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.
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.
Experiments In Leadership July 22, 2008
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.Tags: Leadership, Scouting
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I recently returned from a week at Boy Scout Summer Camp, at idyllic Camp Raven Knob in the mountains of North Carolina. I was not alone: camp is best experienced in large groups. To that end, I was there with Boy Scout Troop 244 with eight other adults and 39 Boy Scouts, including my son. Overall, the camp was home to 650 Scouts, with perhaps 150 adult leaders and 100 staff members.
The boys spent the week earning merit badges, hiking, swimming, building fires, playing with sharp objects, eating camp food, getting rained on, and fooling around. The adult leaders focus on ensuring that the boys have fun, don’t get too homesick, and return home with all the eyes, fingers, and limbs they brought to camp at the start of the week.
To the casual observer, Scouting is just another extracurricular activity for boys that involves camping and various outdoor skills. Those involved in Scouting know better. Scouting is an outstanding leadership training program for young men that uses outdoor experiences as the venue for boys to try their new skills. For 100 years, Scouting has been teaching young men how to solve problems, organize teams, develop strategies, and lead people. When you throw in the opportunity to build fires, use knives, and get dirty, it becomes almost irresistible to most 12-year-old boys.
Most people never get the opportunity to experiment with leadership with no fear of failure. By the time we are placed in a leadership position, failure carries a huge cost. Scouting creates leadership opportunities where failure has no downside. Instead, boys get the opportunity to see their mistakes, learn from them, and try again. By the time they move into a real leadership role, they have the experience to be successful and avoid previous errors.
I once watched my son try to lead a patrol of eight boys in cooking breakfast. He struggled as boys wandered off, ignored his plan, and went their own way. He wound up doing much of the work himself and found the experience frustrating. Everyone did get to eat, but the process was messy, literally and figuratively. Afterward, I asked him how it went. He declared he never wanted to be in charge of cooking again! I laughed, and we talked about how to motivate a team, delegate tasks, follow up, and finish a project. Since then, my son has managed patrol meals on many occasions without a problem, and his patrol eats very well. (Menu highlights have included penne with shrimp in a tomato cream sauce, chicken fajitas, and apple pie, all prepared in various remote locales across North Carolina).
Leadership training is an essential part of any good organization. Just as Scouting provides a lab environment for future leaders, we need to create training opportunities for our people to test their leadership skills. Most importantly, we need to give them the ability to fail without fear so that they can learn from their mistakes and get better. Fear of failure is paralyzing. Let your people fail, provide structure to contain the potential damage, and give feedback so they can learn from their mistakes. Although you may not be able to send them camping for a week, they’ll still grow and mature into more effective contributors in your organization.
Achieving Critical Mass May 19, 2008
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.Tags: Leadership, Teams
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In my most recent posting, I began by discussing the basic criteria for a successful nuclear explosion: getting the right material in the right place at the right time. In a blinding flash of obviousness (obviosity?) I realized that this is true of so many things in life, particularly in the role we all seek to play as leaders.
It is a sad fact that those of us living towards the top of the org chart do very little real work. Instead, we direct, manage, and inspire those below us who actually do productive things on a regular basis. Our job is making sure the right people do the right things the right way and understand why.
As leaders, it is not enough to simply spout some grand scheme and stand back and watch it unfold. It is our job to make sure the right people come together at the right time with the right resources. Our people often cannot bring all that together; they lack the authority or wherewithall to make it all happen. Instead, they look to us to bridge those gaps, break down the barriers, and orchestrate the myriad of elements beyond their control that ensure their success.
It is easy to miss this critical aspect of our job. Poor leaders often blame their teams for failing to bring it all together when they actually carry the responsibility for making their team successful. In some cases, teams cannot see all the pieces of the puzzle, let alone figure out how to put them all together. We need to do that, and our teams need to trust that we are doing this for them.
This need not involve dramatic micromanagement or a heavy-handed approach. Often, simply asking the right question at the right time is all it takes. Questions that begin with “Did you consider…” or “Did you talk to…” or “Have you thought about…” may be enough to start a train of thought that leads to a better solution to a problem.
Truth be told, it’s fun and rewarding to see all those parts come together to create something great. It may not be as cool as building your own nuclear weapon, but it is a real pleasure when a plan works just like you hoped it would.
The Effective CIO 