Offering regional and national programs, CIO (and CSO) events bring together some of the most respected names and thought leaders in information technology and security. Presented by CIOs and other senior level executives, these invitation-only programs offer timely topics and strong networking. Learn More »
Public Council Teleconference: Application Rationalization — Hidden Costs and Smart Decisions
November 17 at 11:00 am US/Eastern (GMT-5)
Join Honorio Padrón, of The Hackett Group, who will share the drivers for companies to tackle application rationalization and the results of research that define the hidden cost of complexity. Additionally, we will discuss key decision milestones—to start or not, holding the course steady and fulfilling expectations.
Virtual Desktop Cost-Benefit Analysis — Michael Jacobs, Catlin Group
The analysis contained in this presentation measures the cost of everything from the machines and licenses to the infrastructure for virtual vs. traditional desktop environments.
Honor your best senior team members - Apply for the CIO Ones to Watch Award
Get well-earned public recognition for your top up-and-coming team members, your IT organization and your enterprise. Award winners will be announced, publicized and feted in May 2010, great timing to help attract new IT recruits to your company.
Learn more about the CIO Executive Council »August 09, 2007 — CIO —
Harvard Business School Professor John Kotter is one of the top authorities on leadership and change, and author of the best seller Leading Change. He says that he has not always found it easy to cope with personal change.
I personally admire Jack Welch as a change leader. And I have learned many lessons from him. He's said that "the world is moving in nanoseconds," so you better damn well be sure you're good at change. He's also talked about how "incremental change can easily be resisted by a bureaucracy."
Constant baby-step improvement is fine, but it is not enough. Sometimes sweeping change is what you need. It is what leaders do. They take existing systems and adapt them to new waves of technology and competition. Go back and research history. The major leaders, like Abraham Lincoln, whom we revere today were associated with huge changes.
The more adaptable you are, the better. I've found that the more adaptable organizations or individuals are to change, the better they can sustain high performance over time. There is a definitive relationship between leadership and change, which is how I got into this research in the first place. I was physics major at MIT, then I got into electrical engineering and finally, labor economics. That was followed by business school and a focus on organizational psychology. During my research, I began to see a relationship between performance and change. The companies that were better at change were performing better over time. And they had better leadership.
The most basic aspects of leadership and change are a function of human nature. I've found there are specific steps in the process of how people make significant changes. The steps tend to be universal, independent of the content of change. They apply to process reengineering, the need for more innovation, new business strategies, you name it.
The eight steps are to create a sense of urgency, put the right team together, create a sensible change vision and strategy, communicate the plan to obtain buy-in, empower people to act, garner some short-term wins, then pound away the changes you are trying to make until you implement them and can make them stick. That basic process is at the heart of leading change.
Details of leadership are situational. Leaders, by definition, have to fit into the situations they're dealing with. As situations change culturally, and through time, successful leadership styles change too. I would bet that if you look at the people today who are providing terrific leadership in their organizations, some of the things they're doing are different from their counterparts in 1950. Today there is more diversity in terms of gender, ethnic background and race. As the details vary, so does the leadership style.