CIO — From the beginning, Fred V.* saw signs of the end. He’d just accepted a high-profile CIO job at a big-name food services company, and he was excited about the opportunity to develop a global infrastructure and manage electronic relationships with suppliers, stores and customers. But he also knew this big company had a history of acting small. IT was treated like a second-class citizen, and business managers ruled their own technology fiefdoms. There were no IT standards or shared strategy. The company had burned through two CIOs in three years.
But the potential outweighed the risk, and in his first six months Fred saw nothing but success. He introduced new processes and systems that improved the bottom line and earned high fives from the business heads. Then he began pressing for IT standards and outsourcing, topics nobody wanted to discuss. Suddenly the honeymoon ended. The business heads circled their wagons and shut Fred out of key meetings and budget discussions. By the end of his first and only year at the helm, he saw clearly that it was time to get out before he was thrown out. He walked into the CEO’s office and negotiated a severance package, and today he’s an independent consultant.
It’s a tricky thing, knowing when it’s time to leave. You have to be able to read the signs, whether they’re written on the boardroom wall or hidden in your heart.
For Charles Popper, former CIO of Whitehouse Station, N.J.-based pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co., the telltale signs came after seven years on the job, when he started to feel a little stale at work and was paying more than passing attention to outside opportunities. "People were coming to me casually to seek my advice on startups," he says. "When some of these ideas sounded more fun than what I was doing [at Merck], that’s when I realized: It was time." Today, Popper is vice chairman and chief technologist at Orama Partners, a New York City-based investment bank, where he helps startups land venture capital funding. "I’m still trying to get the best business value out of technology," Popper says. "That’s part of the fun."
Here’s how you’ll know that it’s time to go. You can’t get no satisfaction. When you don’t have the impact on the business that you’d hoped for (or had been promised), or IT just isn’t getting a strategic role in the company, then it’s time to move on. "I came in with a vision of what I thought I could do if IT were elevated to a strategic business role. It turned out that [vision] just wasn’t interesting to them," Fred says.
