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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

How do global corporations make decisions?

Small businesses have it easy. One person can make most decisions, and for the rest everyone goes into a conference room to hash things out.

Then they grow and add offices around the country — small branch offices at first, but eventually large installations that in some cases exceed the size of corporate headquarters itself. Making big decisions isn’t as simple as calling everyone into a conference room. At the executive level they can make do with quarterly ELT (executive leadership team) summits combined with lots of email and teleconferences or, better, web conferences in between.

Managers lower down on the org chart also have to deal with geographically dispersed management teams, but lack the executive travel budget. With enlightened spending priorities the company might pop for annual management summits. But mostly, managers minimize the need for consensus decisions while encouraging managers to collaborate as best they can with minimal face-to-face interaction and the trust-building that rarely happens without it.

A few more rounds of growth later and you’re dealing with multiple countries, languages, and time zones. Even an annual ELT summit is something of a production. The collaboration that builds on a shared sense of mission and interpersonal trust?

This is not an easily solved problem. It isn’t, in fact, a solvable problem in any way, shape or form. You can mitigate it, and even that is hard. You can’t solve it.

With that, here are a few random thoughts on how to mitigate the challenges of global decision-making and other leadership responsibilities:

> Culture: Engineering business culture is challenging with a face-to-face leadership team (for guidance, pick up a copy of Leading IT: <Still> the Toughest Job in the World by yours truly).

Beyond that, different countries and ethnicities don’t just have different societal cultures of their own. They have different management cultures.

Global leaders have to choose carefully which aspects of management culture they need to unify and where they should embrace the diversity of assumptions and attitudes that come from a multinational footprint.

> Staff vs Line: In the military, line officers lead troops; staff officers handle supporting administrative responsibilities. A frequent challenge military decision-makers have to deal with is that while line managers know What’s Going On Out There because it’s right in front of them, staff officers have more access because they’re in the same room. As a result, if decision-makers aren’t careful, staff officers have more influence as well.

Business leaders have to resolve exactly the same conundrum.

> The soft bigotry of time zones: I live in Minnesota — Central Time. To collaborate with an Indian colleague we have to find an acceptable schedule when, with a 10.5 hour time difference, there is no slot that’s in normal business hours for both of us.

Working with a colleague in Plano instead means not signing up for exceptionally early or late hours and not asking the colleague to make up the difference, either. Overcoming this calls for self-consciousness and, not to be overly dramatic, self-sacrifice as well.

> The softer bigotry of accents: I’d pay good money for a version of Rosetta that teaches no language but instead makes me more proficient in understanding heavily inflected English.

Given a choice between interacting with a colleague who speaks English as their first language and another who is at least as competent, but with whom I have to ask, “Could you repeat that?” more often than I understand the point the first time round … well, as with time zones, self-consciousness about the decision is mandatory.

> The even softer bigotry of bad circuits combined with accents: Take heavily inflected English. Now, speak it through a bad telephone network. The result: heavily inflected and badly muffled diction that’s so difficult to understand that it’s easier to interact exclusively through e-mail and chat. Or not at all.

> IT has to take the lead: There’s TEAMS/SharePoint/Skype if you like Microsoft solutions. There’s Slack, Webex, and various other alternatives if you don’t. It’s up to IT to establish a rich set of collaboration tools and provide them, not just those who “need” them but to everyone who might take advantage of them.

Then, make sure you first, then your team, then their teams become so proficient that using the tools is as much second nature as grabbing a marker and drawing on a whiteboard in a conference room.

Encourage the CEO to do likewise.

Then make sure Organizational Development establishes training in the tools as well. Beyond that, encourage making proficiency in these tools part of every employee’s performance appraisal.

A carpenter who can only handle a hammer, not a nail gun, doesn’t know his trade.

Isn’t this the same thing?

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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Most IT managers started reading in the first grade. So far as I can tell, most stop shortly after they’re hired for their first full-time position.

I’m no longer surprised, but am chronically disappointed in the response when I ask members of IT leadership teams what they read to stay informed about industry developments. The usual response? Embarrassed shrugs, punctuated by acknowledgement that Gartner is their primary … make that sole source of strategic IT insights.

You’re reading this right now, which makes you an exception. On behalf of all of us who write and publish, thank you.

But if you’re in management and especially if you’re in IT management, reading is just the ante. It won’t win you the pot.

As a reader you’re aware that “Digital” has become a noun. As a regular KJR reader you know that, whether noun or adjective, Digital is about turning new technologies into new business capabilities and turning those new business capabilities into competitive advantage.

Presumably you read more than just KJR, familiarizing yourself with specific Digital technologies that seem especially promising for your company. That’s what prepares you for conversations about using them to increase marketshare, walletshare, and mindshare.

As a regular KJR reader you’re an IT leader no matter what your job title or official position on the organizational chart is. If you weren’t, your eyeballs would be elsewhere. And so, a reminder: The most important difference between a leader and an individual contributor is that individual contributors succeed. Leaders build organizations that succeed.

It might be my fault. I named this e-letter Keep the Joint Running to embody the principle that, as put forth in the KJR Manifesto, before you can be strategic you have to be competent.

Keeping the joint running is no small thing. That doesn’t mean it’s enough. It’s necessary, but it isn’t sufficient.

Reading isn’t just for management. Reading is the difference between a data warehousing team actively promoting hyperscale “schema on demand,” data-lake repositories and wondering why IT management brought in outside consultants to make them happen.

It’s the difference between developers embracing microservices architectures and saying, “This is no different from what we used to do with COBOL copylibs,” while IT management brings in outside consultants to develop new applications built on a microservices foundation.

It’s the difference between IT infrastructure management advocating replacing the company’s MPLS-based WAN with an ISP-centric connectivity model, and figuring they’re meeting their SLAs so it’s all good while the CIO brings in an IT services firm to make it happen.

So reading isn’t just important for management. It’s everyone’s tool for staying current and not slowly sliding into irrelevance.

It’s everyone’s tool, and as an IT leader it’s up to you to encourage every member of your organization to use it … to recognize that being knowledgeable matters. Maybe not quite as much as competence, but close.

What does this encouragement look like?

Here’s one possibility: With the rest of the IT leadership team, settle on a handful of promising Digital technologies and parcel out responsibility for turning “promising” into either “important” or “never mind.”

Then, each IT leadership team member involves their staff in the process. For small and medium-size IT organizations this might mean reserving two hours in everyone’s time budget for this purpose — one hour to read and one hour for discussion. The desired outcome: A briefing on the technology, that (1) defines and explains what it is; (2) lists and describes the new or enhanced business capabilities the technology might make possible; (3) assesses the technology’s maturity and market readiness; and (4) sketches an adoption roadmap that takes IT from incubation to integration.

And, by the way, once-and-done isn’t good enough. These briefs will be out of date as soon as they’re published, and new high-potential technologies are popping up all the time. Those who write the briefs are responsible for keeping them current.

Keeping track of Digital possibilities is a vital role for IT because the company’s org chart says it is. It is, that is, unless the CEO gave up on the CIO’s ability to provide this level of leadership and hired a chief digital officer to pick up the slack.

In our upcoming book, There’s No Such Thing as an IT Project, Dave Kaiser and I reserved a chapter to describe IT’s new role as business strategy leader. It’s a role that’s important for IT because a department that doesn’t know What’s Going On Out There is a department that neither receives or deserves respect from the rest of the business. It’s important for the rest of the business because …

Well if it isn’t, what’s all the fuss about Digital about?

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