Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

My last Advisor (see "In Time of Testing, Remember Values, Communication, Slack, Part I," 26 March 2009)1 raised this question: how do you perform in such difficult times while maintaining the company's values? Is it possible at all? The answer is "yes," and the evidence can be found in history.

With the current state of the economy, there has been a seemingly endless stream of articles about scarcity and the natural human reactions to it. Almost to a one, the articles examine the propensity of individuals to focus on what they might not have if the situation doesn't improve, prompting the reaction of thrift. People save. People hoard.

Before you do anything else, please go and read the Boston Globe article headlined "Electronic Health Records Raise Doubt" (13 April 2009).

People have diverse beliefs as to what a successful contract is. Some would consider a contract successful if it did not end up in court. Others believe it to be successful if they did not need to manage the contractor too much. In a recession, it will be about getting it cheaper than before.

I met with several CIOs recently and discussed their approaches to cost containment. In the discussion, one made the interesting point that cost containment is merely the current crisis. CIOs have regularly faced others: innovation (last year), alignment (the year before), demonstrated value of IT (the year before that), and so forth.

As an architect, I'm constantly challenged to help organizations come up with better ways to do things. Unfortunately, in IT, we don't usually bring in architecture before there is some kind of mess to clean up.

Many economists believe that the risks present in the current global economic downturn have the potential to repeat the Depression years of the 1930s.

In a recent discussion among international members of the Centre for Art and Leadership at the Copenhagen Business School, we considered the broad question: "What can art do for business in the current financial crisis?"