Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

It still amazes me how many enterprise data warehousing/business intelligence (DW/BI) projects struggle, often to the point of paralysis, with the "Inmon/Kimball" debate. This impasse revolves around whether a DW/BI program should insist upon routing all information through a complex, third normal form (3NF) data layer o

I would like to follow up on a story mentioned in my previous Advisor ("Who Watches for the Watchers When the Watchers Don't Watch?" 12 January 2012).

The general literature on leadership is very confusing. There are over 250 different definitions of leadership in the literature! Many of these definitions are not operational in that they don't provide guides to action. What specifically does a leader do? There is confusion over how leadership contrasts with the words "management" and "authority." Educational institutions like the Harvard Business School say their mission is to train leaders, but every professor has his or her own definition of leadership.

I started to see this trend play out last year, and this year I expect it to be more popular based on the advice I have been giving some of my vendor clients.

A few weeks ago, the New York Times published an opinion piece by Susan Cain titled, "The Rise of the New Groupthink."1 It was a controversial article, and she took her lumps the next day in the "Letters" section. In the online comments, folks were more in agreement.

Business resilience has become increasingly important in the wake of an unusual period of natural disasters around the globe, and new technologies and organizational models have yielded improved capabilities to move forward in the face of any disaster. Threats, both natural and man-made, continue to proliferate, as all the possibilities of business, financial, and physical risk meet the evolving threat environment of increasingly pervasive IT.

As I write this Executive Update, it is the season for annual performance appraisals. Managers and team members gather feedback, catalog accomplishments, and fill in forms. Managers collate, rate, and rank.