All Posts in Office Politics

|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

I’m offering you a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to become a charter member of the Value Prevention Society. To qualify for VPS membership, just include, with your check for $950, a notarized copy of the page in your IT procedure manual that specifies total desktop lockdown.

VPS members allow nothing but MS Office and whatever enterprise application client-side software is required for each individual’s job. These are, after all, the company’s PCs, not the employees’, and if individual employees install anything else it could destabilize their PCs, kill the company in an SPA audit, and destroy all life on this planet. Besides, all employees want to do is to install games and screensavers, and these have no place on a corporate PC anyway.

Okay, I made the destroy-all-life bit up, but the rest is standard fare among the VPS crowd. And it’s a pile of baloney. Sliced thinly. Starting with the bit about a bad piece of software destabilizing PCs. Sure, a sufficiently bad application can destabilize any version of Windows now shipping. So only provide help for IT-approved software, and when there’s a problem, only commit to restoring a standard image and the My Documents folder. Since this situation will occur on about 0.2% of your company’s desktops annually, the impact on IT’s workload will be pretty small.

How about those SPA audits, though? That’s a tough one. Okay, I lied, it isn’t. Just require users to send you a scanned image of the installation disk for self-installed software, along with documentation of his or her manager’s approval. There’s plenty of software that can automatically inventory software to help you monitor conformance with this policy.

The most noxious argument, though, is that it’s the company’s PC. Of course it is. Which means it isn’t IT’s PC. IT has no business preventing other parts of the company from taking maximum advantage of information technology. Games? If you think you’re paid to prevent employees from playing games you should make decks of cards illegal too. Otherwise, let business managers do their jobs while you get back to yours.

For the most part, employees install software to make themselves more effective. When you prevent them from doing so, you might cut IT’s costs just a bit, but you’re reducing the benefits of information technology by a lot more.

If you think that’s a good trade-off, welcome to the VPS. We’re proud to have you as a member.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

My LDLs, I recently learned, are high enough to experience the Oort cloud up close and personal. Which is why I looked at the nutritional information printed on a bag of fudge-covered Oreos. The news was wonderful — only 0.5 grams of saturated fat per serving. Wow! Then I looked at the serving size. One cookie. Who are they trying to kid? Everyone knows the standard serving size for Oreos is a bag.

Which demonstrates an important marketing principle: With a little ingenuity you can lie by telling the truth. And so long as you can defend your statements in court you’re in the clear. In marketing, this kind of deception is considered ethical. You have to tell the truth, but after that, caveat emptor.

Managers face different ethical conundrums, and CTOs sometimes have a hard time accepting the contextual nature of executive ethics. Take, for example, the widely accepted principle that “lying is bad.”

Imagine this scenario: Your company decides on a round of layoffs. You disagree. Your options:

1. Resign in protest. But that results in someone less qualified, and likely with fewer scruples in charge of the organization you were too principled to continue leading.

2. Implement the decision but tell everyone you disagree with it. In addition to being unprofessional, that behavior is divisive to the company and damages morale and motivation.

3. Implement the decision and tell everyone you support it, even though you don’t. But then, of course, you aren’t being truthful.

4. Implement the decision and refuse to say whether you agree with it. That’ll keep ’em guessing.

5. Or, implement the decision and tell everyone you aren’t qualified to critique it because the people who made the decision have access to more information than you. Except that as a member of the inner circle, you were part of the decision process. It simply didn’t go your way. You’re lying again, and being a weasel besides.

What’s the right answer? There is no right answer that fits every circumstance, and no answer will leave your sensibilities untrammeled. Worse, every time you have to make a decision like this, the line separating acceptable and unacceptable behavior becomes more blurred and gray. But that isn’t the problem — the line, after all, really is gray and blurry.

No, the problem is inversion of purpose. When you can stomach anything, it’s easy to lose sight of why you wanted to be in the executive suite in the first place.

It’s when your goal becomes just being there that you’re in trouble.

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