Leadership Elephant

The path to the farm was very narrow, and we have to get up early in the morning to be able to come back before four in the afternoon to make way for the animals to roam about in the Bia Forest, which makes all villagers walk to their farms early to avoid being crowded with the system of the unofficial rules within the village. I walked in between my father and mother with my little steps. To make me comfortable, my dad decided to be humorous and jovial by pointing to the tall trees and asked that I take a look. "Wow!" I gasped. "It reaches God!"My father had a blast!

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Leadership is one of those things that we all think that we know what it is, but we are hard pressed to describe it to someone if they ask us. This makes picking the next generation of leaders that much harder. We want them to have the leadership skills that we know that they need, but how can we make sure that they have them? Some IT managers revert to using the time-tested trial-by-fire approach, but is this really the best way?

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

One of my negotiating mentors told me that most negotiations are over even before they start. When I asked her what she meant, she explained that the side that prepares the best for a negotiation is the one that will probably walk away with the best deal. Getting ready for a negotiation involves many different things. In order to be successful for your next negotiation, you are going to have to prepare for it. What this means is that you need to understand the steps that are involved, and you need to perform them. Remember, you can win this thing before it even starts.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There are a number of different ways to make yourself more powerful in a negotiation. Bringing a team to the table is one way to go about doing this, but there are advantages and disadvantages to doing it. Not all negotiations are done by ourselves. If we choose to bring in a professional negotiator to do our dirty work for us, then we're going to need to know how to find out if they truly know their stuff.

The art of negotiation depends on your ability to successfully communicate with the other side of the table. An important part of this communication is your ability to signal to the other side what your intentions are. Likewise, they will be signaling to you what they want to accomplish.

In the end, it all comes down to what your customer wants to tell you about your product. However, how many of us have been taught how to listen to our customers?