This is the second of three leadership stories I’ve been reflecting on aided by the brisk mountain air during Spring Break last week.  If you missed it, here is the first story about learning to ski and learning to learn.  I hope these stories provide some inspiration for you and your teams.

Helmets Are A No-Brainer

Photo by danikapierce

When my wife and I started to ski together with our sons, we decided that we would wear helmets since we were going to ask the boys to do it also.  You know, set a good example for them.  Actually, she reminded me that she wore a helmet a few years before we started with the boys.

It doesn’t take too much thinking to realize that it’s just a good personal choice, too; just take a look at the wide range of speeds and skill levels on any green or blue slope.  Just as with seat belts, you can justify it by thinking, “It’s not about me; it’s about the other knucklehead,” even if deep down inside you also realize that nobody is perfect and you might just make a mistake someday.  After all, recreational skiers travel at speeds around 20-30 MPH.  The skiing-related deaths of Sonny Bono, Michael Kennedy and Natasha Richardson are public examples of what can happen.

According to ski-injury.com, the Consumer Products Safety Commission published a study in 1999 reporting that about 7,000 injuries on the slopes could have been prevented or reduced in severity with helmets.  I’m not sure how much this has reduced, but it certainly has not been eliminated.  Last year, the Vail Resorts properties mandated helmet use for its employees and required them for children in lessons.  Whether this move was motivated by a general interest in improving safety or reduction of insurance or workers comp claims, it indicates that some injuries are still happening.

If you are a skier or boarder you will notice that while most/all children are wearing helmets, many adults still don’t – even those who require their kids to wear one.  Why is this?  Is it an issue with fashion, comfort, visibility or expense – or all of the above?  Even if you aren’t sold on the research and statistics, why risk it?

Lead by Example

What happens when the children stop taking lessons?  Are the “no helmet” parents going to tell their kids that they don’t have to wear their helmets?  Or that they should but don’t have to anymore when they are adults?  When the kids are off skiing or boarding with their friends, will they conveniently forget their helmets at the lodge after lunch?

As a parent, it’s a no-brainer for me.  My wife and kids are top priority, so I want to personally be safe and want to model the behaviors I want them to display.  While I am sold on helmets, I’m not trying to push them on you.  I’m only presenting this as an example of modeling good behavior – your family and co-workers will look at what you do more than what you say.

How Can a CIO Set a Good Example?

It’s critical that as a business leader, you model the behaviors you want your teams to develop.  Think about some of the things that you ask your leaders to do that you may not do consistently or at all yourself?

As one example, think about how you run meetings:

1. Do your meetings start and stop on time?
2. Do they have clear agendas attainable in the allotted time?
3. Do you send materials out beforehand so the meetings can focus on the meat and not getting up to speed?
4. How long does it take someone to get on your calendar for a meeting?

Now, think about how often you criticize others for ineffective meetings.

I’ve been watching a series of basketball coaching videos by the Hubie Brown.  In one he talks about his philosophy for running practices.  If he sets 1:15 for a practice, he finishes in one hour-fifteen on the dot.  He says that in his experience, if practices run over, then the players will start to cheat on the drills – that he won’t get the most out of them anymore.

What can you do to better model behaviors for your organization?

My family and I just returned from a week long spring break trip to Colorado.  I’m very thankful for the opportunity to take a long break, as it’s great to spend that much time with family and friends, and it is also a good recharge.  Also, several hours on ski lifts provide some good thinking time.  This is the first of three leadership stories I’ve been reflecting on in the brisk mountain air.  I hope they provide some inspiration for you and your teams.

I Hated Snow

Growing up, we took very few vacations to cold places.  Maybe an occasional trip to New York to see relatives, but nothing much focused on winter sports or activities.  Maybe it was because my parents grew up in the northeast and were tired of all the snow?  In any case, we were more into warmer weather vacations.  As a result, aside from one attempt as a kid, I never skied until I was in college – a friend and I went to Heavenly in California/Nevada and hit a blizzard.  Miserable doesn’t describe it.  I forgot to mention that in addition to my bad skiing experiences, I also was without much of a left ACL or much cartilage.  I wrote off snow skiing.

However, my wife had different ideas – at least for the rest of my family.  She had some great experiences growing up skiing and wanted our two boys to have the same.  So, about six years ago we (she?) planned a trip to Squaw Valley, California for skiing.  Me?  I became the Sherpa.

This wasn’t going to work very much longer cause I know we were going to be a skiing family, with or without me.

The first step to accepting this reality was to get my knee fixed.  I found a good doc and had my ACL repaired at 40.  Despite all of the things I read and stories I heard, it wasn’t a terrible experience.  I only had about 2 days of major pain but the results have been well worth it – several years of skiing and weekly basketball since.

The next step was to learn to ski.  This actually came in the way of a business trip.

More Than One Way to Ski

If you spend any time around the slopes, you have certainly seen the crowds of instructors in their blue or red jackets every morning waiting for their students.  Once they get organized, the rest of the ski school day is filled with columns of Pied Pipers singing their tunes.  Strangely, most of their training metaphors are food based – peanut butter & jelly, pizza and french fries.  Anyway, the first lesson or two I took as a child were focused on the “pizza” – the dreaded snowplow.  While this maneuver provides a lot of control it is also pretty tiring, slow and very goofy looking.

Thanks to a wintertime meeting in Colorado a few years ago, I was introduced to a different way called Direct Parallel invented by Harold Harb.  This method focuses on learning the parallel ski carving moves from day-1 in a progression instead of learning and unlearning the wedge.  I’m not sure why, but my brain could wrap around this approach much better, and I WANTED to ski more after just a half-day lesson.

As a father of two distinctly unique boys, I’ve observed first-hand that people learn differently through the same basic teaching approach at the same school.  One of my sons is a very visual learner (like me) and the other learns by reading and memorization.  What is also important is that different teaching approaches can accelerate your learning and increase your interest and retention.

More Than One Way to Learn

Thinking through my appreciation of my wife for (indirectly) pushing me into skiing, Harold Harb and the instructor Bob, I can’t help but try to apply this to our work.  What kinds of things do you think would be productive, interesting or fun but have never stuck in your organization?  Here are a few possibilities:

• Using Enterprise Architecture to drive your planning
• Applying Portfolio Management to help prioritize and balance investments
• Building a valuable Innovation capability

Maybe they haven’t worked for you and your organization because you just haven’t found the right approach or instructor?

Tan-Dem by Alan Smythee

I’ve spent the last several weeks thinking a lot about the enterprise collaboration and enterprise 2.0 space given increasing interest by our clients.  One of my colleagues sent along a link to a related post about Enterprise 2.0 adoption.  The summary is much appreciated.  What I don’t appreciate as much is the use of generic truisms by experts when asked for specific advice in thinking about a concept, approach, technology or vendor.

There are 4 truisms that we hear over and over and over.  These are not unique to any individual or conference but echo in the halls of companies and conferences everywhere.  Apply these bits of advice to ANYTHING in your professional or personal lives – acquiring a company, planning a project, building a house, running a political campaign, or evaluating outsourcing:

1. Gain Executive Support
2. Provide Strong Leadership
3. Involve Key Stakeholders
4. Communicate Early and Often

Yes, these are all vitally important but they are also no-brainers and as generic as white rice.  Haven’t we heard these enough to know the basics for setting up and managing a successful initiative?  I know there are still some out there who think hiring a bunch of PMP-certified managers is enough, but they should be a small minority these days.

What I expect from subject area experts are specific bits of advice unique to to their fields.  In this case, I particularly like this kind of advice from the conference summary:

• For Blackberry users, transition them to reading blogs via RSS feeds on the device
• Create (or replace existing) an on-line suggestion box with comments and voting [see Kindling and Spigit as examples]
• Integrate social bookmarking into standard browser install to replace local bookmarking

So, I’m asking you as leaders to first make sure you are all over the 4 truisms and can move beyond the seemingly constant focus on them.  These are table stakes for any business initiative and should be second nature.  I’m also asking you to demand more from leaders and experts you rely on (present company included).  Push them to expand your thinking with deep insights specific to their experience.

Oh yea, and don’t forget to say Please and Thank You.

Holmgren Saying Goodbye by Tlianza

With the NFL playoffs in full swing*, most of the league’s teams are on the sidelines thinking about how to get better for next year. Most of the introspection involves evaluating coaches and players. One new front office hire that is particularly interesting is Cleveland’s recruiting of Mike Holmgren as its new president. He is known as the architect of very successful Green Bay Packers teams (75-37 record) and the cultivator of a high quality coaching tree, which included Andy Reid, Steve Mariucci, and John Gruden.

What is interesting about Holmgren’s hire is that it is modeled after Bill Parcells role at Miami – The Football Czar.  He’s not the head coach and he’s not the GM (who usually handles personnel).  Instead, he is something else.  It is a role that leverages his expertise as a position coach, a head coach and a GM.  One that sees the bigger picture and is able to evaluate players AND coaches from a fresh and more independent perspective.  It is a position created to drive the “rebuilding” of a program – something Miami and Cleveland badly need.  In Parcells’ case, he took an 1-15 team and got it into the playoffs the next year with an 11-5 record.  Part of the Parcells formula is to bring in a core of coaches and players that he trusts and who know his systems, both offensively and defensively.

What could all of this mean to an enterprise and specifically, to the Information Technology function?

The IT Czar

The default IT organization is some derivative of the “Apps, Ops, Other” model, in which one group (or set of groups) deals with building and maintaining business applications, one groups deals with computer operations and support, and one group (or a few groups) deals with everything else, which usually includes IT planning and budgeting, enterprise architecture training, HR and measurement/reporting.  Of course, more complicated and/or sophisticated organizations deviate from this, but most have this basic lineage.

One of the downsides of this model is that the CIO is responsible for the day-to-day operations of the team (“the coach”), the personnel (“the GM”) and the executive roles of strategic planning and alignment.  As I’ve detailed here, I believe that some people are just not cut out to wear all of these hats at once.  But, with the team’s collective strengths in mind, a CIO can build a leadership group capable of succeeding across the market and business cycles.

What if we apply the Football Czar model to IT?  What if we think about the traditional CIO role as really two roles:

1. IT COO – runs the IT organization day-to-day, Apps and Ops
2. IT Czar – technology strategist and representative in senior business leadership discussions, IT COO reports to the IT Czar along with Planning, Architecture and Measurement/Analysis

While they don’t call it anything like a “czar,” one of my financial services clients is structured in a similar way.  In their case, the IT COO and CTO report to the CIO.  The model has promise in their organization but has caused the CIO to become too disconnected from the IT organization and their issues.  But, maybe that’s the point?

* sorry Toby, another Yank centric post

Team Huddle by tenaciousme

We’ve had some good discussion on this blog, on LinkedIn IT Leadership groups and my CIO.com blog about the requisite skills and experience for a successful CIO. Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to hear two talks at a CIO conference Diamond sponsored that I’d like to combine into some observations about building teams and specifically, the CIO’s leadership team.

The first speaker was Bill Rollwitz, an organizational psychologist and leadership coach who spoke about emotional intelligence. Along the way he spoke about the need for leadership teams to understand and balance the strengths of each. One thing he said really stuck with me:

Our performance reviews and development plans should focus more on improving strengths than on improving weaknesses.

Supported by research, his point was that since each member of a team may not be the best public speaker, for example, figure out what they ARE good at and maximize that. So, help the person or two who is good at it get better and let the others develop their core skills in analytics, design, modeling, recruiting – whatever. As much as this makes total sense, it is still not done in most organizations with whom I’ve worked.

The second speaker was Rollin Ford, Wal-Mart’s CIO.  He is an excellent speaker and storyteller and I encourage you to hear him speak if you get the chance.  Rollin comes from a supply chain background rather than growing up in IT.  While I feel pretty strongly that a CIO must have a deep understanding of technology and its business impacts, its clear that there are many out there, including Rollin, who have been successful without a long career in IT (interestingly, Rollin interviewed for an IT job but chose working in a DC instead).  The backstory of his remarks was that their innovation and management of the technology to support over 8,000 stores is a team effort.

CIO by Committee

In keeping with the idea that the operation of IT is a lot like a complete business, it is important to think about the various types of skills and management styles beyond the typical functional areas, like apps and infrastructure.  For example, some of your team will be better suited to drive the analytical thinking required to measure IT’s effectiveness, while others will be better fits for broad communications to customers and business leadership.  Configured properly, the set of complementary strengths represented by your leadership team are very powerful – but you have to know who is really good at what.

You can either guess at your team member’s strengths or you can use a more scientific method.  I’m a big believer in the uncanny accuracy of the well-established behavior tests, such as Kolbe A and Myers-Briggs.  With a formal or informal view of your team, there are two questions to ask:

1. Is the team balanced across leadership and behavioral traits?
2. Are the roles each member is performing a good fit with their inherent behaviors?

I’m reminded of an old friend who would always tell me “You’re a better creator and I’m a better editor.”  We arrived at a comfortable working relationship through trial and error.  While it may be good enough to develop a perspective on your team’s strengths organically, a more measured and proactive approach should yield a higher-performing team.

Last week, the Financial Times ran an article about Sir Ian Andrews, the new leader of the UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency (analogous to the FBI) describing some concerns about his lack of relevant experience.  Apparently, there are some who are mad that more hasn’t been done to control over 4,000 gangs and a £ 40B black market.

Here’s a quote from Sir Ian:

I don’t think being chairman of a large organisation does require strategic expertise in one field.  What it does require is a track record of leadership.

This reminded me of a presentation I sat in a few months ago in which the new CIO of a Fortune 500 organization described some of the challenges she saw in her new role.

Us Versus Them

She described her background working her way up in a business unit, finally reaching the general manager position.  In her tenure “in the business,” she described many of the pains in working with IT and how she was now well-positioned to address many of those issues.

All of the great business oriented discussion from the CIO was overshadowed by her constant referral of the IT organization as “them,” even after almost two years in the post.

I’m sure that her leadership experience in the business convinced the executive suite that she was well-suited to join them.  But, I wonder if it is enough to lead an IT organization, especially a large and complex one, without ANY relevant IT experience.  Can you have the right perspective?

Business or IT Background?

Can a CIO be truly successful in both leading his or her organization in the use of IT and leading the IT organization required to make it all happen without any experience working in the IT function itself?  Some elements that each type of person would bring to a CIO position include:

I would argue that if the CIO participates as a full member of the executive team, then the business perspective is represented by all of the functional and business heads and the CIO brings the unique IT perspective.  If an executive team has a CIO with only strong business perspective, it is incomplete.

The CIO Skillset Priorities

This question is obviously more complex than just looking at a CIO candidate and his/her IT experience.  A broader set of skills and experiences should be considered, such as:

1. Leadership abilities
2. Hands-on technology background
3. Experience in leading large change programs
4. Experience in running successful IT infrastructure operations
5. Management experience in a non-IT function
6. Is an innovative thinker and can apply it to solve relevant industry and business issues
7. Ability to understand how projects and operations impact corporate financials

What do you think THE most important attribute for a CIO is?

I’d like to thank Michael Krigsman for inviting me to join him in the IT Failures town hall yesterday.  It was great to interact with a few CIOs and other experts in IT management and leadership and discuss challenges facing the CIO in successfully delivering value.  For those who missed it, the entire session was recorded.

The focus of our discussion was on the CIO’s role in project success or failure.  (William Monroe regularly reminds on on Twitter, there is no such thing as an “IT project”).  This is a rich topic and went in several different directions, including CIO tenure, how to recover as a CIO after a failure and how a project manager or team member could influence a non-responsive CIO.   The angle I’d like to explore a little more is how much of the CIO’s job is to influence desired outcomes versus personally taking control of troubled (or all major) initiatives.

Two of the factors at play are:

• CIO Style, Skills and Personality
• Organization Size and Structure

CIO Style, Skills and Personality

In the town hall discussion and in my post on CIO Tenure, I discussed my theory (that’s all it is) as to whay some CIOs just don’t fit into their organizations.  There can be a major disconnect if the CIO’s instinctive style doesn’t gel with the major work at hand.

Using a behavioral assessment like the Kolbe A Index (similar to the Myers Briggs), you can understand situations in which you and your co-workers will be most productive.  When I took this assessment (I’m a 5 3 8 5), it confirmed that I am a multi-tasker and experimenter and don’t need more details beyond the basic facts.  A CIO with my characteristics would likely lean more to a broader influence role than one that’s more hands-on.

Organization Size and Structure

Unfortunately, many IT organizations are huge.  As a result, the CIOs are separated by several layers from the people and projects doing the real work.  In these organizations, is it even possible for the CIO to take an active, hands-on role in leading a critical initiative?  Furthermore, are there any expectations in the minds of the CIO’s peers and boss (CEO, COO) that he/she play such a hands-on role?

Based on the organizations with whom I have consulted, it seems like there is a size beyond which the CIO can no longer regularly be hands on.  My gut says that this is for companies over the $5-7 billion revenue mark or so.  For these organizations, the CIO must be a master of influence.

How a CIO Can Influence Project Success

Influence is more of an art than a science, so these practices may seem a bit fluffy.  That said, I think there are some practical things that can be done toward achieving them.

1. Reward Problem Solvers – One mentor of mine would enter the weekly management meeting for a $100M software overhaul program for a telecom carrier and offer $100 for the best issue.
2. Increase Transparency – Long and generic status reports make me crazy.  Those that highlight the top 3 management issues and summarize milestones and budgets are better.  The data must be current and factual.
3. Publicize Accountability – Project managers should have the skills and authority to make decisions and the accountability for success and failure.  When PMs are accountable and everyone knows it, different and often better behaviors ensue.
4. Emphasize Right Person for the Right Job – When an organization takes on a new vendor or a new technology, by definition it has little relevant skills.  An influential CIO can emphasize that hiring new staff or a consultant to assist is not just acceptable, but necessary.

As I wrap up this post, I think I have convinced myself that the CIO role is one of influence for larger firms and a balance of influence and control for medium and small firms.  I’d be interested in your take.

Many of the words associated with information technology reflect the long-standing focus on how to do things.  Software engineering, methodology, use cases, BPM, governance, and workflow are just some examples.  This makes sense because IT is complex and focusing on getting better is part of the challenge.

With this as a backdrop, think about some of the questions that you discuss with other parts of the business. Maybe some of these will sound familiar:

• Why can’t we get our products to market faster?
• How can I use it to better engage our customers?
• Are we investing in the right things?
• What it projects should we do?

None of these questions beg a deep dive into how the problem will be solved.  They are all forms of Why questions.  Unfortunately, many of us fall back on the old standby – boxes and arrows.  This is because, to our core, we are How people.  We have grown up in IT as action oriented, process centric, software (or infrastructure) engineers.  I’ve been accused of trying to design solutions in meetings focused on understanding problems. If you’ve her had someone say “let’s not try to design the solution right now” to one of your suggestions, I’m right there with you.  (I usually retort “it’s iterative design” – oh well.)

I finally decided to try to get better at the Why part of my game.

Conversations or Presentations?

One place the Why or How question is front and center is when you are preparing for a meeting.  Many people treat all meetings as How meetings.  These meetings are very 1-sided, as in “let me tell you about how we did this” or “here’s how we can solve this problem.”

I have been annoyed by what I call the “8-point font” presentations or what others call “death by Powerpoint.”  I have come to the conclusion, aided by many others, that these presentations are made by people who have not practiced the “Art of Why.”

I believe that Why-oriented meetings, in contrast, are very conversational and seek to understand the opportunity, situation and context at hand.  They ask a lot of Why questions.  Here are some examples of Why questions that I have heard CIOs ask:

• Why would a customer want to use our website?
• Why are we introducing so many customized products?
• Why do we have so many governance committees?

Each of these questions seeks to understand a given situation in a broader context and promotes conversation, engagement and eventually, trust.

I mentioned that many others have influenced my desire to better understand the Art of Why.  Most of the reading I have done has been centered on developing better presentations and visual communication.  Here are some of the good books I can recommend:

• The Back of the Napkin, by Dan Roam.  This book is the basis for a class I developed for our firm on picking the right time for Powerpoint and the right time for discussion and whiteboarding.
• Slide:ology, by Nancy Duarte.  Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth slides were designed by Nancy’s firm.
• Presentation Zen, by Garr Reynolds
• Advanced Presentations by Design, by Andrew Abela.  This book does a great job of distinguishing presentation from board room style discussions.

These books are just scratching the surface as they are just dealing with presentations.  There is much more to learn in developing great questions, communication styles, etc.

I think that adding more Why-oriented conversations can make us all better communicators, listeners and problem-solvers.

by Chris Curran, with research by Michael Mariani

I am very passionate about coaching team sports and have been a basketball player most of my life. So, I read with great interest a recent MIT Sloan Management Review article, What Can Managers Learn From College Basketball?

There are three very interesting points:

1.  That the majority of new jobs are sourced through “weak ties,” not close relationships. (I never heard this before, but it makes sense.  Interestingly, I heard the same thing at a presentation last week by Andy McAfee on Enterprise 2.0.  The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon in action?)

2.  Between 2001 and 2007 more than 280 coaching changes were made across 341 colleges in the study.  See any parallels here to the CIO tenure situation?

3.  Many of the coaches are part of one of eight “family trees” – The John Calipari Tree or The Rick Pitino Tree, for example.  Furthermore, being part of one of these trees improves your chances of landing good jobs.

This got me thinking:  Are there family trees for the Chief Information Officer profession?

To begin exploring this question, we started with the CIO 100 and supplemented it with LinkedIn and biographical data available on the web.  For anyone who has tried to develop an easily understandable network map of customers, contacts, etc. you will know that it is a difficult task to identify links and make any sense out of them.  That said, we think there are some indications that CIO trees do exist.

After spending a few days digging through the data, a few trees seemed to emerge.  One example was around John McKinley, the CIO at GE Capital, Merrill Lynch, President/CTO at AOL and now a partner with a digital business incubator, LaunchBox.  Here is an example of some of the IT leaders who were in John’s organizations and their current firm:

Since I don’t know anyone on this chart, it only represents leaders who were working in the IT organizations during John McKinley’s tenure and went on to CIO positions later in their careers.  Given all of the IT organization variants, it’s also unclear what kind of reporting relationships existed in each organization and how much influence or opportunity for mentoring there was.  But this data can at least fuel an interesting discussion.  The idea of a CIO leadership tree seems a even a little more plausible at GE, given Jack Welch’s history of developing future corporate leaders.

The other interesting question explored in Daniel Halgen’s original study, “All in the Family: Network Ties as Determinants of Reputation and Identity in NCAA Basketball”, is if members of strong coaching trees are more resilient in the job market.  His research found this to be true and that the jobs were more prestigious for those affiliated with the trees.

I wonder if by more prominently highlighting our leadership lineage, we can land more desirable jobs?  Food for thought.

Today marks President Obama’s 100th day in office.  Gallup reports that Obama’s 63% approval rating is the best since Carter’s early approval rating in 1977 (the highest was JFK’s 74% in 1961; CNN’s take).   Americans have used the first 100 days as a predictor of Presidential success ever since FDR’s barrage of New Deal programs.  NPR even has an Obama Tracker that has been documenting domestic, economic and foreign policy milestones since the President entered office.  (If you are an Edward Tufte follower though, you might cringe at this chart’s lack of information at first glance.)

Always looking for a good analogy, I wondered what lessons a new CIO could take from Obama’s early days.  This is especially relevant for CIOs as a good percentage of them are always new in their positions – a direct result of short tenures we see in the role.

Kill Some Sacred Cows

President Obama has certainly hit this one hard.  Reaching out to Islamic and hard-line Latin American leaders, thawing Cuban relationships, and closing Gitmo .

New CIO Analogy:  There will likely be several things – processes, policies, governance teams and meetings, not to mention icy relationships – that will cause some serious head-scratching.  Ask around to find out why they exist and if you don’t get a good answer, kill ‘em.  Chances are you will make a lot of friends.  I have an insurance client who has a strange organization structure with three layers of CIOs.  The next CIO (the boss) in there should kill that cow.

I’m From the Government and I’m Here to Help

Obama has changed the decision-making process to involve more of the central government and teams of experts and seems to be adding value, whether in banks, schools or health care.  While some may argue it is a heavy-handed approach, it is one that takes responsibility for solving problems.

New CIO Analogy: Is the IT organization seen as problem solvers or problem creators?  What are the burning issues in the organization that are because of IT or that can be solved by IT?  Insert yourself into one or two of these to set a new tone.  Start with IT service delivery as it is the base on which IT credibility is built.  The IT shop in a beverages company I worked with was constantly, but inadequately, responding to tech support requests from the business executives.  My client, a new CIO in the position, established a “concierge” for the business leaders and quickly increased service and goodwill.

Demonstrate that You are a Competent Manager

There were (and are) many skeptics that Obama’s background as a community organizer was enough to prepare him for White House management responsibilities.  So far, he has demonstrated that he can maintain his composure with days full of CEO firings, bailout discussions, speech writing, meeting heads of state, releasing top secret memos and weather-driven evacuations.  Some would even ask for more emotion.

New CIO Analogy:  A new CIO has sold himself to his boss and his peers during the hiring process.  The first 100 days is a golden opportunity to sell yourself to the organization.  Providing leadership is one part of it – but as important is demonstrating management competency in understanding, prioritizing and directing both tactical and strategic projects.  The first 100 day workplan should include building a prioritized list of the top business issues, important projects and service issues and an action plan to address them.  One of my financial services CIO clients spent much of his first 100 days meeting and dealing with vendors.  This was not a good use of his time.  He should have focused first on his own leaders, teams, issues and projects.

For more perspectives on Obama’s first 100 days, see Charlie Rose’s interview with NY Times writer David Brooks,