Computing Awards: IT Leader of the Year shortlist

The VNUNET.com shortlist is out, for IT Leader of the Year, and among it are many familiar names and organisations:

• Mark Akass from BT Global Financial Services;
• John Crane from National Australia Group Europe;
• Richard Cross from ITV;
• Rorie Devine from Betfair;
• my old colleague Benoit Laclau from EDF Energy;
• Gareth Nutt from Mouchel Parkman (I’ll have to look this up!);
• very unsurprisingly Al-Noor Ramji from BT;
• and Darrell Stein from Marks & Spencer.

Congratulations to all, and I’m sure you’ll now be expecting my call, as well as every other product and service vendor in the Kingdom.

I was intrigued by the synopsis paragraphs…each one incorporated a suggestion that the candidate had implemented a strategy and achieved results.  It implied, though without support, that the stategies were brilliant, and the results outstanding.

I found this curious, because this is a leadership award, and in only one case did the synopsis paragraphs discuss leadership behaviours – that of Rorie Devine – who runs ‘fortnightly “talkback” sessions to encourage feedback from engineers, and sends out a weekly email called “Rorie’s Ramblings” to share the ups and downs of a week as a CTO.’

Perhaps all the other candidates do these things too, and it’s VNUNET.com’s technical bias that is showing, but I’m pretty sure none of the brilliant strategies were fashioned, nor the outstanding results achieved, without the support of extensive project teams.  So why not talk about project leadership behaviours when you’re talking about IT leadership?

— Philip Greenwood

Tags: VNUNET, IT, Leadership, Shortlist

Linklaters launch a wiki initiative

I noticed yesterday, on Scott Vine’s Information Overlord, that Linklaters (esteemed law firm, and member of the magic circle) is launching a wiki initiative that they’ve called “linkpedia”.

In The Lawyer, Linklaters chief knowledge officer comments:-

“the purpose of Linkpedia is to organise and share the knowledge held across the firm on a platform that staff are familiar with. The overall strategy is to see how the firm can use the technologies available in the public domain within the corporate law firm environment"

Now I’m hoping that it’s a success, but a couple of things worry me. Firstly there is “empty wiki syndrome”, and the problems associated with using a “dirty wiki” in a high pressure corporate environment that relies on getting things right first time, and maximizing the sale of billable hours.

But the quote from the CKO worried me a little too…

“The overall strategy is to see how the firm can use the technologies available in the public domain within the corporate law firm environment”

To me, it smacks of a world view in which wiki’s are like SAP, something you plug in, and get a legal wikipedia out the other end. It’s a cold lifeless definition of the strategy, and although wiki’s can be used like that, it doesn’t allude to the secrets that make some wiki’s great, while others languish empty.

the secret to creating a great wiki is unsurprisingly about community and quest, it’s about  having something that draws people together to collaborate on an endeavour that is larger than themselves. A wiki shouldn’t be classified as a technological tool … (hey isn’t almost every key business tool a technological tool?) A wiki is a community facilitation tool.

What if the CKO had said this…

“The overall strategy is to grow THE legal reference work for British law. This internal resource which will grow case by case, and have input from the best legal minds in our firm, will become our key knowledge resource over the next 50 years”

Now I understand that Linklaters have the ability to reward people financially for their contribution to the internal knowledge resource, but is this ‘encouraged’ contribution really going to get the kind of whole company response that creating “THE legal reference work for Linklaters and British law” might?

The lessons from Wikipedia aren’t all about the technology used.

– Jason Bates

edit : 02-07-07
I understand from someone who knows more about the initiative than I do, that Linkpedia is more of an interactive extension of their intranet, than having a go at creating THE legal wikipedia. That's interesting... they have the community internally, and I've always thought it very cool when company's create 'Rough Guides' - things you really need to know about day to day living in an organization. Hopefully they will pitch the wiki in a way that really captures the organizations imagination. JB>

Tags:  Linklaters, Wiki, quest

Strategic Librarian

Can I get away with that title?  Probably not, but Nina Platt can, and does. Let it be known I read some pretty diverse content.

I loved the fact that Nina is commenting on Change Management – it’s one of the keys to building a learning culture.  I particularly liked the fact she took a moment to remind us that the term means different things to different people.

 

Seth talks about "The vibe"

Seth Godin (marketing / business guru and author) posted a small note on his blog last week about “The vibe”.

‘Engagement’ is another word that many are using for the same phenomena. In fact this concept however it’s packaged seems to be getting some real traction with our corporate clients at the moment.

Project management methodologies don’t touch it, and most corporate handbooks won’t go anywhere near it. (Even Seth acknowledges that it sounds ‘flaky’)

But when you walk into a team, a company, a project that has ‘the vibe’, you can smell and taste it. The world of business has changed, and those that are ‘engaging’ their employees and have ‘the vibe’ are kicking the ass of the rest of the grey wage slaves out there… don’t believe me, take a look at the hard facts.

— Jason Bates

Tags: Seth+Godin, Project+Leadership, vibe, engagement

The Clearest message

An interesting quote from a US pastor on “church leadership”, Via The Leadership Now blog.

"Here's an incredibly important principle. You cannot communicate complicated information to large groups of people. As you increase the number of people, you have to decrease the complexity of the information. Congregational rule, when you're trying to make a complicated decision, works against the principle. So consequently, the guy with the microphone and the clearest message always wins. The most persuasive person in the room is going to win. Whether right or wrong."

How right he is. Recently I’ve been working with a senior exec. in a large multinational on his communications strategy for a large programme of work. When I first met him I asked him what the key messages he wanted to put over to his staff were.

After the first 10 minutes of his answer I knew that we had a way to go…

It did actually get a lot easier when I explained that his messages should be consistent course corrections rather than an explanation of the art of navigation. As with large oil tankers, you can’t steer small turns on a large programme, you have to keep things big and simple, know where you are and where you want to go.

–– Jason Bates

Tags:  "leadership+now", "church+leadership", communications, project+management

Oi! You've been poking my friends...

I can say without a shadow of a doubt that Facebook is the new big thing in professional networking.  I signed up while researching an earlier blog piece, and I’ve started to receive friend requests at an increasing rate.  It blur's the line between the wildly successful social networking site MySpace, and the wildly successful (but oh! so frustrating) professional networking site, LinkedIn.

I think that the big difference between Friendster and LinkedIn is the inclusion of a photograph…it sounds trivial, but you get a totally different scale of reaction to finding the picture of a friend, than finding the name of a friend.

There is another huge reason:  Its underlying technology allows other companies to write applications, using Facebook as a platform.  For a detailed analysis of the pro’s and con’s of this approach, have a look at Marc Andreessen’s blog (He founded Netscape, so he knows a thing or two).

One of the quirky aspects of Facebook is the idea of “poking”.  Apparently you can just poke people, and then they are informed you’ve poked them.  And you can see your friend’s friend’s pictures.  I wonder if it’s safe.

— Philip Greenwood (Your Open-networking Project Leadership Friend)

Tags:  Facebook, Professional+Networking, Networking, LinkedIn, Social+Networking

Amen!

“Quality is only 2^nd to Honesty.”

For the full visual effect, click here.

Brain Lessons

Do Project Leaders need to understand the way brains work?  When I read Brain Lessons I was surprised how many of these neuroscience authors  focussed on, or displayed compassion – often self-compassion.  Is compassion a leadership quality?  Ask the Dalai Lama!

Since I’m fond of saying that “you can’t learn Project Leadership from a book”, I’ve copied another comment that focussed on learning below:

Daniel Levitin, author of This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession.
I spend a lot of time in my job learning new things, and I spend a lot of my leisure time learning how to play new pieces on the piano or guitar. What I know about the brain has changed my life by teaching me that with learning, "slow and steady wins the race." A few minutes of practice each day is better than several hours all at once, once a week, because of the neurochemical and neurodynamic processes involved in memory consolidation. I also know that practicing—whether it's a new Bill Evans solo or cracking a multivariate differential equation—is best done every day at the same time.

I was also very interested in this comment, regarding our ability to problems solve:

David Linden, author of The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God.
The brain is not a generic problem-solving machine—rather, evolution has shaped it into a strange edifice that is very proficient in dealing with a particular subset of problems.

—Philip Greenwood

Tags:  Neuroscience, Cognition, Leadership, Dalai+Lama, Compassion, Mind, Brain

Visual Communications

Indexed is one of my favourite sites for a quick hit of humour. The posts are based on the type of diagrams you find in a traditional business presentation applied to very “non-business” insights.

 

Rat-holing...

From wikipedia:

“Rat-holing is a term used to describe a conversation or process that has deviated from its original productive purpose into a generally unproductive but long and winding detour that eventually comes to a dead end.” 

“The original discussion purpose may be to agree on a course of action. However, if one or more people rat-hole into a specific point of the discussion then the discussion stalls with no actionable outcome.”

Back from a trip to Belgrade, I was catching up with my reading last night, and saw a reference to rat-holing on 43folders. I’m sure that like me, you recognize this behaviour as a regular occurrence in meetings that lack a coherent and engaging goal.

When people aren’t engaged around a shared purpose – in a meeting, a project, or a programme – they lose their way and find their own purposes, they rat-hole to issues they care about.

Rat-holing is a warning signal, look out for it!

— Jason Bates

Tags:  ratholing, 43folders, meetings, purpose