Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

Over the past year, I've seen a lot in business technology discipline (or not). I spent a day at a large enterprise where they explained how they had implemented 11 ERP systems and multiple instances of them. When I got up off the floor and promised them huge savings by reducing the variation in their back-office environment, they told me that they really weren't interested in the savings because they would require too many meetings, too many arguments, and -- well -- just too much discipline.

In my last couple of Advisors (see "Working Around the Delete Key, Part 1," 24 August 2006 and "Working Around the Delete Key, Part 2: What Are Our Users Really Doing?," 7 September 2006), I've commented on how inventive human beings become when working around perceived problems with their systems.

The concept of uncertainty is another way of defining project risk (including IT), insofar as risk is defined as those uncertain factors that can measurably and negatively impact project performance and undermine the outcomes sought. Historically, uncertainty has been identified and analyzed by its source: technical, people, financial, and so on. A completely alternative approach exists in thinking about uncertainty as the central characteristic of risk, an approach involving the foreseeability of risks.

Most IT practitioners today are well acquainted with the concepts, benefits, and pitfalls of offshore outsourcing. Furthermore, most companies, IT or non-IT, have used some form of sourcing since the early days of the information age.

Team captains in sports arise from natural leadership skills that key players use to bring the entire team up to a new level of play. A team captain is not necessarily the quarterback and is certainly not the coach or the general manager. The captain rallies the team in tough times. During some particularly tough times at Pages Software, Bruce Henderson, one of the senior developers, roamed the halls, wise-cracking and generally encouraging the rest of the team.

In June of this year, 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 recently have been plaguing Toyota automotive products.

The novel A Tale of Two Cities 1 begins with the oft-quoted line, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...." Although these words were written to describe the situation prior to the French Revolution, the same words could apply with equal force to the situation consumers face today with respect to protection of their private information.

Cultural misunderstandings can bring globalization to a halt! OK, that statement is a little dramatic, but you may have had this type of confusion bring some of your projects to a halt. Knowing how to avoid cultural communication misunderstandings is a competitive advantage. Thus, this Executive Update reviews three main global communication styles and offers steps on how to use this knowledge to reduce cultural snafus.