Critical.
Authoritative.
Strategic.
Subscribe to CIO Magazine »

What Moving from Good to Great Means for CIOs Who Want to Lead

Author Jim Collins explains why he sees CIOs as quiet leaders, and what challenges they face in their drive to be the best
Page:

Jim Collins, author of best-selling business books Good to Great and (with Jerry Porras) Built to Last, is nearing completion of his latest research effort, a look at organizations that have thrived while operating in environments characterized by severe disruption. An avid rock climber, Collins uses the analogy of performing well high on a mountain, in an environment characterized by fast-moving and unpredictable forces. Collins believes that most leaders today feel they are metaphorically moving higher on the mountain, and notes that this might be especially true for CIOs. He and his research colleague, Morten Hansen, have been researching the question of why some companies prevail in such environments, while others fail to perform (or survive).

Over the long course of history, a great company is built by a series of good decisions executed with supreme excellence
Jim Collins
Collins shared some of his initial findings at the CIO Leadership Conference held April 29-May 1. After his talk, Collins spoke with CIO Senior Editor Stephanie Overby about what CIOs can learn from his research on leadership, including what he calls the "asymmetric risk" IT leaders must manage every day, and why CIOs are uniquely qualified to succeed in the CEO role.

CIO: You spend a lot of your time studying CEOs. At the CIO Leadership conference where you spoke earlier this year, you had the chance to spend some time with leading CIOs. What did you learn?

Collins: As we got to talking, I was really struck by the duality of risk and opportunity CIOs have to manage. On the one hand, a couple people talked about threats of cyberterrorism. I mean, this is real stuff — I had no idea how real. You add that to how dependent companies are on their information systems and technology systems — one CIO I spoke to said that it used to be if we went down for a few hours it was annoyance; now it's a catastrophe — and that's a huge burden. Man, this is one of those really, really tough jobs in life where every day that's a success, you're invisible. Yet the one day when something goes wrong, you become very visible. What a hard job when you think about it.

At the same time I was really struck by how CIOs are really energized by wanting to help push the organization forward, to do innovative things, to bring in things that advance the flywheel of business.

Thinking about how they deal with that duality is how I came up with the image of CIOs being like climbers. You don't want to just cower in your tent and never go up. That's not living. That's not really being a CIO. At the same time you don't want to make the one mistake that will kill you. That duality of putting yourself in a risky environment — going for the summit, going to try to do something bold and being really disciplined about protecting your systems, not making the one mistake that will bring us down. I wouldn't go so far as to say no other role in the business is like that. I don't know that. But it strikes me that this role is pretty far out on that curve.

Page:

Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.

More about: Bill, Boeing, Empirical, Leader, Leader Computers, Level One, Rock, Rose, Southwest Airlines, Speck, Wal-Mart

Comments

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
Users posting comments agree to the CIO comments policy.
Login or register to link comments to your user profile, or you may also post a comment without being logged in.
Related Whitepapers
Latest Stories
Community Comments
Latest Blog Posts
Whitepapers
  • Business Intelligence Best Practices for Dashboard Design
    Even if a dashboard’s appearance looks professional and is aesthetically pleasing, appearances can be deceiving. Although visual design is important, it is also important to ask yourself: Is the data reliable? Is it timely? Is any data missing? Is it consistent across all dashboards?. This paper offers an overview of best practice business intelligence (BI) dashboard design principles and discusses data integration options for getting data into a dashboard.
    Learn more »
  • Why performance management? A guide for the midsize organisation
    Midsize organisations are uniquely positioned to take advantage of a performance management approach to business. Compared with larger companies, they have more agility to bring information and people together and respond faster to changing market conditions. With one performance management solution, midsize companies can turn disconnected data into information, turn information into valuable insight and turn insight into action.
    Learn more »
  • IBM zEnterprise System Brings Hybrid Computing Capabilities to Midsize Organisations
    This paper focuses on the IBM z114 cross-tier solution, which brings IBM AIX Unix and Linux workloads into the mix, with Microsoft Windows support to follow in the future. This blended approach to computing allows workloads running on any of those operating systems to communicate more quickly and effectively with the System z, producing business benefits from the orchestration, or coordination, of management for all of the workloads running across all of the linked platforms.
    Learn more »
All whitepapers
rhs_login_lockGet exclusive access to Invitation only events CIO, reports & analysis.