Officer, a Senior Vice President or perhaps even a Chief Digital Officer in a large organisation is seen by many – quite rightly – to be the very pinnacle of achievement in the world of Information Technology. Today, an increasing number of IT leaders have become Board or Executive Team members in their companies. Almost all exert high levels of power and influence. However, the life expectancy of this corporate rainmaker is shockingly short. IT leaders often seem to enjoy a span no longer than a mayfly as they flutter away in the turbulent waters of the corporate pond. Few seem to stay the course for much longer than a couple of years and it is rare to find anyone making it to half of a decade or more. Some organisations even change their CIO every year. And most of the endings are not happy ones either. Very often something, or more commonly a whole bunch of somethings, goes horribly wrong and the reign of the noble IT leader comes to an abrupt and brutal end. In some cases the disaster takes the form of a slow-motion train wreck. With growing inevitability, it can be months before the inadvertent act of hara-kiri is finally completed and the inevitable mushroom cloud of dust and the smell of doom imperiously rise from the tangled mass of mangled locomotives, twisted rails and spilt cargo. More often however, the end is quicker and much more sinister. Whispered rumours around the water-cooler are shortly followed by a curiously empty executive office and a bland corporate announcement referencing “Special Projects” or some similar metaphor. It's all very sad. After all, the incumbent had probably spent twenty years or more of their life assiduously building their career and preparing for this great opportunity. Who would have thought it would end with little more than a cardboard box full of belongings, a tearful goodbye from their executive assistant and a lonely trip down the service elevator? The displaced IT leader will be wondering what happened and what, if anything, they could have or should have done. They will also believe that life in the IT industry is unfair, which of course is also true.
What this IT leader and many more before them may not have fully appreciated is that the IT industry is riddled with a bewildering arrangement of trials and challenges. Each of these horrors has been carefully designed by Mother Nature to cause you the maximum amount of pain, suffering and even career death. There are however, a few, sparse straws of hope onto which you can clutch. As you contemplate the vistas of vicissitude ahead of you, be aware that others have gone before and some have even stayed the course. The very few wise, battle-scarred warriors who have lived to tell their tale know that these same horrors appear again and again with relentless regularity. It doesn't matter which business or public sector organisation you work in. It doesn't even matter whether you are trying to run a relatively small IT function on a single site or a complex enterprise scattered across far distant geographies. Suffering is pandemic at least as far as leadership in IT is concerned.
In this book, we will examine some of the worst trials and challenges you might well run into on your quest to be a world-class IT leader. Some you may be able to side-step and we will look at various methods of fancy footwork you might employ. But unfortunately many will already have a firm missile lock and you will have to endure some pain as well as dealing with the aftermath. Only the most careful attention before, during and after the event will give you any chance of staving off disaster. A strong constitution is also required. I was once given an indispensable piece of advice by a wonderful lady aviator who taught me how to fly (few are immune from their mid-life crisis). “What should I do if things go wrong up there?” I asked. She broke into a broad smile, laughed and said. “Panic slowly of course”.
CHAPTER 1
Dislocated Stakeholders
“Where is the ‘any’ key?”
Stakeholders, as one of my colleagues once said to me, “should be tied to one”. He was definitely in the “Joan of Arc” school of stakeholder management. “It's all very good when they are feisty and swashbuckling,” he continued, “but when they start to get irritating, you should tie ’em to a pole and light a bonfire.” This approach has obvious attractions, but there are few people who can avoid the scourge of the irritating stakeholder whose mission in life is to make your life a misery. King Henry VIII, the sixteenth-century King of England, was one of the few heroes of history who was able to buck the trend. As most British schoolchildren will know, Old Henry had a penchant for doing his own thing. It was never a good idea to be his wife when he got bored (which happened at least five times it seems). Kings in olden days generally didn't have that many stakeholders to worry about especially if they had bags of charisma and a large, loyal army at their disposal. Henry therefore pushed the boundaries of his not inconsiderable power to the limits. During his reign he worked his way through six wives, as well as starting a war with France (which is something every good British monarch feels they have to do). He also created the Royal Navy (Loades, 2009) and is even thought by some to have written the quintessential English song Greensleeves (Trow, 2010). Henry was certainly a colourful and decisive monarch and he knew how to please a crowd. When he became King at the tender age of 17, one of the very first things he did was to order the execution of the two men his father had employed to collect heavy taxes from the fair folk of England. All but two people in the land thought that this was a great idea. He was also fond of hunting, gambling and dancing. It is said that he only spent an hour a day on government business (Spartacus Educational, 2013).
Perhaps Henry's biggest moment in history came when he decided to divorce his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Popular culture suggests that Henry grew bored of Catherine. Knowing the response he'd get from Pope Clement (who wasn't much of a fan of divorces, especially when they involved Catholic Queens), he apparently decided that he would stick his fingers up at the Catholic Church and invent a whole new religion. This we now know today as protestant Anglicanism. While it is true that Henry was eventually excommunicated by the Pope, the divorce from Catherine was probably only one symptom of Henry's problems with his stakeholders (Weir, 2002). Henry was a fiercely independent chap by all accounts and his motives and methods were devious – at least when it came to finding ways that allowed him to operate in a completely unconstrained fashion. He was also thought to be a good Catholic, but Henry just couldn't live with the concept of an old guy with a beard in far-off Italy telling him what to do. Between 1532 and 1537, he instituted a number of statutes that dealt with the relationship between himself and the pope. For example, in 1534 he mandated that the clergy could only elect bishops nominated by him. For an encore he then declared that the King was the only “Supreme Head on Earth of the Church of England”. So there! All in all, Henry must have been a very fine megalomaniac even if he did over-eat a bit as he grew older.
We, unfortunately, do not have the freedom of action enjoyed by people such as good King Henry, or any other historical giants for that matter. We therefore need to understand the identity and motivations of the stakeholders who hold influence over all that we do (at least in the work place context). Tudor-style, summary execution is frowned upon today. This means that it is a relatively unlikely outcome if you do somehow become detached from your stakeholders. But be warned, there are plenty of other nefarious and deeply unpleasant methods of punishment available to people in corporate life today. Dislocation is painful and if you do not rapidly connect things back together properly, then they will become detached forever and it won't be long before someone decides to put the pieces in the air-lock so that they can be blasted out into space.
So who are our stakeholders and what do they want?
Wooden Poles with Holder
In its simplest sense, a stakeholder is a person, group or organisation that has interest or concern in an organisation (Business Dictionary, 2013). The days when people felt they needed to carry wooden poles around with them disappeared with the wizards of Middle Earth. Stakeholders also have nothing to do with vampires, though if you do unhappily have a vampire infestation on your hands, driving wooden sticks through the hearts of the un-dead while they sleep in their coffins is widely considered an effective pest control measure. These days life
