Leadership Elephant

CEO Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.'s memoir about the extraordinary turnaround of IBM and his transformation of the company into the industry leader of the computer age - the great American business story of our time.

When Louis V. Gerstner became CEO of IBM in 1993, shares had slumped and the company was on the verge of collapse. Hired for his successful management of RJR Nabisco and American Express, Gerstner had no background in technology, but during his seven-year chairmanship, he transformed the company into the leading force of the computer age.

As product managers, we all want to become better at what we do. However, sometimes we can find ourselves in a rut: we've solved the immediate problems, our product is doing well, and we've just lost that drive that we need in order to reach the next level. This is when the power of competition comes in. We all like a good challenge. When we are faced with a situation in which we might not be the best, or we might not know exactly what we should do, that's when we can become our best.

Product failures are never something that a product manager wants to talk about. We all live with the secret dread that someday the product that we are responsible for might turn out to be a failure. It turns out that we're all missing an important learning opportunity. Products do fail, and they end up failing for a wide range of reasons. Every product failure is loaded with fantastic learning opportunities for product managers. We just need to take the time and open our eyes to see what we can learn from each failure.

When you find yourself in a leadership position, you'll want to make the most of it. This means that you want to be viewed as being both powerful and effective. In order to make this happen, you need to have a good understanding of what leadership is really all about.

The key to being a successful CIO is making sure you have a good understanding of just exactly what a CIO does. This means you have to take a look at what CIOs do and then learn from them. In order to be a successful CIO, you may decide you need an MBA. There are a lot of different ways to go about getting this degree - which one is the right one for you?

At the heart of what it means to be a product manager lies the ability to market your product. No matter if you are trying to get people inside of your company to provide you with the resources or funding that your product needs in order to get out the door or if it's customers that you are after, you've got to be able to paint a picture of your product that makes people want it.

Congratulations - you are an IT manager and you've been given a budget to work with. Oh, oh, now what? Oh, and if you're going to want any money next year, you had better learn how to ask for more money. This budget stuff can be tricky. The fact that we talk about budgets using a vocabulary that most IT managers probably don't have (or at least don't use every day) makes it just a bit harder.

In order to be successful as an IT manager, you need to be able to show the company that under your leadership your team is able to deliver high quality products on time and under budget. If you want to have any chance of being able to pull this off, then you are going to have to discover ways to build a high performance IT team.

At the heart of being a CIO is the responsibility to manage an entire department of technical professionals. It is your job to provide an overall direction for the department to move in and when problems arise, and they always do, you are going to have to work with your staff in order to create solutions.

There are a lot of bad guys out there. For some odd reason, a lot of them seem to want to break into your company's networks and applications. As the CIO, it's your job to make sure that this does not happen. As much as we like to spend our time looking outwards in order to detect the next threat that our company may be facing, perhaps we're looking in the wrong direction. Just as important may be the insider threat that lurks within the company. No matter where it comes from, cybercrime is your problem to deal with.

So just exactly what is innovation? It turns out that innovation is doing something new. It can be a new method, a new idea, or even a new product. In the world of IT, we have the ability to solve just about any problem. However, how we go about solving problems can become outdated quickly. What we need to do as CIOs is to find out how to bring the spirit of innovation into our IT departments.

When you became a product manager, did anyone take the time to mention to you that you were signing up to become a member of your company's sales department? You might have thought that you were joining the marketing department, but if your product doesn't sell, then you won't be holding on to your product management job for long!

All too often we find ourselves in the position of being an IT manager with little or no training on what it takes to correctly staff a team. This is a critical skill for us to have. Ultimately, the success of an IT manager rests on how his/her team preforms. You might think that staffing is all about hiring the right people to come and join your team. It turns out that there is a lot more to this. Staffing involves attracting and retaining the right people. However, it also deals with knowing when it is time to let the wrong members of your team go.

When we sit down to negotiate, we are really entering into a very specialized conversation with the other side of the table. We have a set of goals and they have their own set of goals. The purpose of the negotiation conversation is to find out if there is a way that the needs of both sides of the table can be met.

Any manager is only as good as his or her team. I'm pretty sure that we've all heard this before. However, that leaves us in a bit of a bind - more often than not we are just handed a team and told the make the most of them. However, it turns out that over time we have the ability to reshape and mold our team based on who we choose to add and remove from it. Learning how to do this the right way is what can determine the ultimate success of a manager.

This audiobook has been written with one goal in mind - to show you how you can make your product management career a success. It's not easy being a product manager so we're going to show you what you need to be doing in order to make you stand out and be successful! Let's make your career a success!

It's not easy being an IT manager. There are constant staffing issue, budget issues, project issues, and the challenge of keeping your management informed about what is going on. The one thing that too many of us end up overlooking as we try to accomplish all of these things is that we have one more management job to do: Manage our careers.

As the CIO of your company, it's your job to stay on top of all of the different forms of technology that the company uses to accomplish its business goals. This task is made even harder by all of the changes that are always occurring in the various technology fields. As the CIO you need to be understand how to pick the correct type of database to be used on projects. You need to watch the rollout of other large-scale IT projects and learn from them: what went right and what went wrong.

Every company wants to grow and become more successful. There is no magic formula to make this happen, but it is generally agreed that in order for this to happen the company cannot stand still. Instead, they always have to be trying new things and growing.

What does it really mean to be a CIO? You sure won't be writing any software any more. You won't be stringing network cables or updating firewall parameters. What does a CIO really do? I've got some bad news for you: CIOs manage.