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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

At least a dozen different people have, in correspondence, endorsed an alternative to bailing out AIG: Instead we’ll divide the $85 billion evenly among the 200 million adult U.S. citizens, giving each of us $425 thousand.

Other than the misplaced decimal point this would be a fine idea: The correct division of spoils is $425.

The economy has, in the words of Ambrose Bierce, an “implacable aroma.” The impact on your IT budget is a predictable, if misguided desire for panaceas. CIOs should plan on thinner budgets, demand for more services, and insistence that these two requirements are entirely compatible.

There’s no point in arguing, either. Those who insist will have both the authority to do so and the desire for it to be true. It’s a lethal combination — neither facts, nor logic, nor shouting at the top of your lungs will result in any discernable dissuasion.

You’re in danger. It’s time to dust off a basic rule of responding to requests: Both yes and no are bad answers — in this case because one admits incompetence; the other is insubordinate.

Answer yes and you’ve admitted to having run a hopelessly inefficient IT organization for lo these many years. If that weren’t the case, how can you now find the efficiencies necessary for delivering more for less? You’re dead.

Answer no and you’re disobeying a direct order from the person you report to. That’s generally a very bad idea. (Yes, I’m stereotyping CEOs. Some are quite reasonable and won’t put you in this situation. This type of CEO is terrific to work for, but quite useless as a rhetorical device.)

Your alternative to yes and no is, as always, “here’s what it will take.” You can get from here to there, but not for free. Some alternatives will require investment; all will have risks attached.

Investment and Risk pay for your ticket out of Can’t Win Land. They explain why you haven’t already done whatever it is you have in mind, without you looking like a slug.

Now all you need are the ideas.

Here are some starters. See if you can spot the risks (add a Comment below this column):

Increase trust: Distrust is expensive. It’s a luxury distressed companies can’t afford. Specifically, distrust drives unnecessary rework. This increases unit costs, lengthens cycle time, and decreases throughput in any process where it plays a role.

Increasing trust is far from simple. Distrust exists for a reason, and there’s no simple recipe for overcoming it. The chapter on Building and Maintaining Teams in Leading IT: The Toughest Job in the World provides some useful techniques, but it’s hardly exhaustive.

Managing the interpersonal dynamics among employees to identify and address dysfunctional relationships is a core leadership responsibility. Focus on it yourself, and insist that the managers who report to you focus on it as well.

Cut meeting participation in half: Many consider all meetings wastes of time. It might be true of some, and possibly most meetings in your company.

The challenge: You don’t know if they’re wastes of time because they aren’t needed or because, while needed, they aren’t run very well.

In my experience, most meetings are convened for good and valid reasons. Also, most have more participants than necessary, primarily due to distrust: If someone isn’t personally in the room, that person doesn’t trust those who are to do a competent and unbiased job.

Increase trust and you can probably cut attendance at the average meeting in half, freeing up all of those hours for other work.

Do something about negatively productive employees: Employees fall into three clusters. The first, and biggest, consists of those who put in an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay and deliver acceptable, workmanlike results.

The second consists of star employees. These folks aren’t twice as productive as the first cluster. They’re an order of magnitude more productive.

Then there’s the third group — employees who not only fail to deliver useful results themselves, but who interfere with everyone else.

Getting rid of these employees is a triple win. First, you save their salary. Second, since their productivity is negative, their departure increases average productivity.

The third benefit? These folks spread distrust the way a manure spreader spreads … well, manure. Get rid of them and the level of trust among those who remain will almost certainly increase.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

One of the most questionable ideas in this year’s presidential campaign is the asserted importance of “standing up to entrenched interests.”

It does, to be sure, have a resonance that stirs the soul. One hears the phrase and imagines an accompanying chorus of angels.

Now imagine you’re interviewing an executive candidate instead. The imaginary angels vanish, replaced by the ghostly visage of Don Quixote.

Last week’s column explored the questions we might ask Senators McCain and Obama if we could give them job interviews (“A conventional approach to executive interviewing,” Keep the Joint Running, 9/8/2008). Let’s continue pushing the metaphor.

Candidates, be they political or business-executive, who claim they’ll stand up to the entrenched (or special) interests are either grandstanding, or … well, about the best that can be said for them is that they are victims of a false dichotomy. The proper response to entrenched interests is neither standing up nor caving in, not least because “the entrenched interests” isn’t singular, or even a small number.

If you look at political history in more than a completely superficial way, you’ll see an inescapable pattern: What those who achieved important results did with special interests was manipulate them, playing them against each other.

And if standing up to one proved necessary, as in the case of Teddy Roosevelt standing up to the trusts, the lesson is clear: Stand up to just one, and have most of the rest lined up on your side when you do or you’ll look like one of those cartoon characters who’s been run over by a steamroller.

In your company, the “entrenched interests” are such individuals and groups as: Accounting, the Marketing Department, Sales, the Board of Directors, shareholders, and whatever regulatory bodies oversee your industry.

If you were to interview an executive candidate who told you he or she would stand up to these constituencies, I trust you’d have the wisdom to choose someone less likely to destroy the company. What you want to hear is that the candidate will listen to them, understand their priorities, and find ways to move the company forward in ways that harmonize their interests — ManagementSpeak for playing them off against each other.

And another thing: Metaphorically speaking, Senators McCain and Obama are internal candidates no matter how much they claim to be “Washington outsiders.” Given the extent to which both are promising change, they had better be internal candidates. If that isn’t clear, think about interviewing an external candidate for an executive position, who says, “I’m going to shake things up, clean house, and make big changes.”

“Oh, really?” you might plausibly ask. “How do you know shaking things up, cleaning house and making big changes is what we need to do?”

Compare that to an internal candidate — one who knows How Things Get Done Around Here — who makes a similar claim. You’d have two questions for this candidate: (1) In their estimation, what most needs shaking and cleaning; and (2) how they would go about it.

“I’d stand up to the special interests,” is, for any internal candidate, a disqualifier, for this reason: Everyone is a special interest and the most successful are the most entrenched. The only way to stand up to the special interests is to stand up to everyone. That’s the opposite of leading.

Politics, whether corporate or national, is first and foremost a game. As with any game it has players, rules, objectives, strategies and tactics.

Those who play this game play it to gain advantages (not to win, since the game never ends), and they do what they do because they think it will help them.

Anyone who is serious about changing things recognizes that to do so they will have to change something about the game.

In business (and, we can wish, in government) the process is called “root cause analysis.” So with internal candidates what you want to hear is clarity about what needs the most attention, what the key leverage points are, and how that candidate would go about using them to achieve planned changes.

For example: One of the most important pieces of legislation passed in the last hundred years was the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Lyndon Johnson, who got it passed, was not known for being a nice person.

What he was known for was his skill in playing special interests against each other.

He was, that is, a consummate politician. To be the president of this country, or of a corporation of any size, that’s a big part of the job description.

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