Hunting Bad CIOs In Their Natural Environment 112
onehitwonder writes "Bad CIOs are a blight on the IT profession, the organizations that employ them and the IT staff who toil under them (usually cleaning up their messes). Yet bad CIOs manage to migrate largely undetected — like the mythic Big Foot — from company to company. In the process, these bad CIOs lay waste to businesses and information systems, destroy staff morale, pillage budgets and imperil shareholder value. To help rid the world of this scourge, CIO.com has compiled a list of behaviors common among bad CIOs that recruiters, hiring managers and IT staff can use to identify them during the recruiting process."
Re:A point of disagreement with TFA (Score:5, Insightful)
hey... (Score:3, Insightful)
Hey, I think I work for this guy!
[anonymous for job security reasons]
Two points stand out on the top-10 list... (Score:4, Insightful)
FTA:
Bad CIOs do not understand the Tao (Score:5, Insightful)
Because their time is wasted in meetings.
Why are programmers rebellious?
Because the management interferes too much.
Why are the programmers resigning one by one?
Because they are burnt out.
Having worked for poor management, they no longer value their jobs.
no one recognises their own voice (Score:3, Insightful)
Likewise, when you recount a CIO's (or anyone else's, for that matter) behaviour to them, they won't recognise it as "bad". So there's little point in writing an article on recognising bad CIOs and then publishing it in an article for CIOs. They'll all either agree or disagree on the points, but none will see their own behaviour described there.
From a company's perspective, the only questions that really matter are whether the CIO being interviewed has a record of delivering programmes of work on target, on budget. That they can successfully turn around a failing (but not turn around a successful) IT department and that they positioned the IT dept. to allow a company to grow efficiently.
It doesn't matter if they name-drop or brown-nose. Anyway a hiring CIO just wouldn't recognise the pattern of behaviour - whether they, themselves, are good or bad.
Re:Article in a nutshell (Score:4, Insightful)
Seem like 'bad candidates' for any position... (Score:4, Insightful)
Problem not unique to CIO's (Score:5, Insightful)
In practice, because shareholder elections are a farce, most boards are compromised by being populated by other executives, typically leading companies in the same or similar industry as the executives they are supposed to oversee. This frees executives from shareholder control, essentially giving them reign over other people's assets. Lavish stock grants entrench executives by giving them share ownership which in turn increases their control over the board.
Freed from oversight, executive goals diverge from shareholder goals. The limits to this divergence are mostly appearance based. You can't appear to be diverging from shareholder goals too much. Image is everything. To achieve this, executives typically vet those they hire based on loyalty. Many employees, while they profess to understand this, do not. So I repeat. To achieve the goal of appearing to promote shareholder values, executives hire first and foremost on the candidate's ability to be loyal to the hiring executive. This results in the typical knuckle dragging tribal culture found leading today's corporations.
Saying that solving this problem is hard, is a major understatement because you are talking about making America's ruling class accountable. Solutions like co-determination do exist, however, but would require the right political climate to implement.
Re:Bad CIOs do not understand the Tao (Score:3, Insightful)
>> Because their time is wasted in meetings.
You probably come from a different background than me, but in my case this has been the opposite.
Especially in a smaller company without its own fleet of business analysts, meetings are extremely important. The programming team I work with has been non-productive for a long time simply because they've been *doing the wrong thing*.
It doesn't matter how much of an uber-programmer you think you are, if you aren't meeting with the stakeholders before and during the project to make sure you're giving them what they want, then you're wasting not only the programmers' time, but everyone else's time too.
Of course I don't mean to imply that every meeting at every company is valuable
ATMI (Score:3, Insightful)
I formerly worked at ATMI, and they employed the dumbest CIO they could find. He has no IT training or knowledge, claiming his managerial accounting background will allow him to do the job. The CEO is a guy that surrounds himself with yes-men, and Kevin Laing is his personal puppy of a CIO.
Kevin hired an infrastructure director, who was trying to gown up in our clean room and couldn't find any left handed rubber gloves. It's no wonder the companies stock has been flatlining for the past 5 years.
Those poor bastards still working there will never get an annual bonus, because the CIO blows the budget horribly every year. The Help Desk manager has run off all the competant staff with full blessing of the CIO, I just don't see any upside to this guy at all. If the CEO and CIO were fired tomorrow, I'd guess there would be a jump in the stock just because they would be gone.
Key attributes of Kevin LaingRe:Bad CIOs do not understand the Tao (Score:5, Insightful)
Meetings between two people are incredibly productive, but their use drops off dramatically the more people you add. Most of the communication in a large meeting is between some subset of the group, with the rest being bored. Another common trap is to use meetings for one-to-many communication. These are much better handled asynchronously, because otherwise the speaker has to go at the speed of the slowest listener. The only time a meeting is the correct form of communication is when everyone invited to the meeting is an active contributor to the discussion. If someone is just there to listen, their time is probably better spent sending them a copy of the minutes later.
I'd thoroughly recommend the book Peopleware to anyone interested in this subject.
Re:A point of disagreement with TFA (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:But how do we get rid of them? (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't. Once someone reaches "C" level, they have something akin to diplomatic immunity. Even if they screw the shareholders out of billions of dollars and run the company into the ground, the only thing that might happen is they get fired, get a huge golden parachute, and some other company will immediately scoop them up for even more salary and stock.
Re:How to Identify Bad CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, CFOs .... (Score:2, Insightful)
Eh? How can something be both evil AND amoral?
Re:Bad CIOs do not understand the Tao (Score:2, Insightful)
I love being briefed about meetings only to discover that software I've written has mysterious features and properties that I did not create! And now these phantom features need to be heavily used/extended on a very tight budget.
Simple rule: no matter what happens, programmers can't win (except if they quit just before everything explodes).
We need a LIST! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bad sign #7 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Seem like 'bad candidates' for any position... (Score:2, Insightful)
Geeks (primarily IT types) love to believe they are the only employees that have to deal with these problems. Moreover, they believe that all IT types are productive members that do nothing but significantly contribute to a company. An employee is an employee, no matter what field they work in. Some will be great, some will be horrible, and most are nothing more than average.
I am so sick of the PHB vs. IT, CIO vs. IT, users vs. IT, everyone vs. IT complaints. Based upon the majority of posts viewed on Slashdot, I could say that most IT-types are paranoid, self-entitled, whiny babies. See how that generalization works? Some of you will take offense to that; just as I would take offense to you painting all management types with the same brush. People are different, regardless of their chosen profession. Some of you suck, and some of you are great...and the same could be said of all people.
Re:wrong way to recruit (Score:3, Insightful)
I disagree. It's at the very least an indicator of changing companies frequently.
In some positions, you can live with turnover. Others really benefit from continuity. In my mind, that includes a lot of technical and accounting positions, the C*O level included. In those positions, the more history you know, the more effective you are.
Especially with software development and IT infrastructure, there are a lot of ways to get the job done, and each person has their strengths. Change key people too often, and you'll pay a lot to switch approaches over and over, without seeing any real payoff.