he became particularly upset about things. At one stage he was crunching his way through mice at a rate of more than one per week. However, an unusually empathic member of the support team, armed with a liberal supply of spare electronic rodents, transformed the whole relationship between this business unit and the IT function. A couple of hundred dollars’ worth of mice helped build trust. From this platform we found we could implement quite dramatic change through technological innovation in medicine discovery. This isn't the kind of example that you find in any textbook, but it worked a treat for us. I for one would never have thought that meek and gentle people could achieve such a powerful outcome with just a few plastic animals. Executive support isn't a particularly egalitarian concept, but let's not be too pure about this – after all you want to extend your shelf life, rather than ascend to an ethereal spiritual plane of IT enlightenment. All that stuff can come later when you get into the thorny subject of delivering projects.
Assuming you are able to get some kind of engagement with your leadership, then it's never a bad idea to play your strategic cards early on. The implementation of a highly aligned IT strategy shortly after you work out which way is up is crucially important to long-term success. Just doing it is probably even more important than getting the strategy right. Any alternatives involve laps and Gods. Strategy Schizophrenia is something you do not want to catch (which is why we talk about it in another chapter). If you are not successful in engaging the leadership, then life will initially be difficult, then intolerable, before finally becoming impossible. Each horror-story anecdote about a project screw-up or a lengthy service outage will steadily chip away at the sandy foundations of your support. Eventually, you will look down and discover, like any good cartoon character, that there is no longer any corporate ground underneath you. After a couple of futile seconds while you thrash your legs and try to defy gravity, the audience laughs and then down you go.
Bored Boards
Company Boards in most countries, are highly populated by non-executive directors. These folk do not directly intervene in the detailed day-to-day decision making that goes on. However, the non-execs are the nominated representatives of the shareholders (who after all, own your company). They have a responsibility to hold the executive management accountable for their actions. The detailed function of company boards differs slightly between countries and different companies sometimes have different bylaws. The smallest Boards can contain only three or four people, but some companies have extended the representation to over thirty individuals. In my experience, Boards in the US tend to be smaller affairs than their European counterparts. Often, only the CEO and CFO attend the meeting as executive representatives, while the rest of the places are occupied by non-executive members. It is generally considered good practice in corporate governance for the non-executives to outnumber executive members of the Board. In the UK, Boards are often larger with key business representatives joining the executive representation. In Europe, members of the workers’ councils also attend Board meetings.
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