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."
Learn from the bad CIO.... (Score:5, Interesting)
I reported to a bad CIO for years. First off, the mind of a politician isn't much different from that of a corporate-climber. I found the same mind in my experiences with attornies. It's enough to make anyone appreciate the misanthrope Jonathan Swift. At the core of all these folks is a basic deceptiveness invented, grown and maintained with one single goal: power.
I've read Ringer and I've read Lewis. Ringer says, "Look out for number One." Lewis rebutes (although he wrote this before Ringer by decades), "a life devoid of virtue is simple a life looking out for number one.... and void of its purpose...." Or something to that effect.
I could write a novel containing my thoughts and experiences on the bad CIO, but in short I believe being absent any real talent, being totally goal-oriented and power-hungry, they practice basic machievelian manipulations and mob psychology to intimidate people into staying in line.
In my experience, any true and honest person that happened into an officer position at a corporation is quickly devoured by the meat-eaters.
If you want a life and job filled with honest work, non-game-playing individuals and good sleep at night, then read the signs and minds of those around you, build yourself, bend the questionable intentions of those around you into tools that form who you are, and, as Shakespeare put it, "to thine ownself be true." Eventually, you'll find that job and slowly realize "yes, I'm here. I can just do a fulfilling job and get paid."
Trust me, it happens....
Spotting Bad CIO's. (Score:3, Interesting)
wrong way to recruit (Score:4, Interesting)
Bah. The correct way to recruit, for any position not just CIOs, is to look around and identify top talent, then *invite* them to your company. Posting an ad and then trying to decipher resumes is really not an intelligent way to hire anyone, let alone CIOs. You should, of course, post an ad and have a brief look at resumes in case there's some talent out there who has no connections to you or is invisible, so that they have a chance to reach you. But in general, most good talent is visible in some way, so you can watch them from a distance, identify their weaknesses and strengths, and then invite them when you need them (this of course doesn't guarantee that they will come, but it is for this reason that you should always keep a list of multiple potential CIOs that you could invite rather than just 1).
As for the article... it suggests CIOs who change company too often might be bad. That's not an indicator of anything. That's not even a good heuristic. They may change employers for a great number of reasons, only some of them having even the slightest to do with their own performance, and many times the performance of a person is contingent on their environment. A resume cannot tell you anything about a person or their future performance. Academic degrees, even from top tier schools, mean nothing, and you cannot even trust references as you never know how and why a person recommends another, and basing your decisions on past employment record is not useful if you can't know what they were doing while being employed there (they could be playing chess all day thanks to them being the son of the company's president, etc).
There is only one way to know whether a person will perform well: you have a set of requirements, and the person in front of you claims they can satisfy them. The way to know rather than guess their future performance is to *test* them, in real or near-real environments.
How to test a CIO? You first have to identify what a CIO has to do within your company. Oftentimes, CIOs design processes and rules for information sharing, protection, and processing. So, if in your company you find that your CIO will likely spend their time coming up with improved processes and monitoring them, then why not get them do exactly that during the interview instead of trying to guess the unguessable from a resume or asking stupid interview questions with no meaning? One thing you could do is to have them manage a small team composed of employees in your company for 15 mins or half an hour or so, asking the wannabe CIO to devise rules that would enable the team to finish a simple virtual job quickly over the company's LAN, then simply hire the CIO who were able to make the team work faster during these 15 mins. This may cost some money, though, so you could build a computer simulation to do the same: the simulation would model some essential business processes, and the wannabe CIO would have to think of ways to let the simulated business components share information in the most effective way, then you would configure the simulator to run the policies the CIO suggested (or chosen from a multiple choice menu), and you would keep the time. Assuming the simulator was built in an intelligent way to capture the essential parameters of reality (which isn't an easy task, of course, which is why I recommend using real human teams for testing if you can spare some time), the CIO who thought of a policy that led the simulation finish faster would get hired. This doesn't even need to be done during the interview, it can be done remotely, eg over a Web-administered pre-hiring test, so you would need to invest absolutely no time and money in testing wannabe CIOs from the moment you build the test. One word of warning, though: the test must be built as to encompass emergent characteristics and complex noninear behaviours, just like real life, so that no one can predict the simulator's run time from the initial parameters.
And another word of warning: Some talent dislikes being tested too much, which is why you shouldn't ask them to be tested for more than 15-30mins at a maximum, and only once.
The ego train (Score:5, Interesting)
The cult of personality CIO is probably the most destructive and wasteful of all of them. They're particularly dangerous in government. The last big contract I worked had one. He brought in "his" people to manage projects. Some of them were, in my opinion, charity cases. A couple had qualifications that included boarding their horses at the same riding academy. They had unproductive jobs and were bossy and abrasive on top of that. I watched them waste millions of dollars, produce nothing tangible or productive, then get promoted. The talented people took other jobs and left.
It's very demoralizing when you're trying to do the right thing for the customer and be cost effective, then see someone ride in with his toadies, blow millions on something that never had a chance of working in the first place, then get moved up the chain. Makes you question if there's a margin in being practical and productive. I always thought that if you made good business decisions in IT, the customer would eventually come back to the value proposition. But it doesn't always work that way and I'm starting to question whether that's naive.
I certainly have several first-hand experiences where the incompetent, impractical and wasteful have flourished.
A funny but sad example (Score:3, Interesting)
- Implemented a strict dress code that applies at all times including weekends and nights. Facility operates on a 24/7 schedule
- Not allow for Hawaiian shirts on Fri even though it is a military tradition
- Not permit flex scheduling like leave early on Friday's
- Schedule an all-hands meeting for 3 or 4 on Friday afternoon and did that routinely.
- Implement strict rules on Internet surfing such as not allowing you to change options on IE. Firefox and Netscape not allowed. The options does not allow you to bypass pop-up commercials.
- Put in a boat load of offices and cubicles in the basement but did not put in matching capacity for bathrooms. People complained and his response that if you didn't have to wait more than 20 minutes to use the toilet, then it is considered sufficient.
- On the subject of bathrooms, when he went to use the toilet, he would kick everyone else out.
- Implemented a traffic safety hotline where you can get reported for speeding and then get disciplined when you got into work. He tried to implement a vehicle inspection program since he complained about modified vehicles such as trucks and his pet peeve was dark window tinting. Luckily he was shot down on that.
Overall, this person thought he was so important.Re:He? (Score:3, Interesting)
Updward Feedback (Score:4, Interesting)
One interesting approach is a list of about 15 traits, and employees pick the top 3 that the manager needs to improve on. This avoids a "blunt" ranking that many organizations dislike, but at least gives the top layer feedback on the biggest problems.
What's the Point? They'll Get a Reward (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=204702770 [informationweek.com]
This was a running joke inside our company as the man was considered woefully incompetent and borderline retarded by all who worked in IT. His true gift was looking like CIO and convincing IT magazines that he was good.
You'll laugh (Score:1, Interesting)
So, it's hard to take any of those lists seriously.