Cultural challenges and challenging cultures

Trying to catch up with some blogging but back on the road again traveling and trying to manage “day-by-day” because sometimes, that’s all you’ve got. So what then?

“There are three constants in life… change, choice and principles.” – Stephen Covey

This came up in one of my Brainy Quotes RSS feed and I really liked it – and very timely as well. I was catching up with a colleague who was in between roles and looking to move from the Program/Project role into traditional IT. I remember being a bit startled by that because I was trying to go the other direction but also because I find that IT in Asia is a miserable slog. Not what I’m used to and not what I’m willing to accept despite the feeling that it is what it is … for a long while.

As we work through or struggle with unpredictable and difficult changes, unclear choices, wide open opportunities, what do we do? Sometimes we run afoul of paralysis by analysis and end up just standing stuck and not able to move forward to the next steps. Sometimes it’s just because one can’t come to grips with the unpleasantness ahead. And this quote from Covey I think is a great breakthrough.

Change is going to happen so let’s not spend too much time with it. So what choices do we have then to manage it – emotionally, professionally, psychologically, personally, whatever? I think we can skip then to the last one admonition – one’s principles. Let that be the foundation, the guiding light, to help with the choices and the changes. Working backwards, I think we ought to know what we stand for, what our passions are, what our strengths and weaknesses are and let that gently guide us or at least help us avoid making the wrong decisions.

This leads to personal success:

“Be who you are and be that well.” – Saint Francis de Sales

And this leads to a missive on managing IT in Asia. Leadership requires we tackle the toughest issues that have a direct impact on our ability to achieve success. Besides the organizational cultures we deal with, there are cultural ones that embed itself into organizational cultures and people behaviors/actions. While I don’t want to suggest that cultures cannot change, it’s extremely difficult and requires amazing toughness, perseverance, and courage to challenge it.

As managers we need to ensure that the processes, behaviors which incorporate so much cultural baggage are tailored to respect it. Yet, this isn’t sufficient, because, business change (especially now!) hence, people and their behaviors must also change which means that processes must change along with it. And this is the chicken/egg conundrum…

Defining insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. (Albert Einstein attrib)

How to get people whose cultural values put stability, command-and-control/authority to do things differently? As James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner put it in their classic book, The Leadership Challenge: “The art of mobilizing others to want to struggle for shared aspirations” is what leadership is about. Moving the “immovable” object takes serious sweat, tears and stick-the-neck-out-first actions.

And therein is the hard lesson – how do you make the horse drink the @*!&^*(@% water???

The water I want people to taste are:
1. Have some self-direction – don’t ask someone for where you should be going.
2. Personal initiative – don’t sit on your ass waiting for the cattle prod. Go, get up and fix a problem and be useful to someone.
3. Independent minded critical thinking – you were born with a brain, please freaking use it or give it to someone else.
4. I have the answers and am part of the solution – yes, you can actually make a difference no matter what level you’re at, what title you have (or not)…
5. The boss doesn’t always have the answers. And if s/he does, it’s not his/her job to get it done – it’s yours. Earn your pay check or else someone else will.
6. One day it won’t be so hard to fire people here….There goes your “iron rice bowl”.
7. I want to hear “can-do” this, “shall-do” that and simply get it done. I don’t want to keep hearing excuses and expect failures.
8. It’s NOT OK to be ignorant. You have GOOGLE now and I didn’t…so what’s your excuse hm?
9. Working hard is great but working smarter is better and easier. It’s the best guarantee of career longevity in the long run.
10. It’s really ok not to know the answer and be wrong and make mistakes. Because if you already were great, perfect and knew it all, I’d be happily working for you instead.

For IT especially, it is so dynamic and challenging, people must by nature be mentally agile, emotionally stable, mentally strong to handle all that’s thrown IT’s way. Speed of change vs immovable cultural object.

So then…. Why?

IT Management and Culture (in an Asian context)

My blogging has been mostly off recently due to trying to achieve work-life balance by re-prioritizing things, get some vacation time in between projects and upcoming management activities, and figuring out what are the things important to me. Some good cave time to be had is good for the soul and recharging the mind and calming one’s emotions. Getting some inner peace is a good exercise.

Last week, I participated in an IT Forum that a network company sponsored to introduce to their customers and interested IT professionals their new products and services. Additionally, it was a forum for just general sharing amongst IT professionals about common IT issues. I facilitated the second part of it and found it to be great fun and glad I did.

We had a wide ranging group of professionals – technical experts, IT operations folks to very senior ASPAC level IT Directors and CIOs. It was an open sharing format and to get such a diverse group of people to open up was super stuff.

We discussed in hopscotch fashion:

1. Business change – faster and sharper than before?
a. How to manage it? Personally, organizationally? Or just be like a jelly-fish?

2. Cost-savings/Budget reductions –> IT Governance
a. More systems integration, consolidation, legacy consolidation
b. Where are the pressures hitting? infra? apps? security? people? outsourcing?
c. How to manage long term IT needs vs. short-term tactical requirements
d. How to prioritize, what to prioritize?

3. Staff retention / hiring
a. Roles and responsibilities changing
b. Skills sets raised higher?
c. Status of the IT Director?

4. IT innovation – avoid latest & greatest or continue to push for innovation in our IT operations, services, infrastructure, technology to better serve?

From the crowd mood, personally and organizationally, the super fast change of the business and IT environments was creating major stress points. In fact, one of the participants shared that after 20 years, this forced him out and look to do something other than IT. And nearly everyone expressed similar types of this sentiment – the personal difficulty facing today’s IT environment and secretive longing to also leave IT for other pastures.

One very senior IT manager asked the audience whether or not IT managers are treating IT staff well? That’s a brave question to ask and I commend him for asking.*

On this point, I would say that in an Asian context, most managers I see, are not supporting or supportive of IT staff. I believe it is culturally rooted – short term thinking, coupled with a poor view on talent development, and treating people as commodities that can be easily replaced – are fundamental reasons for why quite a few IT people I know in this part of the world are not optimistic in an IT career.

Discouraging yes, but hopefully this can change as economic and business prospects turn around for the better. But, there is a central need IMHO to find a better way to develop IT profesionals, promote greater IT maturity because it’s a key foundation for long term sustained business success. And this for us in Asia is an on-going concern always in an ever-increasing competitive business world.

* Note: I recently was explaining to a promising junior helpdesk talent in my team the criticality of upward communication, especially when news is bad. There’s strong cultural pressure in Asia to not speak up when news is bad. Undertanding this, I countered with this: “If you don’t speak up, then you will keep living in shit. That’s guaranteed. Do you want to keep living in shit every day?” But I said by the same token, “if you do speak up and management doesn’t listen and fix things, then management is shit.” Both needs attention and he and I agreed that it takes two-sides to make the future better so let’s give it a try.

And this fits into today’s Brainy Quote:

Ben Sweetland
“Success is a journey, not a destination.”
Maya Angelou
“Nothing will work unless you do.”

Historical snapshots in time – July 1 & July 4 2009

These two days represent important dates in history. July 1 in particular is a major milestone for Hong Kong’s history as the day marks the birth of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

Hong Kong Skyline Night View

Often viewed as the major gateway into China historically, it presently faces a bit of a difficult cross-roads, economically, politically, and socially. Democracy still lives as Tens of thousands march for democracy in Hong Kong. But not all is well in this city state – focus and direction for itself under the big shadow cast by China is always present.

July 4, America’s day of freedom, is under threat and it’s not an external one. Felix Rohaytan writes in his recent op-ed piece: Saving American Capitalism. The so-called American Dream has come under serious re-evaluation since the excesses of the US capital markets are directly responsible for missives like Rohatyn’s.

Rohaytn writes:

Market-based capitalism requires a platform of political freedom, the creation of wealth and fairness in its distribution. These values were reflected in the American economy until the 1980s, when American capitalism and European social democracy created reasonably similar economic outcomes.

It’s no wonder that both the US & HK feels itself at a cross-roads given the above truth between economic and political freedoms and social health.

There road ahead isn’t all that clear, in HK, universal suffrage won’t come at least until 2017. In the US, the excesses continue unabatted. If the greatest crisis to happen to the US since the Great Depression can’t be reigned in by reason, then there is even less hope.

However, both Hong Kong (by extension China) and the US can find the future roadmap in the “idea of an “ownership society” mentioned by Rohatyn. It’ll require stricter regulation to ensure human nature doesn’t prevail, sacrifices across the board to ensure equity. Ultimately the system must be fair, it must be regulated, and it must be ethical.

An Educated Consumer is our Best Customer(R)

No sorry, this isn’t about Syms Corp, a US discount clothing retailer that’s been in business for about 50 years throughout the north eastern, middle Atlantic regions and in the Midwest, Southeast and the Southwest.

I grew up hearing their commercial and this tag-line and it’s stuck with me ever since. It really applies to technology more than ever. With the ever quickening pace of technology products being introduced commercially for personal and corporate use, the “every day” user needs to be very literate. And most unfortunately are not. Since dumbing down the product isn’t feasible (you can’t sell it, nor raise the price), then the only hope is for the IT departments to find ways to get user acceptance up.

I think that’s an area we in the corporate IT space don’t pay a lot of attention to. We more or less just take what the technology vendors give us and we find a way to digest it. Except you can’t. Our brain capacities are finite and limited – by culture, background, education, personal preferences etc – so how do we raise user adoption rates of technology higher? I posted something about this several months ago on my company’s corporate intranet in response to a marketing user’s invitation to talk about how IT can be improved to assist in the modernization of the company. Back then, I said that instead of discussing internally focused IT issues, it would make a lot more sense if we found a way to have better educated business users who could discuss IT technologies with their IT colleagues. At the moment, many/most do not or cannot. It’s mightily painful to have business users think that setting up a SAP ERP system is like “copying and pasting” from a previous SAP ERP system we set up for a similar business unit. Like we do for desktop PCs (i.e. ghosting images)! they are irrate and incredulous when you tell them that no, it’s a wrong analogy and insisting on faster, cheaper, better quality, more flexibility and no user documentation required is not only not possible but a route to disaster.

Check out Mike Schaffner’s blog where he asked the same question recently: Breaking the Paradigm: How Do You Get People To See The Possibilities Of New Technologies?

So then folks, how DO we educate our users better with all the technologies coming out in 3-6 months cycles when our corporate IT systems are 3-6 years out of touch? This is one bridge between IT and business we should definitely pay more attention.

Does IT Matter (Part N)?: Tech Payoff for Companies Remains Elusive, Study Finds

In today’s New York Times Bits Column, the article revisited this very question again: Tech Payoff for Companies Remains Elusive, Study Finds. It references THE SHIFT INDEX (from Deloitte’s Silicon Valley research unit).

The author writes:

But two numbers really jump out. The return on assets for United States companies has dropped by 75 percent over that span, while labor productivity has more than doubled.
…
Why haven’t companies benefited more from technology investment?

My reaction to this was “oh no, here we go again” — is IT relevant or not? My belief is that “productivity” (however that is measured) and “innovations” (in a broad sense from inventions, new products, business processes etc) are traceable to technological developments utilized in everyday personal and corporate “life”. On the face of it, try to imagine doing the things we do now without technology.

However I found one reply from reader Paul to be very intriguing. He finds the report conclusions believable and says it’s attributable to two causes:

The first is the Red Queen Effect where “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” You’re not going to gain a competitive advantage when all your competitors are making the same changes.
…
The second cause is one I’ve observed repeatedly in corporate America; it’s the “customer effect”, by which I mean internal customers….The problem here is misapplication of the technological resource.

He goes on to suggest that technology, “if done right”, would eliminate whole departments and radically change corporations and not go by way of the dinosaur. Emotionally, I agree with this direction. IT should be both (1) steady and stable, but yet (2) innovative and ever-changing to permit structural changes. I believe though that in the past 35 years, technology (with help from venture capitalists, capital markets, strong business leadership and innovations) has done this very successfully.

Take a look at your daily “tools” you use the most and how you use it. Now imagine it goes all away….

RIP – Rajeev Motwani, Google founder’s professor and early investor, dies

This is worth a separate mention.  While Sergey and Larry certainly should get their due recognition for Google, the fact is, it’s often the people behind the entrepreneurs that really “make or break” the startup.  Such is the life of Silicon Valley startups – your VC is equally critical to your success – hence the need to find the very best.

With out Motwani’s influence would Google have been as successful?  I shudder to think life without Google – it’s been that powerful and transformative in our generation.

Check out Techstartups 3.0 obit.

MBA Oath & Masters of Barely Anything

I couldn’t help myself on this blog post. The article “A Promise to Be Ethical in an Era of Immorality” from New York Times, May 29, just triggered a mental conniption in my head. It follows the efforts of Harvard MBA grad Max Anderson and his fellow classmates in their pledge to not advance their “own narrow ambitions” in an MBA Oath.

What a bunch of fringe lunatics really. These folks don’t have anything to show for from of their truly expensive education? That supposedly among the best and brightest feel compelled to taking an “oath” will somehow make them more ethical than before they got into the program and graduated? We got ourselves a bunch of genius’ for sure.

For the corporate hiring managers world-wide, here are the 651 losers to-date who you will definitely NOT want to hire.

I promise you, taking the oath won’t make any of the 651 more ethical than before they entered Harvard. And, that is perhaps the saddest testimony from this whole embarrassing tale. We have sown a generation of “future leaders” that out-Gecko, Gordon Gecko!

NOTE: The terminology “Masters of Barely Anything” came from a July 12, 2004 BusinessWeek article. I liked the following book reviews – by Eric Nehrlich, an unrepentant generalist, and Jim Stroup, author of Managing Leadership.

Conversation comments around the WWW

I do my best to keep up with some of the interesting discussions threads over at LinkedIn because of the quality of answers and also the caliber of the posters. A couple of good ones came up which I’d like to share.

First subject is about the “First 100 days” for the CIO (from the CIO Forum) which is great not only for the 100 days but as a continuous cycle yearly review when one is doing the IT strategy.

Michelle Garvey, Global CIO for Warnaco, referencing Gartner’s report (which I couldn’t successfully google for) writes:

1. Understand your team: interview direct reports and the key level or two down from there, understand their relationships to each other, how they are perceived, strengths/weaknesses, priorities… form an opinion on their value and fit and start to develop a view of the current organizational chart appropriateness
2. Understand your users: have formal meetings with all senior executives and the key IT users down a level or two. What are their key business objectives and priorities, what are their frustrations with IT historically, what do they think of the team…
3. understand your system inventory: what do you own, are there stability/quality/issues, are the licenses current, are the versions supported…
4. read the current audit reports, understand what issues are being called out by IA
5. what are the projects in progress – what were the business cases behind them, what are the schedules, are they on track, are they in trouble, are they the right things….
6. understand your budget: where are you in the year relative to plan, are you under or over spent,
7. if management has brought in outside consultants to evaluate IT or has received proposals on specific projects from outside firms, read those and meet with the consultants you find intrigueing
8. identify the quick deliverable you can do to solidify the perception of your value add and ability to drive positive change, and get it done.
9. roll all the above into a documented assessment/strategy/plan

This is KISS in action. Throw in some of the principles from Michael Watkin’s book and you’ve got all the bases covered. See this article from CIO Australia for another good approach to the question. All of this of course is meant to answer the bigger relevance question.

The other interesting thread from the same Forum titled “Do you need to cut cost, improve operational capability or reduce head count?” by Shaun Taylor will likely get some interesting comments. Check it out HERE. For a different look at the same question, check out Chris Curran’s post, “A CIO Can’t Do More with Less“.

Another CIO blogger I discovered from Facebook NetworkedBlogs is Andrew Blumenthal. Check out his “Executives, One Foot In and One Foot Out” post from The Total CIO. Good stuff.

IT Competencies revisited

I recently came across Mike Schaffner’s amazing blog, chock-full of Business and IT wisdom which he dispenses in a down to earth style that’s easy to read and understand. This true Pai Mei IT guy had words of wisdom in the area of IT competencies and skills which made re-think about my Building an IT Team post and (Successful) IT People’s Characteristics post.

In Critical Skills and Competencies for IT employees, Mike breaks it down into simpler parts and much easier to follow. Definitely keep it in mind as you go about building your own IT (or Project) team that will bring you fantastic success. If you think hard about it, the qualities identified as competencies are like personal characteristics important to any high-performing team. The one I like and often not have enough of is sense of humor/positive outlook in things.

On that front, no matter how bad things can get in the IT shop, sing or hum these two tunes (“official” IT theme songs) 😉 …

…and be cheered! 🙂

Departmental / Functional theme songs

A few years back as I was getting to understand more about my company’s culture, some colleagues and team members got together in a karaoke place in Taiwan. Here we sang, drank and chatted up about our personal views of our current work place etc. These sorts of outings are awesome for team building because (a) it’s in a social, neutral setting, (b) we can be open and honest with each other (we’re probably drunk or getting there anyways), and (c) we get to know each other better – warts and all. By now, I had already formed certain strong beliefs of what I thought each of the departments/functions stood for as well as what each of the major departmental heads represented in their role.

So during this setting where we were getting pretty warm and fuzzy minded, here’s what we came up with. Please share your thoughts in the poll afterwards! 🙂

CEO/MD/GM:

GENERAL COUNSEL/LEGAL:

SALES & MARKETING:

HUMAN RESOURCES:

IT gets 2 songs (maybe 3)l, one main and the second one due to the fact that many corporations split up IT into 2 different functions – artificial Demand IT and Supply IT distinctions that create needless rifts in the IT service management life cycle, IMO.
IT:

Due to the nature of Finance’s scope & portfolio, they have 3 themes. Check out this reference about it and why (better yet, see it!). FINANCE:

If you feel that I should include a function left out above, please drop me a note. There’s probably one or two that I know of that probably should be in there but not enough practical exposure to quite give them their own “theme song”.