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CIO Leadership: Qualities, Quotes, and Quandaries Expert insight and input from the top CIOs

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CIO Leadership: Qualities, Quotes, and Quandaries

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The leadership qualities of a CIO veteran

Technology leadership quotes from the 'CIO Decisions' e-zine

To be a better leader be a team player: CIO leadership lessons from a pro

Leadership qualities of CIOs who do big things

No two CIOs are the exactly the same but that doesn't mean the good ones don't bear some striking similarities in terms of leadership style. Discover what the most successful CIOs have in common and obtain the lessons they learned along their way to becoming impactful leaders. Find out how they look at their changing roles across their respective industries, what they report as their biggest challenges, and how each manages to avoid potential technology tragedies that could interfere with innovation.

The leadership qualities of a CIO veteran 2014 By: Christina Torode

According to World BPO/ITO Forum event chairman Jim Noble, the days of

megadeals and monolithic contracts and years-long IT projects are gone; in

their place is the need to be agile and accountable for business outcomes.

"Today, if you said, 'The business result is years away so I can't take

accountability,' [the business] would laugh at you. The result needs to be six

months away," Noble said.

And guess what? You are accountable. As a result, CIO users of outsourcing

services are taking on much more of the systems integration and service

integration responsibilities.

You could spend hours picking Noble's brain on the BPO landscape, or any

other tech topic, really, but what I wanted to know was what Noble would

have done differently in his previous roles and what advice he has for CIOs

today. He himself has been credited with sea changes while he held the CIO

position at General Motors Co., British Petroleum and Talisman Energy Inc.,

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where he launched in-house IT academies and used technology as an

enabler of business outcomes.

Even over the phone, it was clear why so many global companies (AOL Time

Warner, General Electric Co. and Kraft Foods Inc.) have reached out to tap

his leadership qualities. He did not assume that I knew what he was talking

about, taking me back to the days of telcos and grids to explain the origins of

cloud computing and service-oriented architecture, for example. He was

quick to point out the things he would have done differently, including his

focusing too much on cost versus business results.

Among the many leadership qualities that came through:

1. His ability to think on his feet no matter what question I threw at him;

2. His ability to see things in new ways, such as the need for big

service providers to move toward industrial strength (versus

commodity) services and commit to business outcomes, such as

gain share or risk/reward payment models, with their clients; and

3. His willingness to take risks. He was once a military test pilot and

racecar driver, although you would never guess it from his calm,

somewhat academic demeanor.

Above all, as I learned from his patient explanations, Jim Noble is a coach --

for the major leagues. Here are three leadership qualities he believes lead to

CIO success:

Discover what the single most important issue is for your CEO or

Executive committee; become a technology enabler for that issue and

bring your street smarts into play.

"If you're in a manufacturing company, the key issue can be quality, as it was

for me in General Motors. If you're in a process company, the key issue

could be unplanned business outage. If you are with an energy company, the

issue could be safety, as it was for me at BP and Talisman," Noble said.

"Once you're convinced that you've latched on to the winning idea, then you

use all your street smarts to get one [line of business] to pilot the idea and

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make the another [line of] business envious of that success and have them

want to jump on the bandwagon. You can trick them by allowing the early

adopters to go to the head of the line with equipment refreshes or the most

modern smartphones. You give them the goodies and they willingly embrace

the idea -- that's what I mean by being street smart. You coax one of your

lines of business to be the exemplar and then the others watch and want to

follow."

Focus on real-time, fact-based decision support

On the question of what technology he believes will revolutionize business as

we know it, Noble said:

"Across every industry sector I've worked in, there's been one thing and

that's been fact-based decision support. You might want to call it analytics or

big data, structured or unstructured data, real-time data, predictive analytics

or in-memory processing, but if the IT people can give the business people

the facts, then the business people will run the business better.

"The connection between good quality data delivered in a timely fashion and

a business that prospers --that connection is indisputable."

Take accountability for business outcomes

"CIOs generally tended to be order takers. We tended to focus on silently

running, smoother operations. We tended to automate the business process

and sometimes we made bad things happen faster. ... I wish we had stood

up and taken responsibility for business results with all of these initiatives,"

Noble said.

"Historically, we found a lot of excuses not to do things. It's a business

initiative, not an IT initiative, and, therefore, we said the business people

were the only ones who can take accountability for success. That was more

of a smokescreen than a reality. We should have adopted the two-in-a-box

model, where the business and IT leader oversee the execution of the

initiative and accountability of it and are rewarded in compensation for the

result. In the olden days, we used to say, 'But the result is years away,' and

that was our biggest mistake. It was years away, and things changed. People

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moved on; the business climate changed; the macroeconomic situation

changed.

"Today, if you said, 'The business result is years away, so I can't take

accountability,' they would laugh at you. The result needs to be six months

away, and in six months, if you can't stand up and be counted, then more

fool you. Even when CIOs were aligning IT to business initiatives -- running

IT as a business -- IT was run on cost. Now, we should be running IT as a

business on business-outcome grounds."

Technology leadership quotes from the 'CIO Decisions' e-zine By: Rachel Lebeaux

A recent cover story in our CIO Decisions e-zine came with something of a

Shakespearean admonishment: Know thy users -- especially those who use

the cloud. And, yes, if anyone could have imagined a distant future in which

information worldwide is accessed via a "floating" structure, it would have

been the Bard, he who penned the line, "There are more things in heaven

and earth, Horatio/Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

The cloud certainly opens up vast new IT opportunities, but also presents

some striking governance challenges. It's a theme that runs through the

October issue, as our CIO interviewees grappled with such technology hang-

ups as ERP deployment, social collaboration and even the future of the CIO

role. The technology leadership quotes we've culled shine a light on these

and myriad other issues IT executives face -- and also offer some advice on

how to avoid a technology tragedy.

"If at any point in time, if there were even one of our executives that pushed

against the project or what the project was to accomplish -- luckily that did

not happen -- we would have seen catastrophic issues in that area of the

company."

--John Bowden, CIO, Lifetime Products Inc.

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"On the technology side, you can afford a little more innovation, a little more

risk, so to speak. Because you're constantly innovating, you're constantly

pushing the envelope and testing products and testing yourself against those

limits. Engineers are more willing to do that, take corrective action, iterate

through and move forward."

--Bill Miller, CIO, Broadcom Corp.

"We're trying to create a culture where, whether it's an hourly-paid associate

on the food and beverage line or the CIO or [chief marketing officer] or CEO,

it's everybody's job to come up with new ideas on how we can make things

better."

--Tom LaPlante, CIO, TopGolf

"What we are experiencing today, I truly don't believe we've ever had

anything quite like it. There aren't that many people who really understand

the individual technologies; to manage to have them integrated is extremely

complicated."

--Jerry Luftman, former CIO, professor emeritus of the Stevens Institute of

Technology, managing director of the Global Institute for IT Management

"We've all been taught by McDonald's how to order McDonald's -- pick a

number. [Users] will get used to it if it works; they'll start to understand the

key functions they need to perform, how they think it should work and

eventually say, 'I just hit this button and the magic happens.'"

--Ian Clayton, senior vice president of operations, G2G3

"When we bring that to an internal private cloud perspective, if we can give

users that same level of choice and present them with [a few options], that's

probably going to be good enough. They feel like they've got a choice, but

they're not getting into the deep, deep weeds."

--Chris Ward, CTO, GreenPages Technology Solutions

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To be a better leader be a team player: CIO leadership lessons from a pro By: Karen Goulart

Suggest to Carl Wilson the CIO role is going to be absorbed by the business,

and the former CIO and executive vice president of Marriott International has

a response you're not likely to hear elsewhere these days.

"It's more likely the business might be absorbed into the CIO role as IT takes

on a bigger role within the enterprise," Wilson said.

No career is over quips here.

Wilson, of course, is not your ordinary CIO. He led the IT team that enabled

Marriott to revolutionize the hospitality industry for the digital age by being

the first to implement online reservation services and to offer high-speed

Internet in its guest rooms.

With an accolade-filled career spanning four decades, Wilson knows his way

around an IT organization, the C-suite and the boardroom. It's his familiarity

with the boardroom, in particular, that helped set him apart as a leader and

laid the foundation for his new avocation: CIO coach. Now a hands-on

mentor to four Fortune 500 CIOs, a consultant and a board member himself

at several companies, he contends that true CIO leadership --the quality that

will ensure CIOs endure -- paradoxically comes from being a team player.

Becoming part of the business

According to Wilson, the CIO role will continue to grow in importance if CIOs

are willing to work with and within the business. For Wilson this lesson was

self-taught. In the early days of his career, when he was still a computer

operator, he took careful note of what was happening around him. Typically,

business users would agree to the specs of an IT project, IT would go off and

work on it and develop something users didn't ask for -- or didn't think they

did. Disconnects abounded.

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"A lot of technologists at the time tried to get the business to understand IT,

and I saw it was more important for IT to understand the business and meet

them where they were," Wilson said. "I worked that into my leadership

approach, making sure that all the IT leaders were business technologists,

not just technologists."

Throughout his career, which included engagements as a turnaround CIO at

The Pillsbury Company, Grand Metropolitan, PLC and Georgia-Pacific LLC,

he practiced what he preached. By the time he arrived at Marriott

International in 1997, his approach to CIO leadership was nearly perfected.

At Marriott, his philosophy of forging a tight collaboration between IT and the

business was quickly embraced by his IT team and business peers. He put in

place the processes and procedures to ensure that happened. One inviolable

standard: that every major IT project the company took on would have a

business owner and an IT owner, each equally accountable for achieving

business benefits.

"We forged that type of thinking in the organization, along with collaborative

MBOs [Management by Objectives] where everyone was rewarded for the

success of participating, whether you were in the business or IT

organization," Wilson said, referring to the managerial practice of aligning

objectives with organizational goals. "A lot of common goals and interests

developed."

Changing an industry, easier than it sounds

Wilson quickly brushes aside any insinuation that he deserves the credit for

revolutionizing the hospitality industry with one-stop Internet reservations and

in-room high-speed Internet access. It was a total team effort --which itself,

he stresses, was an integral part of the Marriott way of working.

"It was the IT leadership team, plus very engaged C-level executives,

especially in marketing and sales area," Wilson said. "It wasn't as hard as it

may sound, simply because everybody worked together. That's part of the

characteristics and culture of Marriott, which I think it comes from the

company being in the hospitality sector."

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The combination of knowing its customers and an awareness of the potential

of the Internet as a reliable technology for commercial use -- in other words,

a blend of business and IT knowledge -- turned out to be a productive

partnership. The newly minted Marriott.com held the potential to not only

greatly reduce the cost of how rooms were sold but also personalize the

guest experience. Marriott.com is now a $6 billion-plus, lowest cost

distribution channel for Marriott.

"It just made good business sense," Wilson said. "There was a reliable

emerging technology coming on board in the Internet, and we took

advantage of that."

The Marriott team also recognized another business reality before it became

apparent to the rest of the world: namely, how important Internet connectivity

was becoming to its extensive clientele of business travelers. They were

starting to arrive with PCs in tow, looking to work or stay connected during

their visits.

"The number one thing they needed was high-speed Internet access so they

could work in their rooms, and we provided that to meet their needs," Wilson

said. "We just happened to be the first company who really endorsed it and

aggressively went after it because we saw that need --we kept our eye on

guest expectations."

Governance for industry breakthroughs

Keeping an eye on customer expectations might sound all too easy, but

providing Internet access to business travelers once again relied on a close

relationship between all business functions and the information resources

function, Wilson said.

Indeed, IT and the business were not simply aligned, they were fully

integrated under Wilson's watch. Every senior-level executive in information

resources was assigned to work directly with a C-level business partner, from

e-commerce to finance to marketing and sales, participating in their staff

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meetings and strategy sessions like any other part of that particular

management team.

"Although they may have reported solid line into the IT organization, they

were actually perceived and behaved as if they were part of the management

team they were working with."

One of the greatest compliments of Wilson's tenure came from the chief

operating officer who remarked that, in meetings, if he didn't know them, he

wouldn't be able to distinguish the IT people from their business partners.

"IT people knew the business processes and understood the business area

they were accountable for, and their partners were learning the technology

because we worked so closely. That's why we were successful," Wilson said.

And yet this cultural structure and approach, with all its proven benefits, still

eludes many companies. To those CIOs, Wilson suggests they start by

following the money.

"The language of business is finance, so we made it a point to ensure all our

senior IT leaders had a good grasp of the finances of the company, how the

company made money," Wilson said. "Without that, you could never engage

at the level they needed to with their business counterparts."

Change management, the biggest challenge for any CIO

Technologically speaking, everything wasn't perfect when Marriott decided to

implement online reservations in Marriott.com. Systems needed to be

modified to support the reservation application. But the modification couldn't

be a one-off change --the technical changes had to anticipate future

requirements. From this challenge a three-year technology roadmap

developed, dictating that any time system adjustments were made because

of a business change, the underlying technology would also be upgraded to

serve future business needs.

While building a technology roadmap was a challenge, the bigger problem by

far was figuring out how fast the company could learn and change, Wilson

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said. He's seen one big technology initiative after another misfire because an

idea makes sense on paper but is a poor cultural fit.

"These companies didn't appropriately assess whether the organization will

be able to assimilate that technology and take advantage of it," Wilson said.

"If you overestimate how quickly your company can learn and change, you

run the risk of putting in a system people won't be able to use, and you may

end up worse off."

On the flip side, underestimate your organization's abilities and you could be

creating a competitive disadvantage. These cultural assessments, Wilson

said, are one of the greatest challenges of CIO leadership. So how did he do

it?

"It's more of an art than a science; you spend a lot of time engaging with

people who will be your internal customers and partners to find out where

their heads are," Wilson said.

To this, CIOs -- and their companies -- a well-planned, forward-looking

recognition, reward and compensation program.

"There's a saying I heard years ago: 'Tell me how a person is recognized,

rewarded and compensated, and I'll tell you how they behave on the job,'"

Wilson said. "If you want to bring about organizational learning and change,

and you want to motivate people to get there with you, make sure your

reward, recognition and compensation programs reflect where you want

them to go, not where you are today."

Leadership qualities of CIOs who do big things By: Linda Tucci

CIO Jim Whalen has been a people-pleaser for as long as he can remember.

More often associated with the female gender -- and frequently called out as

a trait that needs fixing -- people-pleasing, I'd wager, rarely tops the list of the

leadership qualities of powerful business executives. That doesn't seem to

have slowed down Whalen, who oversees IT strategy at Boston Properties

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Inc., the $30 billion Boston real estate investment trust, or REIT, that was

founded by mogul Mortimer Zuckerman and specializes in the kind of

marquee office buildings that ooze machismo.

As reported last week by SearchCIO.com's Karen Goulart, Whalen told a

gathering of Boston CIOs that his intrinsic nature to please, far from being a

roadblock, informed a commitment to customer service that helped propel his

30-year career in IT. Nature cast its die, but nurture mattered too in shaping

his path to becoming a leader, he said. He started helping out in the family

plumbing business when he was 5 years old, developing a strong work ethic

while still in elementary school. His analytical skills were developed over

summers playing All Star Baseball, the popular board game that was a mid-

century precursor of today's stat-driven online sports games. "I just turned

50, but my leadership style is still evolving. I'm always picking things up as I

move forward," he added.

Whalen's story -- and his personal accounting of his path to leadership --

prompted me to go back and take a look at a study, published last year by

University of California, Berkeley Professor James Spitze, on the "invisible

factors of extraordinary success" possessed by transformative CIOs. Not that

long ago, CIOs functioned mainly as supervisors of the computers that ran

the payroll, general ledger and other business systems, Spitze noted. The

role was largely technical, and if things went wrong, the impact was fairly

limited. Today, as overseers of a company's information flows, CIOs play a

major role in a business's results, and IT failures often make front-page

news. Given the breadth of the CIO role, Spitze and co-researcher Judith

Lee set out to answer why some CIOs exert a powerful influence on their

companies -- actually changing how whole industries do business -- while so

many others (an estimated 95%) "are viewed as simply managing a

necessary but often annoyingly expensive service," they wrote.

Focus on the customer and other leadership qualities of 'Renaissance

CIOs'

A selection committee identified 14 "Renaissance" CIOs (see the list below)

for Spitze's and Lee's study. (Along with Spitze, the selection committee

included Max Hopper, the author of American Airlines' SABRE system; Bruce

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Rogow, ex-executive vice president of Gartner Inc.; Harvey Koeppel,

executive director of the Center for CIO Leadership; and Naomi Seligman,

co-founder of The Research Board.) In addition to being "wicked smart," the

CIOs all had made "a massive and enduring positive impact on their

employer … and on their industry." Twelve questions, sent to each of the

super-CIOs in advance of their in-depth interviews, elicited the following

broad traits:

Personal attributes: All 14 CIOs could be described as "industrious, self-

reliant/confident, honest/trustworthy, practical, a risk-taker (but a prudent

one), a quick learner and an excellent communicator." Of the six

management styles the authors applied -- coercive, authoritative, affilliative,

democratic, pacesetting and coaching -- the authoritative style predominated.

Birth year: Most of the CIOs achieved their first major success in mid-

career, between the ages of 36 and 48 -- an important data point, according

to the authors. Their initial major successes came before they had become

so entrenched in their careers to have become risk-averse or resistant to

change.

Education: Although two-thirds of the CIOs hold advanced degrees, the

authors found that lifelong learning proved a stronger factor than formal

education in the success these super-CIOs had achieved.

Parental influence: Virtually the entire Renaissance cohort recalled their

parents as early role models of the importance of a strong work ethic and as

believers in education. Almost all the CIOs had "meaningful part-time jobs in

their youth -- and many had fond recollections of those as foundational to

their careers," Spitze and Lee state.

Relationships: In a new and rapidly changing field, interpersonal

relationships are critical to success. All 14 CIOs had been able to attract

mentors and had served as mentors themselves. They had long lists of

people who had helped them along the way. They enjoyed "valued,"

longstanding professional relationships and made a point of surrounding

themselves with "good/excellent people." The cohort all possessed

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"emotional intelligence." Their ability to work with a variety of people and to

"marshal the collective intelligence" of the enterprise was identified in the

study as critical to their success as CIOs.

Motivators: All the Renaissance CIOs were self-motivated. All could be

described as "compulsive completers" with a "strong bias for action,"

according to the authors. When obstacles arose at "many points in their

careers," they had found a way to work around them. They liked "large

challenges" and worked "with energy and intellect" to meet them. Most cited

both positive and negative feedback as having a valuable impact on their

career.

Career actions and outside influences: Virtually all the Renaissance CIOs

seemed to possess short learning curves in matters that mattered to their

careers. They accepted missteps and learned from them. They proactively

managed their careers, were unafraid to make a move when things dead-

ended and were primed to capitalize on opportunities -- including broad "IT

inflection points" -- that came along. Luck played a part as well: Most cited

being in the right place at the right time – their company was growing, their

CEO was supportive -- as a factor in their success. All the Renaissance CIOs

completed a major project that was recognized as a "game-changer." And in

all cases, the game-changing project had a direct and positive impact on the

end customer.

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