Showing posts with label Synergy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Synergy. Show all posts

September 5, 2016

The Beating Of Life's Drums


So this was some awesome drumming at the Renaissance Festival today.

The beating of the drums was powerful and in a sense mesmerizing. 

It moved the people to sway, to dance, and to feel the power of the moment. 

In life, as they say, we all sort of move to a different beat--our own beat!

Recently, I had the experience to meet someone who was a truly wonderful person, but who came from a very different geographical, religious, and cultural background. 

There just seemed to be so many misunderstandings as a result, and it wasn't because anyone was being hurtful or a bad person. 

Rather, we were dealing with good people, who just had very different expectations of each other and of life. 

The beat was there--like a heartbeat, but the beat wasn't in sync, so in the end, everyone decided it best to go their own way in blessing, and find the life that would met their needs and where the beat was going to be in tune for them. 

In a sense, while we are all the same, yet we are all subtly different whether by nature and/or nurture, we come to situations and to each other with different viewpoints, distinct needs, as well as specific ways to satisfy them and grow us. 

Good and bad is beyond the point.  

Two hearts beat as one and that is a miracle when it happens. 

At other times, two hearts beat each other in their differences and maybe in exasperation and finally in sorrow.

The beats are strong and we search for the beats that uplift us, mesh with us, and make us better when we're together. ;-)

(Source Video: Andy Blumenthal)
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July 21, 2016

A New Diplomacy In Town

A wonderful colleague sent me this really impressive photo.

This was one of my favorite of 3 aircraft carrier strike groups taken together (Abraham Lincoln, Kitty Hawk, and Ronald Reagan)--the 1st and the 3rd of which are Nimitz-class nuclear-powered supercarriers. 

According to the slides, there were literally 4 four nuclear submarines standing guard in the waters beneath, as well as a B-2 stealth bomber flying overhead.  

What I really liked the most though wasn't even the photos, but rather the motto for the carriers of:

"Over 90,000 tons of diplomacy...wherever... whenever..."

Diplomacy can be listening, negotiating, and compromise, but it can also be through the projection of the ultimate national and human strength. 

With a staggering rise in global terrorism, militaristic adventurism, and the proliferation of dangerous weapons of mass destruction, perhaps it's time to harden up on some of the soft power, and demonstrate as well the very credible hard power and resolve we have for protecting American lives, freedom, and human rights. ;-)

(Source Photo: here)

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March 25, 2016

Cherry Blossom Sky

What beautiful weather we are having this time of year.

Just loved this gorgeous Cherry Blossom tree with the white leaves against the pale blue sky. 

Almost looks like snow flakes, but thank G-d those are gone now. 

All this nature is sort of the opposite of work, but on my mind is this quote that I heard this week:


_____________


"Plan the work

AND

Work the plan"

_____________

It's simple, but gets right to the point of the necessity of planning and then executing on the plan.

I like the gorgeous nature and this smart saying.  ;-)

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
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December 12, 2015

Helping Kids To Stand On Their Own

So my wife and I have a longstanding disagreement on the best way of teaching children. 

Her perspective:

TEACH TO CARE - Get the kids to do them for themselves, learn to be independent, by doing they learn to stand on their own two feet, don't baby them, by teaching them to do for themselves you are caring for the kids, if you jump every time they ask then there is no reason for them to try themselves.

His perspective:

CARE TO TEACH - Do for the kids when they are young, by showing them how then they start to learn how to do it for themselves later in life, children need to be shown love and caring so they can learn to one day care for themselves as well as for others, by loving and giving selflessly to children they learn that they are valuable human beings and grow to a healthy maturity. 

The reality:

CARE AND TEACH - We need to show care and love to children, but also need to teach them to do for themselves. We can't smother children nor can we send them out into the world unprepared. Care for them at an early age, show them how, and then give them opportunities to do it for themselves and become full adults. 

Like with most things in marriage, and relationships in general, the bringing together of two heads and hearts is better than just one alone. We balance each other, complement each other, and synergize each other--one is alone and deficient, two is together and with G-d making three, it is a whole. 

And always tell your wife she was right. ;-)

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
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August 23, 2013

Posture Matters

So the military got it right when they teach their cadets to stand tall "at attention."

"Chin up, chest out, shoulders back, stomach in."

The Wall Street Journal (21 August 2013) says that "posture can determine who's a hero, [and] who's a wimp."

Research has shown that striking a power pose raises testosterone levels that is associated with feelings of strength, superiority, social dominance, (and even aggression at elevated levels) and lowers cortisol levels and stress. 

Power poses or even just practicing these have been linked with better performance, including interviewing and SAT scores.

Body language or non-verbal communication such as standing erect, leaning forward, placing hands firmly on the table, can project power, presence,  confidence, and calmness. 

It all ties together where saying the right thing is augmented and synergized by looking the right way, and doing the right thing. ;-)

(Source Photo: here with attribution to Official U.S. Navy Imagery)
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March 7, 2012

The Meaning of CIO Squared

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An article in CIO Magazine (1 March 2012) describes the term "CIO Squared" as "the combination of chief information officer and chief innovation officer," and goes on to provide examples of CIOs that are both of these. 

While I respect this definition of the term and think innovation is certainly critical to the success of any CIO, and for that matter any organization in our times, I have been writing a column called CIO Squared for a couple of year now in Public CIO magazine and have other thoughts about what this really means. 

Moreover, I think the article in CIO missed the point of what "squared" really implies. 

Like the notion that 1+1=3, CIO Squared is a concept that the CIO is not just multi-faceted and -talented (that would be 1+1=2), but rather that the CIO integrates multiple facets and roles and synergizes these so that they have an impact greater than the sum of the parts (i.e. 1+1=3). 

I see the CIO Squared fulfilling its potential in a couple of major ways:

- Firstly, many organizations have both a Chief Information Officer and a Chief Technology Officer--they break the "Information Technology" concept and responsibility down into its components and make them the responsibility of two different people or different roles in the organization. One is responsible for the information needs of the business and the other brings the technology solutions to bear on this.  

However, I believe that fundamentally, a truly successful CIO needs to be able to bridge both of these functions and wear both hats and to wear them well. The CIO should be able to work with the business to define and moreover envision their future needs to remain competitive and differentiated (that's the innovation piece), but at the same time be able to work towards fulfilling those needs with technology and other solutions. 

Therefore, the role split between the CIO as the "business guy" and the CTO as the "technology whiz" has to merge at some point back into an executive that speaks both languages and can execute on these.  

That does not mean that the CIO is a one-man team--quite the contrary, the CIO has the support and team that can plan and manage to both, but the CIO should remain the leader--the point of the spear--for both.  

Another way to think of this is that CIO Squared is another name for Chief Information Technology Officer (CITO). 

- A second notion of CIO Squared that I had when putting that moniker out there for my column was that the CIO represents two other roles as well--on one hand, he/she is a consummate professional and business person dedicated to the mission and serving it's customer and stakeholders, and on the other hand, the CIO needs to be a "mensch"--a decent human being with integrity, empathy, and caring for others.  

This notion of a CIO or for that matter any CXO--Chief Executive Officer or the "X" representing any C-suite officer (CEO, COO, CFO, CHCO, etc.)--needs to be dual-hatted, where they perform highly for the organization delivering mission results, but simultaneously do so keeping in mind the impact on people and what is ultimately good and righteous.

Therefore, the CIO Squared is one who can encompass both business and technology roles and synthesize these for the strategic benefit of the organization, but also one who is mission-focused and maintains integrity and oneness with his people and G-d above who watches all. 

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

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October 30, 2010

The Coloring Book of Leadership


In a leadership course this week, I was introduced to the “Insights Wheel of Color Energies,” a framework for understanding people’s personalities and leadership styles.

In the Color Energies framework, there are four types of personalities/styles:

  • “Fiery Red”—The Director—competitive, demanding, determined, strong-willed, purposeful, and driving— they seek to “do it NOW.”
  • “Cool Blue”—The Observer—cautious, precise, deliberate, questioning, formal, and analytical—they seek to “do it right.”
  • “Sunshine Yellow”—The Inspirer—sociable, dynamic, demonstrative, enthusiastic, persuasive, and expressive. They seek to “do it together.”
  • “Earth Green”—The Supporter—caring, encouraging, sharing, patient, relaxed, and amiable—they seek to “do it in a caring way.”

There is no one best type—each is simply a personal preference. And further, each of us is “incomplete and imperfect”.
  • The one who seeks to “do it right” may miss the point with their “analysis paralysis” when something needs to be done in a time-critical fashion.
  • Similarly, the leader that’s focused on “just getting it done now” may be insensitive to providing adequate support for their people, or collaboration with others in the organization.

We saw this clearly in the class. After each person was asked to self-identify which color they were most closely aligned to, it was clear that people were oriented toward one or maybe two types, and that they did have an individual preference.

While no framework is 100% accurate, I like this one as it seems to capture key distinctions between personalities and also helped to make me more self-aware. (I am Cool Blue and Fiery Red, in case you ever decide to “tangle” with me :-).

Combining Color Energies with other personality assessment frameworks, like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and the Strength Deployment Inventory (SDI), can help us to understand both ourselves and others.

With that knowledge we can work together more productively and more pleasantly, as we empathize with others rather than puzzling about why they act the way they do.

Once we start to identify the “color personalities” of others whom we know and work with, we can better leverage our combined strengths.

To me, therefore, leaders have to surround themselves with other excellent people, who can complement their personality and leadership styles so as to fill in the natural gaps that we each possess.

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March 12, 2010

The Many Faces of the CIO


The Chief Information Officer is a complex and challenging role even for those highly experienced, well educated, and innately talented. In fact, Public CIO Magazine in 2009 stated that the average tenure for a CIO is barely 24 months. What is it that is so challenging about being a CIO?

Well of course, there is the technology itself, which some may consider challenging in terms of keeping pace with the quick and ever changing products and services and roles that the IT plays in our society.

But one of the reasons not so frequently addressed is that the CIO role itself is so multi-faceted and requires talents that span a broad range of skills sets that not a lot of people have mastered.

In the CIO Support Services Framework (CSSF), I talked about this in terms of the varied strategic functions and skills that the CIO needs in order to plan and execute effectively (instead of just being consumed in the day-to-day firefighting)—from enterprise architecture to IT governance, from program and project management to customer relationship management, and from IT security to performance management—the CIO must pull these together seamlessly to provide IT capabilities to the end-user.

I came across this concept of the multifaceted CIO this week, in a white paper by The Center for CIO Leadership called “Beyond the Crossroads: How Business-Savvy CIOs Enable Top-Performing Enterprises and How Top-Performing Enterprise Leverage Business-Savvy CIOs.” The paper identifies multiple CIO core competencies, including a generic “leadership” category (which seems to cross-over the other competencies), “business strategy and process” reengineering, technology “innovation and growth”, and organization and talent management.

Additionally, the white paper, identifies some interesting research from a 2009 IBM global survey entitled “The New Voice of the CIO” that points to both the numerous dimensions required of the CIO as well as the dichotomy of the CIO role. The research describes both “the strategic initiatives and supporting tactical roles that CIOs need to focus upon,” as follows:

Insightful Visionary Able Pragmatist
Savvy Value Creator Relentless Cost Cutter
Collaborative Business Leader Inspiring IT Manager

Clearly, the CIO has to have many functions that he/she must perform well and furthermore, these roles are at times seemingly polar-opposites—some examples are as follows:
  • Developing the strategy, but also executing on it.
  • Growing the business through ongoing investments in new technologies, but also for decommissioning old technologies, streamlining and cutting costs.
  • Driving innovation, modernization, and transformation, but also ensuring a sound, stable, and reliable technology infrastructure.
  • Maintaining a security and privacy, but also for creating an open environment for information sharing, collaboration, and transparency.
  • Understanding the various lines of business, but also running a well honed IT shop.
  • Managing internal, employee resources, but also typically managing external, contracted resources.
  • Focusing internally on the mission and business, but also for reaching outside the organization for best practices and partnerships.
However, what can seem like contradictions in the CIO role are not really incongruous, but rather they are mutually supportive functions. We develop the strategy so we can faithfully execute. We invest in new technology so we can decommission the legacy systems. We invest in new future capabilities, while maintaining a stable present day capacity, and so on. The role of the CIO is truly multifaceted, but also synergistic and a potent platform for making significant contributions to the organization.

While certainly, the CIO does not accomplish all these things by him/herself, the CIO does have to be able to lead the many facets of the job that is required. The CIO must be able to talk everything from applications development to service oriented architecture, from data center modernization to cloud computing, from server and storage virtualization to mobility solutions, from green computing to security and privacy, and so much more.

The CIO is not a job for everybody, but it is a job for some people—who can master the many facets and even the seeming contractions of the job—and who can do it with a joy and passion for business and IT that is contagious to others and to the organization.

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December 4, 2009

Playing It Safe or Provoking to Action

Which does your leadership do? Do they play it safe--staying the same familiar course, avoiding potential change and upset or do they provoke to action, encourage continuous improvement, are they genuinely open to new ideas, and do they embrace the possibilities (along with the risks) of doing things better, faster, and cheaper?

Surely, some leaders are masters of envisioning a brighter future and provoking the change to make it happen. Leaders from Apple, Google, Amazon, and other special leaders come to mind. But many others remain complacent to deliver short-term results, not "rock the boat," and keep on fighting the day-to-day fires rather than curing the firefighting illness and moving the organization to innovation, ideation, and transformation through strategic formulation and execution.

Provoking to action is risky for leaders as the old saying goes, "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down," and often leaders that make even the best-intentioned mistakes in trying to do the "right thing" get sorely punished. Only enlightened organizations encourage innovation and experimentation and recognize that failure is part of the process to get to success.

While responsible leaders, almost by definition, provide a stable, reliable, secure, and robust operating environment, we must balance this with the need to grow and change productively over time. We need more organizations and leaders to stand up and provoke action--to drive new ways of thinking and doing things--to break the complacency mindset and remove the training wheels to allow a freer, faster, and more agile movement of organizational progress. To provoke action, we need to make our people feel safe to look out for long-term organizational success strategies rather than just short-term bottom line numbers.

Harvard Business Review (December 2009) provides some useful tips for provoking action called "Five Discovery Skills Separate True Innovators from the Rest of Us."

  • Associating--Develop a broad knowledgebase and regularly give yourself the time and space to freely associate--allow your brain to connect the dots in new ways and see past old stovepipes. Fresh inputs trigger new associations; for some these lead to new ideas.
  • Questioning--”Innovators constantly ask questions that challenge common wisdom. We need to question the unquestionable as Ratan Tata put it. We must challenge long-held assumptions and Ask why? Why not? And What if? Dont be afraid to play devils advocate. Let your imagination flow and imagine a completely different alternative. Remove barriers to creative thinking and banish fear of people laughing at you, talking behind your back, dismissing you, or even conducting acts of reprisal.
  • Observing--Careful observation of people and how they behave provides critical insights into what is working and what isnt. There is a cool field of study in the social sciences called ethnomethodology that studies just such everyday human behavior and provides a looking glass through which we can become aware of and understand the ways things are and open us up to the way things could be better.
  • ExperimentingWeve got to try new things and approaches to learn from them and see if they work and how to refine them. Productive changes dont just happen all of a sudden like magic; they are cultivated, tested, refined, and over time evolve into new best practices for us and our organizations. Experimentation involves intellectual exploration, physical tinkering[and] engaging in new surroundings.
  • NetworkingIts all about people: they inspire us, provoke us, complement us, and are a sounding board for us. We get the best advances and decisions when we vet ideas with a diverse group of people. Having a diverse group of people provides different perspectives and insights that cannot be gleaned any other way. There is power in numbers”--and I am not referring to the power to defeat our enemies, but the power to think critically and synergistically. The group can build something greater than any individual alone ever could.

Of course, we cannot drive change like a speeding, runaway train until it crashes and burns. Rather, change and innovation must be nurtured. We must provoke to action our organizations and our people to modernize and transform through critical thinking, questioning the status quo, regular observation and insight, the freedom to experiment and constructively fail, and by building a diverse and synergistic network of people that can be greater than the sum of their parts.


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November 8, 2009

Building High Performance Teams

At work, there is almost no greater feeling than being part of a high-performing team, and no worse than being part of a dysfunctional one.

Teams are not, by definition, destined to succeed. In fact more often then not, they will fail unless they have the right mix of people, purpose, process, commitment, training, and of course, leadership—along with the time for it all to jell.

I remember being on a team in one special law enforcement agency that had the “right mix.” The project was both very successful and was written up as a case study, and everything in the project was really fulfilling personally and professionally: from gathering around the whiteboard for creative strategy sessions to the execution of each phase of the project. Now, that is not to say that there were not challenges on the project and on the team—there always are—or you are probably just dreaming rather than really in the office working. But the overall, in the experience, the health of the team was conducive to doing some really cool stuff. When the team is healthy and the project successful, you feel good about getting up in the morning and going to work—an almost priceless experience.

Unfortunately, this team experience was probably more the exception than the rule—as many teams are dysfunctional for one or more reasons. In fact, at the positive team experience that I was described above, my boss used to say, “the stars are all aligned for us.”

The challenge of putting together high-performance teams is described in Harvard Business Review, May 2009, in an article, “Why Teams Don’t Work,” by Diane Coutu.

She states: “Research consistently shows that teams underperform their potential.”

But Coutu explains that this phenomenon of underperformance by teams can be overcome, by following “five basic conditions” as described in “Leading Teams” by J. Richard Hackman (the descriptions of these are my thoughts):

“Teams must be real”—you need the right mix of people: who’s in and who’s out.

“Compelling direction”—teams need a clear purpose: “what they’re supposed to be doing” and is it meaningful.

“Enabling structures”—teams need process: how are things going to get done and by whom.

“Supportive organization”—teams need the commitment of the organization and its leadership: who is championing and sponsoring the team.

“Expert coaching”—you need training: how teams are supposed to behave and produce.

While leadership is not called out specifically, to me it is the “secret sauce” or the glue that holds all the other team enablers together. The skilled leader knows who to put on the team, how to motivate its members to want to succeed, how to structure the group to be productive and effective, how to build and maintain commitment, and how to coach, counsel, mentor, and ensure adequate training and tools for the team members.

One other critical element that Coutu spells out is courage. Team leaders and members need to have the courage to innovate, “ask difficult questions,” to counter various forms of active or passive resistance, and to experiment.

In short, harnessing the strength of a team means bringing out the best in everyone, making sure that the strengths and weaknesses of the individuals offset each other—there is true synergy in working together. In failing teams, everyone might as well stay home. In high-performance teams, the whole team is greater than the sum of its individual members.


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April 25, 2009

Groups Can Help or Hurt the Decision Process…Here’s how

Generally, IT governance is based on the assumption that by vetting decisions in groups or boards—such as an Enterprise Architecture Board or Investment Review Board--we get better decisions. I for one have been an outspoken proponent for this and still am.

However, I read with great interest in the Wall Street Journal, April 25-26, an article entitled “How Group Decision End Up Wrong-Footed.”

In this article, an organizational psychologist at Stanford University, Robert Sutton states: “The best groups will be better than their best individual members”—okay, that’s right in line with our IT governance model, but then goes on to say…

and the worst groups will be worse than the worst individual.”—oh uh, that’s not good…here the IT governance model seems to backfire, when the group is dysfunctional!

Here’s the explanation:

“Committees and other groups tend either to follow the leader in a rush of conformity [here’s the herd mentality taking over] or to polarize into warring groups [here’s where the members break into oppositional stovepipes jockeying for position and turf].”

In these all too common dysfunctional group scenarios, the group does not work the way it is intended to—in which members constructively offer opinions, suggestions, explanations and discuss issues and proposals from various points of view to get a better analysis than any single person in the group could on their own.

Instead, “all too often committees don’t work well at all—resulting in a relentless short-term outlook, an inability to stick to strategic plans, a slapdash pursuit of the latest fad and a tendency to blame mistakes on somebody else.”

So how do we develop groups that work effectively?

According to Richard Larrick a psychologist at Duke University, “For committees and other boards to work well, they must be made up of people with differing perspectives and experience who are unafraid to speak their minds…they must also select and process information effectively and seek to learn from their mistakes.”

In this model, people in a group can effectively balance and complement each other, and synergistically work together to make better IT decisions for the organization.

Here are some suggestions offered by the article for effective groups:

The first is to break the group into “pro” and “con” sub-groups that can develop arguments for each side of the argument. I call this the debate team model and this offsets the tendency of groups to just follow the “leader” (loudest, pushiest, most politically savvy…) member in the room, creating the herd mentality, where anybody who disagrees is branded the naysayer or obstacles to progress. To get a good decision, we need to foster a solid debate and that occurs in an environment where people feel free to explore alternate point of view and speak their minds respectfully and constructively with non-attribution and without retaliation.

The second suggestion is to ask how and why questions to “expose any weak points in the advise.” This idea was a little surprising for me to read, since I had prior learned in leadership training that it is impolite and possibly even antagonistic to ask why and that this interrogative should be avoided, practically at all costs.

In prior blogs, I have written how enterprise architecture provides the insight for decision-making and It governance provides the oversight. So I read with interest once more, that oversight has a dual meaning: “the word can mean either scrutiny or omission.” And again it clicked…when the governance board works effectively; it “scrutinizes” investments so that the organization invests wisely. However, when the group is dysfunctional the result is “omissions” of facts, analysis, and healthy vetting and decision-making. That is why we need to make our IT governance boards safe for people to really discuss and work out issues.


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January 19, 2008

“Tear Down Those Silos!” and Enterprise Architecture

One of enterprise architecture’s “targets” is to transform the organization from being purely monolithic, functional-based silos (like operations, sales, marketing, finance, HR, legal, IT and so on) to an interoperable, cost-effective, mission and results-driven enterprise.

Matejka and Murphy in the book, Making Change Happen, clearly states that a “barrier to the successful implementation of any change is the division of the organization into silos. The grouping of the same or similar tasks (creating pockets of specialized knowledge) provides distinct opportunities for the disruption of the seamless implementation of new strategic initiatives.”

The authors ask “what is a silo and why does the term have such a negative connotation these days?

They then consult that Random House Dictionary for definitions of silo, as follows:

“A silo is ‘a tall, cylindrical structure in which grain is stored’ or ‘a sunken shelter for storing and launching missiles.’ Hmm. Very interesting. So a silo is a valuable protector of precious materials, but a single –purpose, single-use, fragmented, isolated, fairly impenetrable piece of organizational architecture.”

What makes organizational silos the enemy of change and transformation?

  • Professional jargon
  • Professional memberships
  • Turf and resource protection
  • Comfort zones…Discrimination”
“In a specialized professional department, is the employee’s real allegiance to the company or to the profession? The answer might surprise you. Many managers we have worked with would privately state that it is the profession.” This is why in functional- based siloed organizations, they cannot achieve the unity, integration, and synergy to make successful change happen."

To break down the silos and implement true “enterprise” architecture, you don’t need to get rid of the functions (since they serve a purpose and are important), you just need to use cross-functional teams, reward cross-functional performance and strategic thinking, broaden the perspective of functional silos by providing cross functional training and development.

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