Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

Leadership and teaming skills are front and center in times of rapid change. Meet today’s constant disruption head on with expert guidance in leadership, business strategy, transformation, and innovation. Whether the disruption du jour is a digitally-driven upending of traditional business models, the pandemic-driven end to business as usual, or the change-driven challenge of staffing that meets your transformation plans — you’ll be prepared with cutting edge techniques and expert knowledge that enable strategic leadership.

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Insight

A client asks about methods to increase the trust between IT and business managers and staff. It seems the relationship is currently broken: business managers don't trust IT, and the feeling is mutual.

A common business adage these days is that "if you don't move forward, you will fall behind." This is reasonable, in a sense. There is a good chance that in a competitive environment, maintaining the status quo internally will give others an opportunity to make advances and leave you in the dust. In effect, you indeed fall backward.

I have a problem with this, in that it implies that our approach should be to aggressively stay ahead of the competition in order to survive.

Microsoft has announced it is acquiring data warehousing appliance specialist DATAllegro, Inc. Microsoft plans to convert DATAllegro's massively parallel processing (MPP) data warehousing appliances to work with the Microsoft SQL Server database.

In far too many organizations, bureaucracy is an inherent impediment to success.

"How do I know what I think until I see what I say?"
-- commonly attributed to novelist E.M. Forster

This is a continuation of a series of recent Advisors on quality (see "Intrinsic Quality?" 3 July 2008 and "Investigating Agile: Inside and Out," 19 June 2008).

In our just-published Cutter Benchmark Review article (see "Linking IT Budgeting, Governance, and Value," Vol., 8, No. 7), we report that only 27% of managers of large companies believe their IT is superior to that of their competition. (By "large," we mean companies with more than US $50 million annual spend.) For all companies, regardless of size, only 39% of managers believe that their company's IT is superior.

Wow.

I once wrote a project plan for a global team with a business challenge of developing a model for the formation and management of worldwide strategic alliances. The seven team members were physically situated in different cities and time zones; we were part of an international executive education program to study key management issues of global enterprise.