed on behalf of their company and should understand the basics of litigation and representation.
  • Psychologist: When things go bad and systems unravel, CIOs may find themselves talking everyone else down from the ledge.  Technology is a great mystery to almost everyone; when it falls apart, you must be able to lead people to a stable solution.  Increasingly, the projects we sponsor are technologically straightforward (install a new reporting system) but socially difficult (and make everyone give up their existing personal spreadsheets).  This kind of social engineering can be quite rewarding but requires deft people skills and the ability to see the world through your users’ eyes.

This isn’t to say that you can forget your technology roots.  Inside your organization, you need the technical chops to evaluate solutions, challenge your people, and be able to hold your own in the occasional hallway debate.  CIOs lacking business skills will fail outside their organization; CIOs lacking technical skills will fail inside their organization.

Imperfect Integration April 15, 2008

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Networking.
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Social networking sites are getting too clever by half, providing more and more features to lure users into their web of connected people.  What they are missing are the features that connect their “walled gardens” to other equally useful networks.

As I’ve posted before, I like different systems for different features.  LinkedIn is the gold standard for professional networking, delivering controlled access to professional colleagues in a manner that most closely mimics (and respects) real-world relationships.  Plaxo is the best contact management tool I’ve seen, with unparalleled cross-platform synchronization.  The Plaxo Pulse, which provides a Twitter-like stream of activity for your connected contacts, is interesting and becoming more useful.  My blogging platform is WordPress, which seems to meet my (limited) needs at this point. To be honest, I don’t know that I have the energy for Twitter, although I’m willing to tinker with it.

The problem with these systems is that they don’t play well together.  They want to attract users, confine them to their system, and keep them there for all levels of service.  I understand the rationale: eyeballs = dollars.  But I dislike the constraints, which makes it harder to use all the services.  I want them to interoperate seamlessly, but they aren’t there yet.

Plaxo makes an attempt at this, allowing you to hook feeds from other sites (like this blog) into your Plaxo pulse.  The problem is that Plaxo pulls the content into Plaxo, instead of connecting to the actual source.  As a result, updates lag and the Plaxo version gets out of date when I update the content.  More importantly, readers in Plaxo don’t see the full blog unless they click through to it.  Reading this in Plaxo?  Click here to read these posts in their full glory, see what I am reading, explore the archives, peruse the tag cloud, and subscribe directly (if you are so inclined).

LinkedIn has fairly pathetic contact management.  Why can’t it get my contacts from Plaxo, so that everything is in sync everywhere?  Why can’t LinkedIn connections be mirrored in Plaxo automatically (and vice versa)?  LinkedIn also has a simplistic Twitter-like feature, as does Plaxo.  Why can’t LinkedIn and Plaxo integrate my Twitter stream so I can update things in one place and see them everywhere?

I suspect this will all happen in due time as this space coalesces and matures.  Like other web technologies (and the web itself), we need this period of experimentation and overlap to figure out what works and what doesn’t.  At some point, it will settle out, great sums of money will change hands, and one integrated system will remain.  Until then, we’ll all be updating lots of similar sites, over and over again.

Abraham Lincoln: Nerd! April 9, 2008

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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Abraham Lincoln is an American icon: an honest, unwavering, hardworking, self-taught leader that saved the United States from self-destruction.  To that list of attributes I can safely add “dork.”

I’ve been reading Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin, a superb history of Abraham Lincoln with a focus on his political and leadership skills.  Goodwin’s engaging style presents a detailed view of Lincoln’s life against the backdrop of the early- to mid-1800s.

As I read Goodwin’s repeated descriptions of Lincoln,  I am struck by his, well, dorkiness.  He was tall and gangly, with ill-fitting and out-of-style clothes.  His pants stopped a full two inches above his ankles.  His suitcoat was poorly cut, too tight in front and billowing in back.  He wore enormous Conestoga boots.  His hair was unkempt.  He was a country bumpkin, tongue-tied in the presence of women.  Once, upon entering a society ball and seeing the women therein, he loudly exclaimed to the other men “Boy, aren’t the women clean!”

How, then, did this man win the presidency and save the Union?  Simply put, spectacular communication skills.  Although distracted by women, he was a masterful raconteur among the men (keeping in mind that only men voted back then).  He could captivate an audience, large or small, and understood how to present an argument in a style that resonated with people.  He could finesse his way through sensitive political situations and read people exceptionally well.  He was self-effacing and humble, but never lost sight of his goals.

There is a huge lesson in this, especially for those of us that tend to fall on the nerdy end of the scale.  In almost every aspect of life, and certainly among executive leaders, communications skills are the key driver for success.  Over and over, Goodwin recounts people who met Lincoln, completely dismissed him based on his appearance, and subsequently became spellbound when he began to speak.  His ability to reach people through w ords transcended his innate goofy appearance.

As you work to excel as a leader, keep Lincoln in mind.  Given the modern ready access to better-fitting clothes, nicer shoes, and modern plumbing, your appearance is easy to correct.  Focus your time in formulating your thoughts and learning how to express them.  You’ll probably never find yourself needing to become president or save the Union, but you will find yourself succeeding in whatever you put your mind to.