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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Do you love technology? Is it really cool stuff, or just a tool for the business, like a screwdriver or bandsaw?

Northwest Airlines undoubtedly logged the flight as an on-time departure, because we left the gate within 15 minutes of the original schedule. Of course, we sat on the tarmac for an hour and a half, but nobody tracks on-time take-offs or arrivals. That’s the problem with choosing poor performance measures: you get what you measure, not what you want.

Because I had the extra time, I read Fortune and Forbes, instead of the history and science fiction I prefer (really the same subject, pointed in opposite temporal directions). Much to my surprise I struck gold, in the form of a Forbes story about Chrysler, currently the hottest performer in the automotive industry.

And that’s why I asked if you love technology. The Bobs who run Chrysler (Eaton and Lutz) love cars, and expect their whole team to love ’em too. “If you don’t have an almost irrational passion for cars and trucks,” says Eaton, Chrysler’s CEO and president, “we don’t believe you’ll jump ahead of the pack.”

Lutz, the vice chairman, adds this: “Let’s face it, the customer [is] just a rearview mirror … When it comes to the future, why, I ask, should we expect the customer to be the expert in clairvoyance or creativity? After all, isn’t that really what he expects us to be?”

I keep hearing we’re supposed to be businesspersons first, which I guess means we’re supposed to all scurry around with yellow legal pads, computing returns on investment and accounting for budget variances while making sure those nasty techies who work for us don’t fritter their time away playing with some new toy on the company’s nickel.

Go away. Maybe my wait on the tarmac has just put me in a mood, but go away. Please. Today, I don’t have any patience for this nonsense.

If you can’t conjure up any passion for what you do … if you don’t think personal computers, and networks, and the Internet, and giant data warehouses, and using computers to control your telephone, and … if you don’t think this is all just awesome … why on earth are you doing this?

Sure, you need to understand how this all fits your business. If it doesn’t fit it will fail, and then you won’t get to play anymore. And besides, technology lacks sex appeal until you see other people using it. You have to be a businessperson or you won’t understand just how cool it can all be.

Early last year I wrote about an unsavory sales tactic: the losing sales team meets with the decision-maker and his or her manager. The sales team tries, in the meeting, to discredit the decision, and especially to provoke some display of emotion. Then they get to say, “Clearly, Clyde has become too emotionally involved in this to be making a good business decision.”

Here’s the proper response (from Clyde’s manager): “I damn well hope he’s emotionally involved in it. I don’t want anyone on my team who doesn’t take it personally when some salesman challenges his professionalism, and I sure don’t want anyone on a project who’s apathetic about the result. Now get out.”

The Internet snuck up on a lot of CIOs. I’ll bet every one of them was a businessperson, not a technology hobbyist. Those who love technology breathed a sigh of relief – they’d been waiting for the right moment to bring the Internet to their company’s attention. Finally, they could stop waiting.

How about your company’s business? You should have just as much passion for it as you do for technology, and for the same reasons. So here’s the best of all possible worlds: you find your employer’s business just as awesome as you find technology.

Now there’s a job you’re perfect for.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

When you’re negotiating, be smart and act stupid.

I’ve heard this advice many times over the years, but my pride never lets me accept it. Ego-gratification always ends up taking precedence over financial gain.

This is semi-good career counsel too. When you try to prove you’re smarter than your organizational superiors (superior in position only, of course), one of two things will happen – both bad:

1. You succeed. By both being smarter and spending your energy proving it, you’ve made yourself dangerous.

2. You fail. You’re not executive material – you just don’t measure up.

Keep your ego out of it. When you disagree, you aren’t right and your boss isn’t wrong. You’re discussing and reconciling alternatives, to help fine-tune the program. In the end, your initiative and skill have to advance your boss’s decisions, not your own. This is called “followership” and it’s a valuable and valued skill.

You may be getting peeved, thinking I’m recommending toadyism. Think again. Pride is one of the seven deadly sins. I’m just giving a practical example of how the workplace punishes sinfulness.

Many readers took similar exception to an earlier column, which pointed out that the ethics of power lead to complications beyond commonplace, day-to-day morality. Right is right and wrong is wrong, and that’s all there is too it, complained some of these readers. Regardless of what I actually said, grumbled others, my column encouraged unethical behavior among the powerful.

Notes from readers and messages posted on the InfoWorld Electric forum on the subject, brought several points into sharper focus:

1. The Edge of the Slippery Slope: Politicians used to gain power to advance their programs. Bad enough, but as campaigning has become marketing, politicians now adjust their programs to gain power. This distinction – gaining power to achieve worthwhile ends vs attaching yourself to whatever ends will gain you power, define (for me) the edge of an ethical precipice. When you’re playing the power game, ask yourself this question on a regular basis: “What am I trying to achieve, and if I achieve it, will I approve of the result?”

2. Means and Ends: The ends, we’re told as children, never justify the means. This guidance provides a useful touchstone … for children. Adults, especially those with some power (and that includes everyone in management) need to apply a more sophisticated calculation.

Every action (the means) has both an immediate consequence, consequences intended to achieve a goal (the end), and unintentional effects as well (side effects). Defining the ethics of an action by its immediate consequence alone is naive – the ethical content of an action must be measured through a complex calculus that takes into account all of its consequences.

You’ve heard this before: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

3. Gut Feeling: Should you trust your instincts when it comes to distinguishing right from wrong? Probably not. Huck Finn pointed this out: “If I had a yaller dog with no more sense than a man’s conscience, I’d shoot him.”

Your gut feelings come from how your mother raised you, and Mom didn’t explain the choices I’d have to make as a manager. An anecdote to illustrate the point:

Several years ago, one of my staff had to insist that a vendor replace a project manager on an installation. Our complaint ended up getting the project manager fired. My staff felt understandably bad about the impact on this guy.

Here was my response: “You knew the guy who got fired. A total stranger now has an opportunity. Your knowing someone personally doesn’t make him or her more deserving.”

After reading the earlier column, my friend Steve Nazian reminded me of a character in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, who recommended: “Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.”

Proving, once again, the value of science fiction to your career.

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