娇色导航

Whenever one talks about high-performance or leadership there is a tendency to break out a list. For example, Major League Baseball scouts are in constant search for rare 鈥�5 tool鈥� players who can hit for power,聽hit for average, field, throw, and run. Is there such a list for high-performance CIOs? If so, how long might it be?

I asked a group of executives for the most important adjectives they would use to describe successful CIOs. The responses included, in alphabetical order:聽accountable, adaptable, curious, decisive, eloquent, empathetic, financially savvy, focused, hard-working, intelligent, improvisational, interdisciplinary, mindful, motivational, patient, practical, principled, strategic, thick-skinned, trusted, and visionary.

That鈥檚 21 skills and traits. Quite a list, just to start.

And that鈥檚 not surprising given that people have been writing about leadership and performance for a long time. Greek philosopher Plutarch (born c. 46 AD) studied the lives of famous Greek and Roman leaders and concluded, 鈥淎ll who wished to become civic leaders first had to gain the confidence of their constituents.鈥� (See聽.)

If we unpack 鈥済ain the confidence of their constituents,鈥� I think what Plutarch was saying was that first and foremost a leader must be 鈥渇ollowable.鈥� Another possible adjective for our list.

Anthony Sheldon, longtime chronicler of the leadership strengths and weaknesses of British Prime Ministers (), concludes that what makes聽leaders followable is being 鈥渁ble to tell a story of where they have come from and to where they will lead us.鈥� Add 鈥渃ommunicator鈥� then to the list of must-have 娇色导航adjectives.

Of course, I do have to add a qualifier here because it is not enough to be a great communicator. Receivers of messages are paying increasingly deeper attention to the authenticity and substance of the narrative being presented. Many firms have been caught out in the embarrassing situation of having spent more time and money on crafting and delivering messages audiences want to hear 鈥� for example around sustainability, diversity, AI-capability sets, and privacy 鈥� than on programs in these hot-button, snatched-from-the-headlines areas. The info-space is cluttered with tales of greenwashing, AI-washing, privacy-washing. You have to walk the talk for the talk to have impact.

Another mandatory adjective associated with 娇色导航success is 鈥渒nowledgeable鈥� 鈥攁nd not just about the current internal IT environment, but also about the geopolitical-economic context, internal political/cultural dynamics, what the organization is capable of, and its appetite for risk and change, in addition to technological possibilities evolving and to come.

As Peter Drucker famously said, 鈥淢anagement is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.鈥�

Achieving that requires a wide range of knowledge, but for CIOs, the basic building blocks of tech know-how can鈥檛 be overlooked: data management, infrastructure and operations, telecommunications and networks, and information security and privacy. Twenty years ago, CIOs had to be knowledgeable about enterprise systems. Today, it鈥檚 all about data.

Or as Vince Kellen, the award-winning 娇色导航at UC-San Diego who is thought to be at least two standard deviations ahead of typical CIO-ness, says, great CIOs, as a starting point, get 鈥渄eep inside every aspect of the team formation of IT and the technology and the architecture of IT.鈥�

And of course, the ingredients of the 娇色导航knowledge set that create stock-price multiple value exponentialization are situational awareness, organizational/cultural聽,聽and opportunity identification.

US Army General James H. Dickinson, commander of US Space Command, when speaking to students at the United States Army War College聽talked about situational awareness prioritizing the need to 鈥渦nderstand the competition鈥� and to be aware of 鈥渨hat our competitors are doing.鈥� Simultaneous with stabilizing the internal IT resource, CIOs must remain aware of what their peers are doing.

Dick Dooley, a pioneer in crafting leadership development programs for IT executives as one of the forces behind the founding of the Society of Information Management (SIM), uses the phrase 鈥渃ollective uncertainty鈥� to describe the general malaise surrounding much contemporary thinking about the future.

Juxtaposed against Eliezer Yudkowsky鈥檚 absolute certainty that the end result of creating superhumanly smart AI is that 鈥溾�� is the less strident assertion of CIOs moving forward in the AI-space that benefits will happen.

As a futurist I like to think that the true secret sauce of 娇色导航success lies in being able to collaboratively craft a narrative describing a better future.聽I believe CIOs need to have a vision of what can be.

I was surprised at the end of my examination of adjectives essential to 娇色导航success to discover that an apt metaphor for 娇色导航greatness is gardening, . 聽A gardener needs to have a picture in mind that 鈥渃an translate into the ground.鈥� A gardener needs to understand聽clearly 鈥渉ow the one plant [i.e., resource] will connect to the other.鈥�