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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: Leadership|Last Updated:

Do you believe in astrology?

Me neither. Still, a few years ago when I worked in product development for awhile, my boss and I regularly finished each others’ sentences. The rapport was immediate and strong.

The weirdest moment of this relationship came when our whole team took a personality inventory. When they were scored, I grabbed our profiles and held the graphs up to the light. They were perfect overlays.

Here’s the weird part: Fred was born just one week before me. Happy birthday, Fred.

Our mutual personality profile hit the target. The evaluator explained that people like us have no trouble with well-defined procedures. As long as we are the authors, that is. Otherwise …

Which may be why I flinch whenever I read about organizational maturity models, the need for clear procedures, and the importance of repeatable, predictable results. It’s the words. We need to give this idea to marketing for a complete makeover. Do you want to be repeatable and predictable? Sounds awfully dull, doesn’t it?

Don’t get me wrong. Manufacturing systems (and any system that produces large numbers of the same kind of item is a manufacturing system) had better produce repeatable, predictable results. I, for one, want every pill in my Exedrin bottle to have exactly the same contents as every other pill.

Data center operations fits the manufacturing model very well, too. If your data center doesn’t run by well-defined and documented procedures, you probably have a pretty big mess on your hands.

Systems development is a different animal. Don’t blindly apply a manufacturing metaphor to it: the fit is less than perfect, which is one reason programmers commonly rebel when managers try to institute quality initiatives. The best programmers are creative sorts, and when you use words like “repeatable and predictable” to them, they have an immediate, gut-level reaction.

To these folks … and they’re usually the ones you depend on the most … a focus on process and procedures sounds a lot like premature embalming.

Here’s the dilemma: we already make too big a fuss about designing a database, some screens, and a bunch of reports. You’d think that by now we’d be good at it, but development projects still go in the tank more often than not. One of the many reasons: We think of every new project as something new and unique, instead of it being just one more database, a bunch of screens, and some more reports. In other words … it’s the same old stuff, so we ought to be able to establish a repeatable, predictable practice. Sigh.

There is a sweet spot in the middle of these positions. That’s the difference between understanding current best practice and slavishly adhering to one-size-fits-all procedures.

So welcome to the magic boundary separating professionalism from bureaucracy. Professionalism includes an understanding of best practices. Bureaucracy means a shift of power from people to rules. And once you transfer power from people to rules, you’ve begun to slide from performance to mediocrity.

Sure, you need to organize people into processes and services. But when you do, define “process” as “here’s our current procedure, which we’re always ready to dump in favor of a better one, or ignore when it doesn’t fit the circumstances.”

Dale Dauten, who writes the syndicated “Corporate Curmudgeon” feature, once wrote that companies start by having “… a leader, employees who think they’re important because they are, and customers who think they’re important because they are.”

Companies lose their souls when leaders become managers, putting their faith in rules and procedures instead of employees who are important. Make rules and procedures … repeatable, predictable results … means to an important goal. Ask employees to focus on that goal. Employees should use procedures when they make sense, and their creativity and judgment when those make sense.

Which, of course, is always.

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