The IT-to-BT move: How CIOs can prep

Here's a 4-part video of "How CIOs Can Prepare for the Shfit from IT to BT" delivered recently by John Brand, VP & Principal Analyst, Forrester Research. Parts 3 and 4 were not loading when I last checked. Hope it works now.

"Un-Follow the leader"

"You sometimes hear "yes" to a question before you've even explained it," says Columbia Business School professor/scholar Michael Morris, who also runs a research lab in India. "It is great that people are so agreeable and eager to help, but, as a manager, I need my young programmers to propose how they think it should be done." Based on his experience and experiments in India, Professor Morris advices, "Un-Follow the leader."

Innovation requires people to assert their ideas, but folks in India know that most employees here – the newly hired, the senior, and all those in between – blindly align with their boss. Note that this alignment is not entirely out of respect for the boss or out of an unselfish attitude. Also, most bosses too support  – and even subtly impose – this culture becaue it helps them as well.

Unfortunately, the outcome of such employee-boss alignment is always mediocrity.

Couple of stories on how I avoided this dangerous tradition and how you can, too ...

Story 1

When my boss saw that the company's Western customers loved the user testing lab I had set up, he suggested that I build on that success by setting up a software testing lab as well. In fact, he encourged me, "We can make the necessary investments." [This, as you know, is a management fallacy – that similar things (departments) should be grouped together, but more on that in a later post.] My response was not "Thanks, I'm in!" My response was not even a politically correct "Sounds great, let me do some home work and get back to you," but a blunt, "No, I don't think that's a good idea because ... Let me know what you think of an idea I've been working on."

Back then in the late 90s, user perspective was one thing that customers missed in work done by tech-savvy Indian software teams. That is why they loved the user testing lab – so you don't want to mess that up. Sure, the boss found the people he needed to run a successful software testing lab, but what happened to my new idea? Well, I introduced a practice that while satisfying user needs brought a new perspective far more important to the customer organization: the business process perspective. This new practice delivered bigger successes for the company.

Story 2

When I asked my team's straight-out-of-college-newly-hireds, "What do you think?" they suspected I was evaluating them or something. They needed to be reassured by their colleagues that this is just the team's culture, which is based on the belief that people regardless of their seniority or position should think and can come up with useful ideas. The good news is: many of them not only adapted to this culture, but actually went on to dominate the world in their own area of specialization. Here's one example.

If it worked for me – and for my team members – it should work for you. So, go ahead and UnFollow your boss. Of course, you may want to continue to Follow your boss in Twitter!

Source: Columbia Ideas at Work, Winter 2013 (Professor Michael Morris' experiments)

Explorer mentality Vs conqueror mentality

A fixation on competitors and on beating them is evidence of what Amazon's Jeff Bezos calls a conqueror mentality. In contrast, people waking up in the morning thinking how to innovate for the customer -- and having intense fun innovating -- is evidence of an explorer mentality.

The explorer mentality resulted in Amazon allowing negative reviews of its products. Reacting to this, a book publisher objected, saying "You make money when you sell things." But Bezos thought, "We don't make money when we sell things; we make money when we help customers make purchase decisions." So explorer mentality also demands a willingness to be misunderstood for long periods of time.

During his 16 years as CEO, Bezos' Amazon has delivered shareholder returns of 12,266% (industry-adjusted), and the company's value has grown by $111 billion. More in HBR Jan-Feb 2013.

Who is a fraud?

"If you see fraud and don't shout fraud, you are a fraud." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb (who Independent calls a superhero of the mind)

Ambition economy Vs Envy economy

"In an ambition economy, people generally enjoy watching others get ahead, because it reinforces their sense that they, too, can succeed," says the Dean of Harvard Business School. He mentions the US as the perfect example of an ambition economy.

"In an envy economy, in contrast, people often feel like they're playing in a zero-sum game and that if someone else gets ahead, it comes at their own expense." As an example, he mentions the Indian society, where "If one person tried to rise above his class, the rest would pull him back down."

100 outcomes-driven CEOs

HBR's 100 Best CEOs in the World are leaders who delivered "solid results over the long run." They were picked based on two pieces of performance data:

1. Total shareholder return
2. The overall increase in market cap.

HBR's methodology excludes stuff that other rankings use, such as reputation, popularity, and celeb status. It also excludes a few performance data such as sales and profitability because they differ by industry, and therefore make comparisons harder.

Source: Harvard Business Review, January-February 2013

Related posts:
What next: outcomes-driven organizations?
Outcome driven methods

Lincoln: the leader, the movie

I watched the movie, Lincoln. The biopic covers Lincoln's last few months, when his life was fully committed to steering the 13th Amendment through Congress. He succeeded in getting 100% of the Republicans and 23% of the Democrats to vote for the amendment. Lincoln confronting his cabinet with the moral imperative to abolish slavery, making his own personal sacrifices to achieve that end, and his political ingenuity are all a timeless inspiration.

In January 2003, I had the picture above taken of me in front of the 19-foot Lincoln statue in Washington, DC. Last week, as I watched the movie, Daniel Day-Lewis appeared as if he was the Washington, DC statue coming to life! Day-Lewis is nominated for Oscar and other awards. (Added Feb 25: Day-Lewis wins the Oscar. This is his 3rd Oscar for the Lead Actor category and no one else has done this before!)

Here's the important question ...

Can presidents today emulate Lincoln's leadership?

David McCullough, who has researched and written about Truman and John Adams, first defines a great president as someone with the ability to lift our sights higher and to get us to make necessary sacrifices. Then he says, "Nobody can do that job totally anymore."

Andy Samberg din't ask his boss

When he was 20-something and new at Saturday Night Live, Andy Samberg never told producer Lorne Michaels what he was doing until he handed him a tape of a short film he made with a borrowed camera. Andy has since then made lots of digital shorts.

I almost never asked for permission to do something, unless I needed the company to invest (like when I set up a lab at Cognizant). Simple reason: doing it was good for the customer and therefore for the company and employees. And "If you don't ask your boss, he can't say No." (quoted in the book Culturematic).

Drones for oil discovery!

I'm passionate about business process innovation, but I never had too much interest in specific processes or industry sectors. Until a few years ago – when I fell in love with the oil industry. Especially the industry's upstream processes such as oil discovery. Reason why this news about the use of drones to discover oil caught my attention. Oil discovery has a remarkable connection to BT practice and I hope to reveal that connection soon.

Larry Page is an introvert ... naturally!

Fortune's Miguel Helft describes Google's Larry Page as an introvert while showing how he dreams up the future and makes it come true. On the other hand, like this confused article by Nona Walia shows, people in india still think introverts are folks that need help. If you are a seeker-of-help-for-introverts or are yourself an introvert, take a look at this list: http://www.forbes.com/pictures/lmj45ifjd/albert-einstein/

Did you ruffle someone's feathers?

Did you rock the boat? Did you disagree? Burn some bridges? Well, isn't that what innovators and change makers always do? Although unintentionally? Rich Barton was only 26 when he went into a meeting with Bill Gates and said that the idea of a travel-book business was "dumb, small, and uninteresting." Then, he went on to create and grow the highly successful Expedia.com and Zillow.com.

Go ahead, ruffle some feathers today!

Human rights irony

The Human Rights Watch continues to report that India has significant human rights problems. "Government claims, but" is the kind of phrase you frequently see in the organization's 2012 summary for India. And countries including the US have been urging India to behave.

While that is the state of India, the Indian prime minister's US-based daughter is reported to have revealed America's human rights record against some recent enemies. Online reactions to news about her work range from suggestions like "A better research topic would have been if she worked on figuring out why in the first place these people became terrorists so that something can be done about it." to strong statements like "It is ironic that the daughter of India's prime minister has taken upon herself to malign our (US) government, while her dad's team is leading the scam capital of the world."

Here's my own wish ... Given the privileges that the prime minister and his daughter enjoy – as leader of India and as an expert in human rights – will they team up to help the country that more desperately needs improvement in the human rights area?

Was it business model or poverty that made Ortega the 3rd richest?

Amancio Ortega's Zara is the world's largest, reaching 87 countries through 1700-plus stores. The fashion empire has made Ortega the world's third richest.

Ortega grew up in a family that was poor. Blanco, who co-wrote Amancio Ortega: From Zero to Zara says, "Poverty clearly made him who he is ... There was a hunger. Show me a great boxer who didn't come from this kind of background."

Fortune contributor Vivienne Walt says, "Beginning 40 years ago, Ortega ripped up the business model that had been refined over decades by Europe's fashion houses and replaced it with one of the most brutally fast turnaround schedules the industry had every attempted." Ask Columbia Business School's Nelson Fraiman (he studied the Zara model and taught the case at the school's executive education program I attended in 2008). He would say this about Zara, “Product innovation? No. (On the other hand) they have done process innovation very well.”

I will leave it to you to answer the question I raised, but we all know about the power of the Business Model. Strategically designed Business Models have helped create and grow companies like Southwest Airlines and Apple. If you are looking for a book on how to create a business model, check out Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur.

This CEO nicely balances business and faith issues

Catholic Healthcare West was losing a million dollars a day in 2000 when Lloyd Dean arrived. Dean executed a turnaround and today the organization relabeled Dignity Health is "the fifth-largest American health system" in terms of net patient revenue.

The organization not only faced a huge business challenge, but it also continues to face religious issues raised by the catholic law or bishop. So, the demands on Lloyd Dean's leadership is more complex compared to CEOs who don't have to deal with faith-related issues. For starters, Dean is not even catholic. During his childhood, he went every Sunday to a Church that gave him "resilience, self-discipline, and faith." When he left the family to go to university, his mother gave him fifty dollars and a "I'm praying for you" goodbye. In 2011 he made more than $5 million, but rather than choose to work in a for-profit company where he would make many times more, he picked the bigger challenge of leading Dignity Health. Full story: "Bay Area Medicine Man."

PS: One of the things Dean did that helped in Dignity Health's turnaround is his mandating of measurable business outcomes. In some ways, did Dignity become an outcomes-driven organization?

Bar code: how it took over the world

Lessons for innovators from Joseph Woodland's success:

1. The technology is reliable

2. The technology's benefits are obvious to the intended audience

3. A governing body establishes the standards

4. "An extravagant, surprising, and often expensive effort to seed the market"

5. Everyone allowed to build their own "version" of the technology.

And of course, the innovator's own conviction and courage!

Source: Bloomberg Businessweek, December 24, 2012 - January 6, 2013

India violent?

That violence happens in every country is known because it is usually seen and heard. Violence in India, on the other hand, is rarely seen and heard. A few reasons why:

1. The form of violence is COWARDLY: They are commited on helpless women. "Helpless" because women in india do not report violence (if they do, things often get worse for them). A NY-Times article reports that violence such as rape and dowry disputes in india lead to "the death of almost two million women a year."

2. The form of violence is COVERT: There is rampant witchcraft attacks that are believed to be unprovable and therefore unpunishable. Due to the "unprovable" nature of these attacks, the media only reports the killing of alleged witches, whereas certain sources such as 1-on-1 interactions suggest that witchcraft is frequently used to hurt or destroy individuals and families. Some reasons for witchcraft attacks are envy, greed, and vengeance.

3. NO PUNISHMENT: In "Why India is So Damn Violent," Rupa Subramanya says, "Consider that out of 635 cases of rape reported in Delhi this past year only one has led to a conviction." (Note that only a very small percentage of violence gets reported in india.) To show that the political establishment does not care, Rupa points out that "all of the major political parties field candidates accused of violent crimes including murder and rape ..."

4. A reality-denying CULTURE: We deny everything that's wrong about india. There is a strong "we're holier than the West" mindset (and anyone who speaks the truth is labeled unpatriotic). We know the facts, yet we pretend like violence is alien to the people of the land of Gandhi. We know that, as Ashis Nandy says, "Only a society having massive, unresolved problems of violence" can produce iconic sages of non-violence like Gandhi, yet we pretend.

What might be a good first step in terms of solution to the problem of violence? I would borrow from Chetan Bhagat, who (writing about another issue) says, "To change, first let us accept our shortcomings. We Indians lack some essential, good values ..." I trust his advice due to its simple truth that ... unless I know and accept the presence of defects in, say, my product, I am very unlikely to remove those defects and ship a quality product.

Added in April 2013: Black magician blamed for suicides

What next: outcomes-driven organizations?

First we had department-centric organizations ... Then business process centric organizations (thanks to BPR) ... Then product-centric (thanks to Lean) ... Are we now seeing the beginning of a call for business outcomes centric organizations?

An article co-authored by health care leaders says, "The marketplace is beginning to demand that health care providers develop and provide outcomes data. This is evidenced by managed care companies, JCAHO, business coalitions, and alliances requiring organizations to demonstrate their effectiveness and quality of patient care services. This demand for outcomes measurement is in addition to the internal business requirements of the organization to measure and monitor performance for the purpose of continuous quality and process improvement activities."

The article Using Data to Measure Outcomes is co-authored by: Pam Matthews, director of clinical services, Piedmont Medical Care Foundation; Nancy Carter, director of utilization management, Emory University Hospital; Kathryn Smith, director of management systems, Emory University Hospital.

President and leadership

What makes a president a great leader?

David McCullough, the Pulitzer-winning author of Truman and John Adams, says, "The capacity to lift our sights a little higher. Somone who can call on us to make sacrifices, not promise to give us more. One who can say, I'm not going to make it easier for us. I'm going to make it harder, because we have hard things to do."

Interestingly, that's what makes a great business leader too.

Source: Harvard Business Review Jan-Feb 2013

Outcome-driven methods

Methods are designed to keep our focus on the making of the output. While this might make us frequently choose quality as the primary objective to target, we also occassionally choose results as the objective. However, the results we typically choose are intermediate results for intermediate beneficiaries – not end results or outcomes expected by the person or entity investing in the output. This is changing in software engineering. My three outcome-driven methods are introduced here: www.OutcomeDrivenMethods.com

Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas!

If you are celebrating Hanukkah, have a wonderful time! If you are celebrating Christmas, have a wonderful season! If you enjoy the season's music, allow me to take you to the 70s. While I enjoy Christmas music across several genres – from Church choir to reggae – what remains my top favorite is The Gunter Kallmann Choir. I've been enjoying their "Christmas Sing-In" album since my childhood ... used to visit my aunt's home just to listen to this album with cousins. The Gunter Kallmann Choir is a German band and the music has a – you guessed it – 70s feel. If you love Christmas music, you should check it out here.

Grateful for ... the Influencers

Courtesy: Carl Richards (BehaviorGap.com)

Happy Thanksgiving!

These are just a few of the many people who influenced me. I have used their insights and have seen those insights work every time.

Eliel Saarinen, the Finnish-American designer, architect, and city-planner. I'm not a big admirer of art nouveau, but Eliel's insight "Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context" is something I have used so frequently for 25 years that I can almost write a booklet on how to apply it!

Tom Peters, whose passionate voice on Excellence is unmatched. Interestingly, his work that influenced me is not In Search of Excellence, but The Circle of Innovation.

Michael Hammer and James Champy, who moved our focus away from organizational groups to business processes. They talked about the value, use, and mis-use of IT in their mid-90s bestseller Reengineering the Corporation (contrast with the 2003 edition of Lean Thinking, where IT is first mentioned only in page 327).

Al Ries and Jack Trout, whose statements on brand extension are debated, but whose Positioning concept I frequently use in my world.

Kishore Padmanabhan, who at Tata Consultancy Services (1989) taught me how to draw a line (timeline, that is) and how to manage projects and teams.

Richard Anderson, my UC Berkeley instructor – his comment "Why not you?" on my assignment paper encouraged me to set up India's first usability lab and his continued mentoring helped me bring new learning to the IT industry in India. I suspect that I learned a few of his presentation techniques as well.

Gilbert Samuel, my 10th grade teacher, a rare forward-thinking person in India at that time, whose frustration with India's antiquated cars (the one based on Morris Oxford, for example) and antiquated thoughts and practices showed me the importance of change.

Edward Samuel, my grandad who constantly preached to me key Biblical ethics, illustrating with his own life experiences. I haven't met anyone of higher moral standards. The best part is he was a star in his profession, heading schools and always hunted by competing schools. Proof that "good guy" and "winner" can co-exist in the same person.

Forced to read locally-produced mediocre textbooks at school, going to college in 1981 was being set free! I spent hours every week day at what was then called the United States Information Service (library at the American embassy in Chennai). It was like discovering an entirely new galaxy! I knew what I was going to read and watch from that point forward. It was a decision I made and stuck to. Thanks to all the American pioneers and contributors whose works have positively influenced my thought and action for over 30 years!

A CBTO speaks at an upcoming CIO summit

Steven Peltzman is among the first C-suite folks to be named Chief Business Technology Officer. This is a change in label and role that CEO George Colony made at Forrester Research.

Steven would be speaking at the CIO Summit 2012 to be held at the Ritz-Carlton, Buckhead, Atlanta, Georgia, December 3-4, 2012.

Is it OK to compare governance with corporate leadership?

Let's take the recent example of big bank CEOs demanding Washington's action to avoid a "fiscal cliff." Why did this unfortunate situation happen?

Most media folks point to partisanship. However, in the corporate world, every time a similar situation happens, it is considered a leadership issue – an inability to inspire people to agree and to get things done.

The question on my mind ... If economy is a key indicator of success in both government and business, should government be run more like a business?

In this difficult time

My heart goes out to every one hurt by Sandy. You remain in my prayers in this difficult time.

Webinar presentation: my first experience



My first webinar presentation was not an entirely perfect event. There was a minor embarrassment – a lesson for those who work out of home. My cat Pinto suddenly appeared outside the door to my home-office. And Pinto's meows were picked up by my USB headset.

Otherwise, I enjoyed presenting something very important for the audience. The webinar titled, "The IT to BT move: Take advantage of the change leader in you" is most likely the first in the world to focus on software development in the BT age.

Hope to make the recording available here at BTpractice.com.

This is the season for your Change initiative!

Just do a quick "scroll" in this blog and you know that a lot of positive Change has happened in recent times. All this Change was triggered by the current economic and financial crises. And people like Elizabeth Warren and Brian Moynihan leveraged the opportunity to make a positive impact.

How about yourself? If you are a CIO, Software Project Manager, or even an Experienced Business Analyst, you can benefit from a Change initiatve – a move from IT to BT. As far as software practice is concerned, the move to BT demands a few changes to your existing SDLC and to your existing business analyst. However, it does not require any new investments. It is not a company-wide big-bang initiative, but happens one software project at a time. All this means that the project you had planned to kickstart in the next few weeks could be your first BT project!

BT being outcomes-driven, your accomplishment is measurable and easy for your boss to see!

Romney ... and BT

Something caught my attention while I was watching the Republican National Convention on TV. It was Romney's statement "I have a plan to create 12 million jobs."

I do not know whether the number is good and achievable, but I like the fact that he mentioned a clear and specific outcome. More importantly, he was spot on in choosing the metric ("jobs") that seems to matter the most to a lot of voters. Overall, it's like saying, "Invest in me (for four years) and I will create 12 million jobs."

Now, here's my point. Like voters, CEOs have been asking for outcomes too – specific, needed business outcomes from their investment in technology. IT teams and providers need to respond positively and "upgrade" to be able to specify, design for, and deliver business outcomes. That is when IT becomes BT.

Not moving from IT to BT is a career-ending decision for the CIO?

Industry analyst Nigel Fenwick says ...

... for CIOs looking to remain successful for years to come, there is only really one effective decision ahead: "How do I shift my IT organization to become an effective business technology organization?" Failure to make this shift will be a career-ending decision for many CIOs.

Strong statement, but it is certainly time to make it a habit to tie technology investments to business outcomes. Read Nigel's CIO.com Blogs article here: http://tinyurl.com/bqjof4u

Business processes in India

Having visited 5 different countries including 10 "entries" into the United States, I know I found the visa process easy every time. But when I simply needed to renew my passport on it's expiry, I had to go through a month-long struggle with the passport process and the "online system." The worst part was not the software, but its lack of integration with the manual processes (read Two Become One).

Writing in Times of India, Chetan Bhagat assumes that I have somehow got my passport renewed and that I'm now at the airport's entrance ... he describes five "stupid" processes I must go through. As always, he ends his article with an advice: "Use your brain ..."

Good leaders are straight talkers?

Carol Bartz, former president and CEO of Yahoo! says "Being honest and truthful is part of being a good friend, a good associate, and a good leader."

Admitting a mistake is also typical of a good leader. Ed Hochuli, who is an NFL official and partner of a law firm says, "If I made a mistake and I'm going to change it, I'm going to explain what it should be and I'm going to stand up for it ... What do you accomplish by trying to hide it?"

Good leaders also make it safe for people to be honest. "You have to make honest feedback a positive experience," says Alan Mullay, president and CEO of Ford. "I had to demonstrate with my behavior that I welcomed it."

In some cultures, straight-talking is considered politically incorrect, admitting a mistake is considered a weakness, and no effort is spent on building a culture that encourages straight-talking. You know what? It all points to a lack of leadership.