BankerVision

Dear Senior Executive...

Dear Senior Executive,

I understand you’ve been given responsibility for innovation. I’ve heard on the grapevine that you’re excited about it, and planning great things. I think it will be thrilling to see what you create.

But I hope you’ll take a few words of advice from someone who has been in the position you’re now in.

Firstly, you’re going to have a hard time convincing anyone that your new responsibilities are important. Oh, everyone will say they think innovation is important, but when the rubber hits the road, they’ll be watching to see if you screw up the line-of-business things you’re responsible for now, not waiting to celebrate your innovation success.

So my first word of advice is to believe in your new responsibilities, even if most of the time you’re the only one who does. Success will come with time, if you let it. 

Secondly, everyone will have an opinion on what you’re doing and all those opinions will be as far apart as the Earth and the Moon. There are no right answers if you have to run an innovation effort, but there is a wrong answer. The wrong answer is trying to satisfy everyone who has an opinion on innovation. If you try to do that, you’ll never get anything done. You have to believe in what you believe is right.

This is my second piece of advice: you are senior, and you are responsible. You aren’t going to make anyone happy with innovation no matter what you do. Every time you try something  new there will be winners and losers. So take my advice, and start new stuff regardless. If you wait for consensus, you’ll never be able to start anything at all.

Finally, you may be senior and empowered to make decisions, but the fact is you won’t be the one implementing them. You don’t have time, and anyway implementation will probably require lots of specialized skills besides your own.

Though you’re in charge, there are lots of less senior people who can do things to stop innovation.  They will never deliberately disobey and obstruct, but they will certainly go-slow if they don’t like or don’t understand what you’re doing. Change in any form is very frightening to those who aren’t making the decisions.

So my final piece of advice is this. You need to build your innovation effort from the bottom up as well as from the top down. The little people at the front line are just as important as the ones in the center who make the decisions. It is the front line and their managers, after all, who will be affected by anything you do. If they love your innovation effort, they will make sure you succeed. If they don’t, you will certainly fail.

My best wishes for your future success.

Promotions Cultures & Innovation

If there’s one thing I’ve noticed working for Government*, it is there’s an endemic promotions culture here, far worse than anything I’ve seen anywhere else.

A promotions culture is what you get when the main objective of everything you do at work is to get to the next grade level. For some people, that’s a financial incentive more than anything else. Others want that promotion for the status and power that goes with it. A few, very few, want to be at the next level so they have an opportunity to make a bigger difference.

A sign of a promotions culture is everyone talks about the “career limiting move”.

I don’t believe in career limiting moves, though of course if it is evident that someone isn’t ready or capable of the next role, that’s something else. I mean, you have to prove that you’re ready for the next role if you want to get the next role.

Proving you’re ready requires a little bit of risk taking. In healthy corporate cultures, that’s behavior which is rewarded.

Not so in a promotion culture.

In a promotion culture, you are rewarded for being as similar as possible to the group of people who decide your next promotion. It is human nature to like those who are similar to us, so pretending to be as similar to your boss as possible is sensible.

In a promotion culture, you are rewarded for showing that you steer a steady course, one that doesn’t rock the boat. It is human nature for bosses to like it when their lives are easy, so promoting those that make it so is an easy decision.

And in a promotion culture, longevity of service, dedication to the organization as it is today, and conformance to all corporate norms is behavior that’s rewarded. A maverick might destabilize the steady progression of everyone else, so being the same as everyone else is the behavior that’s wanted.

You’ll all know where I’m going with this. Promotions cultures destroy any organizational capability to innovate, because they act to petrify the present status quo.

What can you do if you’re stuck in a promotions culture?

The best advice, I think, is find someone who’s senior who didn’t get senior by virtue of the promotions culture. They’ll have a different perspective on things than everyone else, and be willing to take a few more risks.

I consider myself lucky that my boss is in that category. He came into the Department from the outside, and has allowed me the liberty to do things I really doubt few others get.

If you aren’t lucky enough to be in that position though, what else can you do?

I think the choice is really very simple. You are either on the promotions bandwagon, or you’re off it.

In the former case, you should accept that you aren’t able to make any meaningful change, or take risks, or create a better future. Those things are incompatible with getting promoted.

If you’re off the promotions bandwagon, on the other hand, you can do all those things with impunity. You won’t be rewarded for doing so, of course, since rewards are reserved for those on the bandwagon. But you’ll have the chance to make a really significant difference.

Since I’ve joined the Government, promotions have become much harder to get by virtue of the fact that the resources available are being scaled back. And guess what? There’s lots more risk taking and innovative behavior going on. People are being far less conformant. They’re recognizing the old rewards system is changing.

Isn’t that an interesting outcome from public sector austerity?

* I feel I must point out, for any hacks who decide to hatchet me for having a blog daring to comment, that these pages are a private effort not reflecting the views of the Department, or any present or future employer. Yes, I sometimes sail deliberately close to the wind, but I do it with intent, ‘cause sometimes the best way to drive change is talk about it openly. And in case this post isn’t evidence enough, I want you all to know I opted out of the promotions culture on about, um, day 2. Follow #welovebaskers on Twitter.

Walking with Dinosaurs

Tomorrow, I'm going to be giving a talk to a group of young people who have come to our organisation through our graduate programme. They are all very, very bright, and some of them are just about the most motivated to succeed I've seen in a while.

I love working with people at the start of their careers, and particularly this generation. The reason? They know and accept there are dinosaurs around, and they aren't scared of them.

I know when I was starting out, there were also dinosaurs. They had all this experience, all this knowledge, probably won in the "school of hard knocks". They were all senior, and you would never dream of questioning their determinations and decisions. If you did, there'd be consequences. I mean, what would you know about anything? Why would you be entitled to an opinion? Youngsters, you should listen and learn.

Well, that's over.

The dinosaurs today - and I hope I'm not turning into one myself - are hopelessly ill-equipped in many cases to deal with the way things are now. The problem is their years of experience are now a hindrance in a world where what's really important is freshness in absorbing concepts, ideas, and innovation. Things at which young generations have always excelled.

You can imagine the collective meltdown those words are likely to cause in the established IT community, of which I am a part. We're all in charge because of all those years of experience. How dare I suggest all those years are not that valuable?

But, for example, have a look at your IT organisation, and especially at your development processes. I bet you'll find they're gummed up with gates, and procedures, and evaluations and reviews. Everything takes ages, and the mantras will be "reuse" and "architecture" and "governance". These are the hallmarks of the dinosaur.

Why do I say that? Because they are mechanisms for controlling rampant spread of technology solutions in an age when doing big systems was expensive. It is still expensive, but only because of  the artifacts that have been left behind when things actually were expensive. It is our control artifacts that are now making us expensive, not the problems we are asked to solve.

This new generation of tech managers we're growing know this. They sit there and sigh when we ask for "one more gate", knowing that the new world is completely throw away. "Just build it", they mutter under their breaths, and could, indeed, fire up their personal laptop and do it overnight probably if they were of a mind to do so.

Don't laugh. We had this group of students show up once and do a hack-day. In about 24 hours they'd accomplished about as much as we'd done with traditional methods in several months. Oh, of course, it wasn't "governed", and "reusable" and "consistent with our architecture". But is was throwaway. Throwaway is what you want when the cost of development is a reducing function.

And it is a reducing function. I am amazed at what young-people start-ups can accomplish with practically no money. They maybe get half a million dollars from an angel investor and a month or two later have a system that's actually really useful and which people are desperate to use.

They go into these ventures serially. They work until something is obviously not working, throw it away, and start again. It is no accident that many of the most successful tech entrepreneurs presently are pretty young. They're not dinosaurs.

Anyway, back to what I'm going to say to these young technology managers I'm going to speaking to tomorrow.

Firstly, I'm going to tell them to recognise there are dinosaurs around. I'm going to tell them their bark is worse than their bite and even if they get bitten, they have years to recover. But of course, the best won't get bitten, because they will be clever about how they get their messages across.

And I'm going to tell them to question everything that comes from dinosaurs. And that their inexperience with the old way of doing things is their best chance to make a huge difference now.

The next big sale

I am amazed, constantly, that people fail to get that being an employee is no different to running any other kind of small business. Everything you have to do to make a small business work has to be done when you're an employee as well. The only difference is that you've got guaranteed income.

Guaranteed income is something that makes it easy to be lazy. Is there any point marketing your achievements when you're going to get the pay-cheque anyway? Why bother to drum up new activity, actually, when doing additional work fails to result in an increase in income?

The illusion that you don't have to run yourself as a small business comes about because most people only have to sell their services those few times they're planning to change jobs. If that happens infrequently enough, it is easy to forget that everything you do right now is collateral for making the next big sale of yourself.

Those who change jobs more frequently are likely to inherently understand this fact. Contractors, especially, get it. It is why I advocate that everyone has a blog and does social media. It makes it simple to be visible.

One objection I always hear when I talk about this stuff, though, is that "some people aren't good at self promotion".  Considering that being visible is so easy in this digital age, that argument doesn't really wash much with me. It is far more likely,  I think, that people who are poor at self-promotion actually have little or nothing to promote in the first place.

Another objection - perhaps a more relevant one, really - is that one should be thinking of doing the best they can right now, not worrying about the next big sale. Whatever happened to loyalty anyway? This is myopic thinking, because only the very lazy plan to be doing the same job forever. Can you imagine anything more boring than doing the same role, decade after decade?

Treating yourself as a small business has the consequence of reminding you, every day, that you are eventually going to have to make a sale, regardless of the present guaranteed income stream. This has the focusing effect of making sure your performance today is as good as it can be, because it is all marketing for the next big thing.

5 signs you are stuck with an Oxygen Thief

Oxygen Thief (def): An individual who uses up the air supply in a meeting at a disproportionate rate compared to their contribution.

The top five signs you're in a meeting with an oxygen thief are these:

1. They always speak more quickly than anyone else. They speak so quickly because they know the supply of oxygen in a room is limited, so they have to use more words per concept spoken in order to ensure they get more of the air than everyone else.
2. They never listen to anyone else, except in order to determine when it is next their turn to speak. This is a very critical thing for an Oxygen Thief, because their main interest is getting more of the air supply for themselves. The content from whomever is presently speaking is just air they're forced to give up.
3. The cup of tea you are drinking starts to boil spontaneously. What has occurred is that the oxygen deficit has resulted in a lower pressure zone in the room, reducing the boiling point of water.
4. If water droplets start forming on your devices or dripping onto your papers, it is for the same reason. You have a low pressure zone in the room, and precipitation is about to occur. Don't worry though, this is a local weather condition that will go away as soon as you open the door.
5. The top sign you have an oxygen thief in the room, however, is that as soon as all the oxygen is gone from the room, they will find a reason to leave early. As everyone else is gasping for breath, or else wobbling shakily because of the neuron-death, they will determine their work is done and escape to greener pastures.

Does the computer experience have to be awful in the workplace?

Its been a few years now that people have been talking about “consumerisation”, which is the idea that you can want and expect the same kind of computing experiences at work as you get at home.

But, as everyone who works in a large company knows, you never get such an experience at work. Everything is a few versions behind, and even when it’s up to date, it all works so slowly. This, in part, is because of all the management, and security, and monitoring, and stuff that IT people feel they have to do to protect their assets.

What are the key changes IT organisations would have to make if they really wanted to deliver a decent consumer computing experience?

1. They’d need to stop imagining that their staff are stupid. I’m always so surprised when I go into meetings and discover the IT people somehow believe that staff forget how to use the web, Google, and standard productivity tools the moment they walk in the door. Is there an idiot-line drawn on the floor by the entrance, and your IQ drops as you cross it? I don’t think so.

2. IT organisations need to stop thinking that the lowest common denominator is the place to aim their technological aspirations. It may be the case that a small minority of staff can’t progress beyond the green-screen, but frankly that’s not a good enough reason to lose the benefits of the modern stuff.

3. IT managers need to accept they don’t have to control everything. It isn’t, for example, necessary to lock down computers to the degree where you can’t even access the screensaver. Why do we do that stuff anyway? Because we think it reduces our support costs and increases reliability. All it does really is make sure that you have to call the helpdesk for everything, even if you know how to fix a problem yourself.

4. IT can’t only be about cost. I am so exhausted by the amount of effort we go to reduce cost. I mean, I’m not advocating that everyone should just go and spend anything they like on shiny gadgets, but really, this laser sharp focus on cost containment prevents you from moving things forward at a decent pace. IT is an asset, a strategic enabler. Do you ask a starving athlete to run faster and longer with less food? Not really.

5. Standardisation may make things easier to manage, but it is also a way to shackle your best people to the lowest common denominator. I suppose that’s OK if you work in an organisation where keeping talent isn’t a key differentiator.  But I don’t know many organisations that have that view and keep on living long.

6. IT needs to give up on the idea that the most important thing is reliability, scalability and security. Those are important things. But if you want a decent computing experience, they are secondary to making the job at hand as easy as possible. Secondary. Our IT experiences are terrible at work because we’ve all forgotten this.

7. People are on their computer for at least a third of their day. I, personally, am on mine for 12 hours a day. I therefore cannot tolerate shoddy equipment that doesn’t do exactly what I need perfectly all the time. When you have to deal with little frustrations 100 times a day, they’re not little any more. They become big and central parts of your life. Personally, I don’t need technological niggles to be the thing I talk about when I finally get off the computer. Dinner conversation: “yes, I made two cups of tea whilst waiting to boot this morning. Then I made two more at lunchtime when the net was slow. And then I had another one waiting to log out. So don’t bother to offer me more tea with desert”.

8. Internet access is not a privilege. Social network access is not something that will suck up otherwise productive work time. Doing social media is not only a home-time activity. Wake up.

Actually, I could keep on going here for ages, but I think you get the point. Those of us who are IT leaders really need to move where the rest of the world is already, and create great computing experiences for staff. The time is coming where they’ll demand great experiences or they’ll leave. I know lots of traditionalists don’t believe that, but have a chat with the fresh talent and see what they think.

Frankly, things have moved. It isn’t about the IT folk and what makes it easy and cheap for us to manage the IT asset any more.

Fake Experts

It is possible that the most frustrating thing ever is to have to sit through meetings with people who have declared that they’re experts, and then discover that they aren’t.

Here are the top five categories of people I’ve come across in the last couple of weeks who fit this category:

1. Innovation experts who say they know lots about the subject, but then dish out standard stuff that wasn’t current a few years ago. They toss out key buzzwords like “open innovation” and “radical Innovation” and “stage gates” because they’re the words that come up when you Google innovation. I reserve a special level of irritation for those who quote the major thinkers like Clayton Christensen, and then misrepresent his theories as something else entirely.

2. Social media experts who say they know everything about online but don’t do online themselves. Double demerit points awarded those inside large organisations who are responsible for intranets and therefore think they know anything about how social media really works. Their own intranets should tell them they don’t.

3. Analyst gurus who have gone into management, and then are trotted out by account managers because they are “senior”. As you know, my view of analysts is pretty dismal most of the time, because you so rarely see anything original from them. Managers of analysts almost never have an original thought left in them, and they always refer to their past research as if it was what made them qualify as management.

4. Architecture thought leaders. Please do not trot out one more model, or one more rendition of TOGAF with a new colouring scheme. Or, worst of all, a “disruptive” new approach to architecture. It is all so, so tired.

5. Almost all vendor CTOs (thankfully, we have a good one or two at the Department, who at least try).  They are there to flog product. Period. Any thought leadership you get is driven entirely from the perspective of convincing you to make a purchase of some kind. Of course, vendor thought leadership is somewhat an oxymoron anyway. They are always about responding to what the market will buy, so they are pretty much forced into copying the thought leadership they find in the market. That’s why analysts are always reporting what decision makers think, rather than dreaming up new stuff themselves.

What could all these groups have done differently and made the meetings less annoying? To have made it a valuable discussion that created new opportunities?

They could have thought through the stuff they Googled, and used their highly paid brains to give some unique opinion or insight.

They could have said something unexpected, something we might not have dreamed up ourselves.

They could have brought their unique experiences to the table, and used them as a foil for whatever points they were making.

Or, maybe they could have used their networks to bring interesting people to the table that would have astounded us. People we have now way of accessing ourselves.

Instead, what we get is oxygen thievery of the first order. Sometimes, you open the door and the whoosh of air into the room is palpable.

Originality is a precious commodity. Its such a pity that you so rarely see it.

The dark, middle and current ages of IT organisations

In the dark ages, your position in an IT organisation was determined by how many systems and people you controlled. This was a useful proxy for money, of course, but the real deal was how big an impact things had when they went wrong. If you were “mission critical”, boy were you safe in your position.

In the middle ages, your position in an IT organisation was determined by how many important relationships with the business you were in charge of. The more directors, and executive directors, and board members rank and file in IT had to get your permission to talk to, the more important you were. This was the age of IT relationship management. Only the specially anointed ones could be trusted to give the “right messages” to the business, and they made sure to reinforce their absolute control of the lines of communication.

In the current age, your position in an IT organisation is directly proportional to how much change you can cause to happen. And people who are seen to be able to “get things done” get asked by everyone around the place to do just that.

This, of course, is very unnerving to the middle ages hierarchy, whose modus operandi (if they wish to ensure they retain their positions) is to make sure no change happens unless they have personally agreed that its “the right thing for the business”. They have to have this say-so, of course, because otherwise, they don’t have any position at all.

And it is doubly unnerving for the dark ages hierarchy, who try to stop all change because they are there to “protect service” or “managing uptime”. For these people, retention of their positions is determined by how good they are at saying no to everything.

Here is an interesting diagnostic question: how happy are you with your prospects for progression in your IT organisation? If you feel stuck at the bottom of the heap, struggling always to get noticed, I bet you work in a dark ages IT hierarchy. Those are places where longevity of service is the only way to progress.

On the other hand, if you’ve got a quite good manager, who cares about you, thanks you for your efforts,  but despite everything can’t offer you very much progression you’re likely to be stuck in a middle ages IT hierarchy somewhere. They can’t offer you very much progression, by the way, because it would imply giving up control of some relationships, and that would imply reducing their own positions. Here, your progression is determined by how quickly those above you resign.

My suggestion if you work in either of these kinds of organisations is to take a gamble. Take a gamble on driving change no matter what your managers think. The worst thing that can happen is you’ll be fired. But, lets face it, if you’re wanting a big career in IT, you’ll be leaving anyway for an organisation that wants what you have... is there any downside here, really?

10 ways you know you’re with smart people

Update: My blog has moved! Please come and visit me at Innovator Inside for my latest posts. 

1. They don’t talk as much as you, because they know they got smart by listening.

2. They know lots of things other than what they’re specialised in. Theirs is the gift of a broad mind, constantly fed with the stimulant of being interested in what everyone else is doing.

3. They juggle home, work and personal interests with dexterity and never fall back on the tired old refrain about “work life balance”. And when they’re juggling, they somehow manage to seem 100% engaged with what they’re doing, on all fronts simultaneously, even though you know they’re taking appropriate steps behind the scenes to make sure their lives are perfectly, serenely balanced.

4. They probably do social media. Not always, but probably. It is not only another chance to listen, but one they use to ensure they can feed their brains with things they otherwise wouldn’t have come across.

5. Even when things go very badly wrong, they’ll be smiling. Smart people never get ruffled because their smart brains present them with alternatives faster than the bad stuff can happen.

6. They know they are usually the smartest person in the room, but they don’t spend their time dwelling on that. Instead, they take it as a personal challenge to see if they can make everyone else the smartest person in the room too.

7. If they are managers, they will make every effort to get people smarter, more connected and more popular than them in their teams. They’re not threatened because they know that smartness is synergistic. They also make sure that their smart people get to look smarter than them for the same reason.

8. They have hidden skills that never get rolled out until they’re needed. They don’t have any need to show their full capabilities for reasons of proving they’re better than others. 

9. They may or may not have expensive educations. You’d never know, just by being with them unless you had their CV in front of you.

10. They never, ever, under any circumstances, make you look stupid, even though it would be easy to do so. They’ve learnt through bitted experience that the only thing that happens when you make someone look bad is you look bad yourself.

That higher degree

I’m sighing here, because I’ve just heard from an another very good IT professional who has decided their career will be immeasurably enhanced by doing a higher degree.

I’m sighing not because I don’t think there is value in higher degrees from an academic perspective, but because this individual thinks that anyone cares about the higher degree when it comes to what makes someone’s career take off.

There is this false expectation that “if I just get this MBA, I can get to the next level”.

Tied in with this false expectation is the thought that anyone in IT is going to get their career managed for them by their employers.

I have news. You will not have a boss long enough in IT for them to manage your career for you in any substantive way, and most large organisations are rubbish at long term talent management anyway. The fact is, long term IT professionals who don’t change jobs frequently enough get painted into a corner where their skills devalue over time. And IT organisations are full of people who know this, and who therefore  move every few years, making long term talent management pretty impossible.

Now, considering that a higher degree is going to take a few years to get, and everyone on the playing field who matters (and stopping you progressing) will be gone in a few years, how is the new piece of paper going to make any difference at all, really?

When people look at CVs, they don’t usually care all that much about the education, so long as there are signs there is some. They only care about what you’ve already done in your career to that point. Anyone can get a degree, after all, even a higher one.

But not everyone is able to make things happen. That’s especially true in IT, where we have optimised ourselves to make sure that change can only happen in extreme circumstances. “Protecting live service” – which is very laudable of course – has ultimately had the effect of making sure that only those with the largest sticks can make any difference.

A new degree does not give you a large stick. Hierarchical position is a large stick, or control of a budget is a large stick or the ear of someone important is a large stick. You get such sticks by doing stuff, not by having an advanced degree. People who can hand out sticks do so because the have worked out it is OK to trust you.

Really, there are only two times it makes sense to get further degrees, with all the attendant cost and time commitments.

The first is if you’re new to work, and you have no career history. Then, having that advanced degree is a nice CV stuffer that can help differentiate, but I do wonder if the personal ROI on maybe getting selected for a few extra interviews is really worth the extra years of study.

The second reason – really the only reason I think – is you’re interested in the content.

So often, good people with good jobs in IT go and get that extra degree, but not for either of these reasons. That’s why I sigh. Its such a waste for most people.

They’d be far better off cultivating people who can give them big sticks instead.