Miller Lite had a perfect mission statement: “Tastes great. Less filling.”
Not that mission statements are all that important. They aren’t.
Understanding the mission is important. Having a great mission statement is only important to the extent it helps you persuade others to commit to it. Most mission statements have the opposite effect: They put people to sleep, which will only help gain their buy-in if you take advantage of their unconscious state to plant subliminal messages.
Welcome to the first edition of Keep the Joint Running, the successor to InfoWorld’s Survival Guide column, which I wrote from 1996 until last week. Keep the Joint Running comes from a mission statement discussion several years back. For a half-hour we’d been exchanging different bits of visionary pablum when a colleague of mine suggested that keeping the joint running just might be an important part of our mission.
It was an indelible moment, reminding me that no matter how much we want to be strategic, we first have to survive until the future gets here.
KJR‘s mission is pretty much the same as the Survival Guide‘s: to help IT leaders succeed. This isn’t as easy as it sounds, as the average CIO’s lifespan is something short of two years. To accomplish this mission, I’ll do my best to make KJR practical, entertaining, persuasive, and to provide a unique perspective.
Practical: For the most part, what you’ll get here is advice you can use the moment you stop reading. For example … An analyst from one of the big-name analyst outfits told me recently they operate on a “higher value plane” than I do. The discussion was PDAs; his firm, he told me, would never recommend replacing day planners with them.
I operate on a lower value plane — one closer to reality: Since the first fifty zillion or so people who bought PDAs did so to replace their day planners, arguing that this is a bad idea is a lot like arguing with the tide that it shouldn’t come in today. Don’t argue. Also, don’t try to prevent it from happening. Provide just enough support to keep the company out of trouble, and not so much that you create dependency.
Entertaining: This column won’t be much use to you if you doze off while reading it, will it?
Persuasive: Is there anything more tiresome than argument by assertion? Well, yes, of course there is — Michael Moore’s Oscar acceptance speech comes to mind. Nevertheless, a lot of what passes for advice in our industry turns out to be nothing more than unproven declarations.
For example: Ever hear the phrase “best practice”? Ever wonder who decides what a best practice is? Declaring that something or other is a best practice is argument by assertion.
It’s also almost always wrong, because “best” depends on context — almost nothing is best in all situations.
Here, when you read a recommendation about how to lead IT, you’ll read why it’s a good idea, and under what circumstances.
Unique perspective: G. W. Hardy once said, “It is not worth an intelligent man’s time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that.” If lots of other people have already weighed in on a subject and I don’t have anything new or different to offer, I won’t waste your time or mine on it. What would be the point?
So welcome to ISSurvivor.com and Keep the Joint Running. The plan is to be practical, entertaining, persuasive, and to offer a unique perspective. Whether or not I succeed is in part up to you. I’ll write ’em, but I won’t know if I’m hitting the target or not unless you tell me.
So tell me.