Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

Three years ago in June, Toyota and its Lexus brand took the top spot in 11 out of 19 vehicle categories in the J.D. Power and Associates' automotive quality survey. Yet less than a month later, Toyota President Katsuaki Watanabe bowed deeply in front of the world's press, publicly apologizing for the numerous quality problems that had been plaguing Toyota automotive products.

If a factory is torn down, but the rationality which produced is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a government, but the systematic pattern of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves... There's so much talk about the system, and so little understanding.

Creating and maintaining a social endeavor is as much art as it is science, and after a decade of working with online communities and social networks, I have come to believe that they can't be managed but only influenced. In many cases, the communities are left to police themselves. A good example of this is the SAP developer community (called the Business Objects Community) with more than 70,000 developers a day participating.

Creating and maintaining a social endeavor is as much art as it is science, and after a decade of working with online communities and social networks, I have come to believe that they can't be managed but only influenced. In many cases, the communities are left to police themselves.

If you're of the same generation as I am, you probably remember the TV show "Dragnet" and Sergeant Joe Friday's famous line "Just the facts, ma'am" (his actual words were, "All we want are the facts, ma'am," but that's a different story).

If it can be done, there is little that can beat a colocated and relatively homogenous team for cohesion, establishing a sound group dynamic, promoting communication in both verbal and nonverbal ways, and ensuring understanding. However, the real world is not always like that. In some cases, virtual teams are a fact of life and offer compelling advantages.

Back in April, I discussed MapReduce and its open source implementation, Hadoop (see "Hadoop, MapReduce, Cloudera, EC2, and BI," 14 April 2009). At that time, I said that I thought Hadoop offered exciting possibilities for enterprises to carry out large-scale data analysis and mining.

IT has taken a place next to finance and human resources as a critical and pervasive discipline in just about every enterprise and government body. Yet practices and processes for successfully directing and managing IT (i.e., governance) have proved difficult to implement and even more difficult to sustain. This has not been for lack of trying -- many of the ideas, approaches, and techniques recommended today were originally proposed 30 or more years ago.