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When I launched this column as Infoworld’s “IS Survival Guide back in 1996, it introduced the three bedrock principles of good management: (1) Customers … real, external, paying customers … define value; (2) form follows function; and (3) everyone involved must be aligned to a common purpose.

In the 28 years since then I’ve figured out, read about, and otherwise discovered one or two additional notions worth the attention of IT leaders and managers. But none of those notions have led me to jettison any of the big three I started with.

So I figured, as Keep the Joint Running winds down, it wouldn’t hurt to revisit them. And so …

Customers define value

Start by defining terms – the starting point for any rational conversation. And so, what is a customer? A customer is the entity that makes the buying decision about your company’s products and services. I say “entity” because while it might be a person who makes the buying decision, it also might be a committee, or, in these strange times it might be an AI. And so, “entity” it is.

Not the entity that uses them? No, although the sales process is a whole lot easier when the entity that uses a product or service also makes the buying decision.

So we need a different term for those who use, and as someone once pointed out, “user” sounds like someone who enjoys recreational pharmaceuticals. So for our purposes we’ll call those who use our products and services “consumers.”

We also need a term for those who provide the money used to buy products and services. Call them “wallets.” As anyone in sales will explain, everything is easier when the customer, consumer, and wallet are the same entity.

Then there’s the deficient oxymoron, “internal customer” – a term that conflates customers, consumers, and wallets. To be fair, IT does have these. But few IT leaders understand with clarity that the CIO’s internal customer is, personally, the person who can fire them or retain their services. Organizationally IT’s internal customer is the budget committee, which makes the decision as to how much the company should spend on information technology.

Form follows function

I was meeting with a CIO and his direct reports. My goal: Demonstrate to them that engaging my services for improving IT’s organizational performance by helping them construct a useful system of IT metrics was a good idea.

The CIO asked me a question: “What metrics do most IT organizations use?

I made the mistake of trying to answer his question. And worse, because I didn’t have any survey data to rely on, it was obvious I was tap-dancing, too.

The right answer was to answer a question with a question: Form follows function. Different IT organizations have different organizational performance goals. That’s what we needed to discuss.

“Form follows function” is the centerpiece of all successful designs, whether the subject is the organizational chart, the company’s compensation system, or minor matters like your company’s products and services. Start by nailing down “function” and take it from there. If you don’t, you’ll find yourself throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what happens to stick.

Align everyone to a common purpose.

Imagine you’re the captain of a galley – one of the oar-powered warships the Greeks and Romans used in their naval battles.

Imagine your galley’s crew is divided into 50 port oarsmen and 50 starboard oarsmen; also imagine you have two direct reports (mates; call them the p-mate and s-mate). The p-mate thinks the galley should head in the bow’s direction, and instructs their 50 oarsmen to push their oar handles as hard as they can. The s-mate thinks stern-ward is the better direction and tells his half of the crew to pull their oars as hard as they can.

What does the galley do? It spins, of course.

So you reorganize. Instead of a p-mate and s-mate you decide to have a bow mate and stern mate. Now, the front 50 oarsmen push their oars as hard as they can; the rear 50 pull their oars as fast as they can. What’s the galley do? It churns, taking all the power exerted by the oarsmen and using it to neutralize the oarsmen’s efforts.

Don’t believe me? Check this out: Dragon Boat Racing Teams Compete In Epic Tug Of War (Storyful, Sports) – YouTube .

This is what happens when those in your organization aren’t aligned to a common purpose. Each does what they think is best, but because they have different goals they mostly neutralize each other’s best efforts.

Bob’s last word: Please don’t think leading and managing IT, or any other organization for that matter, is so simple that three core principles are enough to get you by. Enough? No. But they’re a pretty good place to start.

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Sorry this is late. A travel day got in the way of my standard posting schedule. Assuming you like what follows, figure I made your Tuesday slightly worse but I incrementally improved your Wednesday.

– Bob

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So I was thinkin’ — a process my incipient grandparenthood triggered.

An epoch ago, more or less, I was the grandkid. We lived in Highland Park, Illinois. My grandparents, along with the occasional aunt or uncle, lived in Chicago. I had, as you might imagine, a non-virtual relationship with all of them.

That was the American norm back then. The parallels to today’s white-collar workforce are, I trust, obvious.

Back in my childhood years, people who worked together worked together physically, not just logically. As the workforce has become hybridized (no, not genetically, and shame on you for thinking that way!), our workplace interactions are becoming increasingly transactional and decreasingly based on relationships. Our colleagues are becoming more digital avatars than multidimensional human beings.

Nor is there just one, digital, driving force behind this. Before digital strategies claimed our attention, medium-size and larger organizations had … well, improvised isn’t too strong a word … how to manage branch-office relationships for a very long while.

Instituting the organization’s business culture while establishing the levels of trust and alignment needed for effective collaboration wasn’t easy even when everyone was expected to show up for work in their assigned cubicles at their assigned locations and schedules, when those cubicles weren’t located at corporate headquarters.

As my grandparenthood inexorably approaches I’m wrestling with an envisioned future in which the soon-to-arrive next-generation member of my family and I will be more digital entities to each other than flesh-and-blood human beings.

It’s parallel: Colleagues might not be family members the way offspring and offsprings’ offspring are, but their relationship dynamics have commonalities worth paying attention to.

For example: From what I’ve heard, read about, and experienced, managers of hybrid workforces who schedule regular one-on-one catch-up conversations with those they’re paid to lead … and who keep to that schedule … are in the minority.

This is ridiculous. For managers of in-person workforces, regular one-on-one meetings are routine, and for good reason: If trust and alignment are essential for effective team functioning, they can only be more so for managers and their direct reports to work together effectively.

So if trust and alignment are essential aspects of effective leadership, frequent one-on-one contact is a prerequisite.

A prerequisite, not a complete solution. Because as all of us recognize who have maintained business relationships via web conferencing tools, these tools are more useful for maintaining relationships than for building them from scratch.

It’s right about here that the grandparental parallels do break down, or had better break down: the bond between familial infants and adults is built far more on physical contact than the relationship between leaders and those they lead.

And so, I’m left to wonder how well a mostly digital relationship will go when getting to know my newest relative.

Bob’s last word: Please, please, please! Don’t start to explore how robot care givers might fit into the challenge. We can imagine technology that gives mechanical nannies and their charges animations of their physical-world faces and so on. I supposed it might work. But the potential for traumatization strikes me as far greater than for better relationship-building.

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