2013 : The year of Zero Tolerance

Its very apparent. It stares you in the face, you cannot miss it. If there was one thing that made an impact in 2012, that was technology - both the device and the software. The mobile devices with social networking apps on them were the kings and queens of 2012. I went into a research mode to see if there was an equivalent ubiquitous thing in the past that made a huge impact. Not surprisingly, what came up was a weapon. The AK-47 assault rifle.This was one rifle that is so light and efficient that sadly it can be used by children with minimal learning. This is the most abundantly mass produced rifle and has changed the way wars are fought!

The same can be said of mobile device+social networking apps in 2012. This weapon has given huge strength to the common man across cultures and geographies to raise voice over what they feel is undesirable, unethical and wrong. Mature democracies to dictatorship regimes have belted down under the force of these voices fueled by the mobile device+social networking app weapon. Occupy wall street to Arab Spring and now in our own backyard in India. Governments are seeing the absolute non-tolerant citizen who might not be voting but is definetly out there to tear down structures that don't find relevance in today's times. Not very sure if the mobile devices are feeding on the need to be socially connected on the move or the apps are feeding on the device proliferation. Computerization of technology is happening at an amazing unprecedented phase, that most CIOs could only wish for their projects in the the enterprise. 

One needs to take cognizance of the fact that the attitudes are changing. Absolute intolerance to mediocricity, blatant abuse of power and flouting of authority to crub voice of dissent will only grow in strength. I foresee 2013 to be a year where people in public service will come under scrutiny and will suffer lack of credibility and respect. The government and hence the police will find themselves completely lacking in credibility. Socilally connected mobile individuals armed with the power of convergence of video  audio and data over the internet will be putting extreme pressure on every social structure - government, police, tradition, religion and family to align to their way of life and find relevance in a positive manner as they live their lives. You will see people in position and power react rather clumsily at first as you have seen in the last two weeks and hopefully, they will adapt and align to serve rather than dictate.

Sooner or later the citizen is going to bring the same attitude to work on monday morning and the affect of this will be felt on the office floors all thru till friday. Enterprises who dont engage on a connected platform with their employees, will find employees engaging outside of the cortporate structure on corporate issues, thru their 3G connected cellphones armed with facebook, twitter and google+. Many corporates today are still heirarchical structures of power when it comes to most things that significantly impact organizational fabric. This is where employees might draw parallels with what ius happening in our society outside the corporate world. Mediocricity and inefficiencies might come under fire within corporates.

Connected employees are much more potent than unions. Most organizations who engage employees effectively, will find a greater appreciation coming their way. The better life inside the security of the corporate building as compared to the life on the street, will only go improve and increase employee engagement scores and drive higher employee loyalty.  meaningful engagement within the connected corporate that not just contributes to the employee but acknowledges employees contribution by keeping them in the decision making process, will go a long way. This is not only the right thing to do, this also keeps the spill over of the anger and frustration from entering the office environment. One such organization I know that dos this effectively is Indigo.     

CIOs have a huge role to play here. They can be the people who can drive the ground rules of connected enterprise, not as an order taker but as a direction setter. Can a CIO stand up and hold their own when some of the ground rules come under pressure from HR, Finance, Legal  and Brand ? many a CIOs will be told that its not their business to set the ground rules of engagement on the platform. How the CIOs react in those situations and conduct themselves, will differentiate the direction setters from the order takers. Direction setting is about painting a strategy and executing on the same with the intent of building long lasting structures on solid foundations. Each CIO knows what the best foundation for their organization is. Jan 2nd 2013 , Wednesday - most people will come into office with a mixed feeling of having mourned the brave-heart, wondering what beholds as future for our girls and women back home, and definetly some excitement around the fact that the old year has gone by and maybe the new year will bring in some hope and cheer. Are the enterprises ready to take on the challenges that will start walking their way starting this Wednesday?

A CIOs Christmas Gift Wish List To Santa

Its the time of the year where I act like a 10 year old with glee and hope in my eyes, as I draw up a gift list hoping Santa will deliver them. As a CIO I absolutely would love any kind of divine intervention to help me out as I deal with various issues. 

My wish list goes as follows:

Dear Santa,

My list is as follows:

1. I want Google to make up their mind, whether they want to remain a consumer services organization or they want to be an enterprise solution company as well. If they decide to get into the enterprise space as well, I want them to price their services in a manner they can sustain enterprise offerings, build a team that can understand and manage enterprises and commit resources to mould a part of Google that is compatible with the way enterprises want to run their IT.
2. No man is an island, and technology is here to serve mankind. No technology can stay relevant if it operates in isolation. Its funny that everyone talks of collaboration, team work and productivity while Apple, Google and Microsoft have built walls around their proprietary platforms. Dear Santa, I want you to give a contract to Leonardo DiCaprio to go back in time and invade the minds of Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt and Steve Ballmer and plant the thought of creating a standard for interoperability between iOS, Windows 8 and android mobile platforms, helping enterprises to carry more effectively and efficiently a safe , secure and sustainable mobility strategy with heterogeneity as an integral feature.
3. I wish for divine intervention to clear up the mobility space and drive clarity. If some need to die, please make it quick and painless (for everyone). Please bestow sustenance for the existing virtues of creativity, sense of purpose, social relevance and enterprise adaptability with all the players in the mobility space.
4. Dear Santa, please give Leanardo DiCaprio a second contract to invade the dreams of all cloud service providers, planting the thought of creating a standard for interoperability and data exchange between clouds and for creating a standard framework and template for shifting data and workloads across clouds.
5. I wish for the gift of the ability to quickly unlearn and sit in a discussion without carrying the burden of having to accept or reject everything being; for my team and me and for the world at large. I wish this for all politicians specifically.
6. I want CISOs to get more business friendly and find ways to support adoption of new invasive initiatives rather than fight it!
7. I wish for Microsoft to realize that mail, messaging and collaboration is availably free of cost thru social networking sites and get off their high horse and find a way to have more meaningful dialogue with the enterprise. I hope Microsoft's global leadership realizes this and re-structure their organization to operate more meaningfully in the current context and become pace setters in time to come.
8. Dear Santa, please help me understand why I feel so hollow for Windows 8 as the next enterprise desktop computing platform. I am not able to analyse this hollowness in me effectively!
9. I wish apple store infrastructure becomes available to the enterprises as a service enabling deliver enterprise app stores to our customers, partners and employees riding on apples creation.
10. The last wish is a more personal one. Santa, I wish for the next new apple offering to be a personal device that can transport people across time and space. I , for once, want to say beam me up Scotty and experience it happen before I die. I also wish for the world to be free of guns (specially US and UP) , children to be safe, polar ice caps to stop melting and last but not the least , both Cameroon Diaz and me get 5 years younger each year for the next two years and then stop ageing!

Santa, some logistics. If you are flying around India, collecting the wish lists, your 3G might not work effectively everywhere and hence you might not be able to access this blog. To make it easier, I will hang a sock on the christmas tree with the wish list in it. Not too complicated a list, I am sure. For a hi-flier like you, this is easily do-able. Santa, you now operate in a world that is performance oriented, goal driven and results oriented. I will soon email you the balance scorecard based on which you will be appraised. You will get a 5/5 if you just manage to deliver to my last wish. You will get a special performance incentive bonus, if you manage to make any three of my first 9 wishes happen. No pressure buddy. Just do it!

Merry  Christmas and a happy holiday season to one and all. Hope your families and you have a blast bringing in the new year later this month. Wishing your families and you a fantastic 2013 filled with peace, prosperity, good health and happiness.
Cheers.

Personal Branding

Haven't you yet been killed with too much of personal branding advice ? Well, if you are reading this, I guess you are still alive, and the pleasure of putting you to death is now all mine !

Why do we need to brand ourselves? That is a dumb question, considering the fact that we have been doing it since childhood. Those of you who have siblings, you started your personal branding endeavor the moment your sibling arrived. The lucky ones that get undivided attention, you started branding yourselves as soon as you realized that your crush and/or first love needed to be competed for attention and affirmation. For those lucky ones with no siblings, and those who got lucky with crush/first love or both without a need to put up a fight; if you got married, you worked on personal branding to deal with at least two love triangles if not more:
1) spouse : mother : mother-in-law triangle
2) spouse : father    : father-in-law triangle
...not to mention that you dont get married to just your spouse but to your spouse's family and their extended family. For those who have not had any of these issues, well you never had a life to begin with!

Personal branding is pretty much the same game, be it at home or work. We show 15% of ourselves (the best parts of our personality) and most of our personal branding revolves around flouting these attributes with an intent to connect with the audience. The strength to our personal brand actually comes from the hidden / behind-the-scenes 85% of our personality. This is where people face challenges when they brand themselves and the branding is not backed up by most of the constituents of their personality. I guess we need to focus on three things:
1) What we brand
2) The brand itself (in this case ourselves and what we stand for)
3) The branding message

I share one anecdotes from one of my past stints, around the branding exercise by IT folks. Similar to people who are uncomfortable with their bodies and hence are embarrassed to take off their shirt while at a beach, some time ago a couple of us decided to brand our initiatives instead of branding ourselves. The branding exercise was successful, and our initiatives were much talked about. Slowly we got distanced from the initiatives as people with much better branding skills worked their way to identify themselves with initiatives under the spotlight. Felt much like Steve Jobs thrown out of the company he created! Under the umbrella of this branded initiative, a lot of business departments went about procuring their own IT needs. Now we had business departments buying IT products and services under the brand created by IT without involving IT ! A lot of us were chuckling even though the joke was on us! We then decided to brand ourselves to get the business departments come to us for their IT needs instead of buying all by themselves. A realization then dawned that when we were not comfortable with ourselves as we projected. Introspection, then resulted in some of us chiseling away parts of our personalities that were irrelevant and bridging the gap with the needed. After a great deal of effort, we saw a close resemblance between ourselves and our aspirational brand image. This effort would have worked against us, had we failed to sustain the perceptions we ventured out to create. This is possible only if the 85% of real you actually grew, evolved and transformed to back up the 15% show-cased.

We have always been taught to play to our strengths. Our core strength areas could be our ability to learn fast, a strong sense of right and wrong, flexible belief systems, tolerance, effective story telling, strong memory, logical reasoning, empathy etc. It makes sense to brand ourselves around our core strengths rather than otherwise. Our conduct and our branding needs to be in perfect harmony. Our personalities will reflect the real us at some point or the other. It would be detrimental to brand ourselves otherwise. A strong story-teller core value could be a great asset in sales or influencer or mentor role. One can brand themselves at fantastic presenter and a sales guru. A person with flexible value systems would make a great go-getter and innovator when playing within the corporate rule framework. It is important to recognize our core strengths and bring them to work, apply them in our individual fields of expertise and gain success. The most fundamental step to branding would be to discover ourselves first. There is no use of branding ourselves as leaders if we have created structures, perceptions and methodologies of management around us. We will be ridiculed if we brand ourselves as direction setters, while our teams do nothing but order taking. It is important to align both the hidden 85% and the 15% window dressing. CIOs are just as good or as bad as their teams. Any personal branding a CIO does, will need to be backed up by their teams in action, letter and spirit. A CIO will end up being ridiculed as a manager and a leader if he creates a ME and THEM as a part of his personal branding exercise. The CIOs personal brand will most definetly rub off on their team and will have consequences. Hence, in performance driven cultures, personal branding can become a very powerful tool.

Sometimes, we can kill ourselves due to lack of finesse in communicating our personal brand. I was delighted  with a DBA, who said her core strengths was her ability to think straight in times of duress. The way she came across the interview table, every part of her body had "nerves of steel" branded all across. Three of us interviewing, felt exactly the same way! People mostly come up and say they are a strong DBA! I heard a CIO describe himself as one who can do anything. Having known him for almost a little over a decade, I know he meant that he is comfortable with the unlearning and learning and has enthusiasm and inquisitiveness as a part of his personality. Due to these attributes, he constantly dabbles with different new technologies all the time. He is a risk taker and due to this he is one of the few guys who would pilot almost every new technology in his enterprise! All of this came out as "I can do anything"! I love the way fevicol has been branded as a bond that never breaks. Been racking my brains on how to get creative around my personal branding.

Once we manage to brand ourselves in a certain manner, we need to be cognizant of the fact that organizations face the challenges of playing in a game, where changes in eco-system and business dynamics is a constant feature. This needs the organization to innovate, change and transform; and all of this demands different competencies from its workforce to meet such challenges.A CIO who is seen to bring stability thru standardization and process discipline\ to the organization might become a liability when organizations needs change agents to compete effectively. One needs to keep an eye on one's own branding and how is it seen relative to organization's medium and long term needs. One needs to decide when and how a shift needs to occur in personal branding, with the passage of time, as organizations need to deal with different challenges. I particularly like this book "SHIFT" by Peter Arnell and recommend reading it.

I personally think the best way to brand oneself, is to play to our core strengths and put our true selves on display thru blogs, tweets and the enterprise social fabric for people to see us to be for who we are. One needs to be constantly looking for feedback to mould and shape our messages to ensure that the messages are being consumed exactly as they were meant to be. Personal branding exercise is all about the perception we want everyone else to carry about us. We need to play to our strength, play full on and visibly so.

The Need For Self Preservation

First responsibility of top managers and leaders is self preservation. I was taught this lesson from a veteran, a very senior board member and a leadership practitioner of a very large and famous IT multinational of yesteryears. His basic contention was, if you don't preserve and protect yourself from each and every threat and not actively lookout for potential threats coming your way, how then will you ever be able to carry out your agenda of value creation for all your stakeholders and the community in general. His message to a couple of us more than a decade ago was to shamelessly protect ourselves if we wanted to really make a difference, and not just take one on the chin all the time.

Managers and leaders will face threats all layers. Let me focus on leadership, as the game is quiet different there and stakes are very high. In leadership roles the following threats are very real but not limited to the list mentioned below, the list below comes from my experience of having fought these demons as they trapped me at various points in time in the past.

1. Delusion
2. Insecurity
3. Amoralism

Delusion:

I have had this amazing opportunity to be in this space called delusion  I have experienced many facets of delusion and have learned very invaluable lessons, and fortunately very early in life. Few lessons I learned, are as follows:

1. What I inspect is what I get. This is true despite the fact that I know the people I work with, I have massive trust and faith in people I work with and some of them have fantastic past track records. I learnt quickly to get out of the delusion that "not placing my trust in someone is bad" is very different from my need for inspection. I trust someone, and hence I bestowed that responsibility to that person. After that, what you inspect is what you get.
2. I am as good as my current conduct. Walking this path has has helped me to stay out of the delusion that despite status-quo, faith in my abilities and character can never be displaced or disputed.
3. I am not an island. I need partnerships and eco-system to carry out my agenda. So, I own nothing and  control nothing. I facilitate for people around me. I am never in delusion of my abilities by virtue of the role and responsibility I shoulder. First thing I do is insulate myself with complementary skills and attitudes and then find ways to empower them fully.
4. Leadership is not a step in an hierarchical structure nor is it a virtue that you need to shoulder all the time. Leadership is a tool that one can pick up at discretion depending on the need of the hour.
5. Leadership and Management and  are two different things. Successful people oscillate between the two based on the best one can achieve by deploying either one of these two tools or a hybrid one. On many ocassions I have chosen one of my mates/colleagues to play a leadership role on a key initiative if that's what is needed to meet objectives or deliver results. My role then is that of  a management person supporting, mandating and aligning resources to my colleague's leadership to ensure success and meeting of objectives.

Insecurity:

I will be honest. I have never been insecure when I was in a corporate job, not even on my worst day. Hence I had to learn this lesson too late in life when the stakes were really high ! As a corporate citizen, I have never been prey to the 6 Cs that characterize insecurity - Comparison, Compensation, Competition, Compulsion, Condemnation and Control. I stepped off a corporate job in August 2011 and started off on my own as an independent IT Consultant. I was blessed with the opportunity to experience insecurity and discover how I could go from bad to worse. Fantastic lessons learned. Insecurity was neither financial, nor was it fear of failure. Insecurity came from the delusion that to be a good business person, I need to understand every aspect of business. I obviously don't. So, I decided to do everything myself ! How stupid is that. Insecurity makes you wear a mask of a superhero. You try to be who you are not and your actions speak. I decided to register for service tax, manage my own financial aspects (tax, income, balance sheet) etc. Instead of focusing on my core strengths and work with people who have complementary skill sets (something I did all my life by choice in corporate jobs), I became superman. I wore a mask and I started comparing my consulting fees with what other consultants charge. I started, leveraging my gift of gab, putting down fellow consultants with some potential clients. There was a deep compulsion to push clients to innovate and do new things instead of helping them see benefits that they could realize and enjoy, talking to them in their language (again something I have practised all my life as a corporate citizen). It took a meeting with L N Sunderrajan to help me realize that I was insecure. I will never forget the favor he did me, by calling me over for a drink at the MIG Cricket Club, Bandra - to discuss a completely different agenda. Sunder has used experts and partners for his financial accounting needs, coding and design. He focuses on the core strengths of his team members and himself and delivers along with his partners. Luckily, I met him while I was in the 4th month of my stint as an individual IT consultant and learnt the most valuable lesson of my life.I am not sure if Sunder ever noticed me to be insecure. I did talk to him on my need to be financially selfish and not share income. How short-sighted and naive is that for someone who has always talked about delivering success in the long-term thru partnerships while in a corporate job!

You will be the only person who would not know if you are insecure. People around you notice it. Keeping an open mind to that fact that somewhere insecurity could lurks within you, helps you test dispassionately this hypothesis. If you keep a keen eye and ear open to how people around you behave with you and what they talk to you. People tend to run projects without involving the potential end-users right from conceptualization till the time its ready for UAT, if some of the Cs are in the play. The Cs are responsible for blaming end users for lack of imagination and appreciation. People who operate in partnership models neither face these C issues, nor are in the business of requirement gathering.

Amoralism:  

The best way to preserve oneself  is to be completely at peace with the eco-system while carrying the burden of one's beliefs, value systems and personal notions of ethics. If you noticed some skepticism laced in dark humor in the last sentence, you've got what I mean. As Sarkar  says, there is nothing that's either right or wrong. One who has the power, his wrong becomes right (bad english translation)!

Organizations are either social or commercial enterprises out there to achieve certain goals, meet certain objectives and deliver value to its stakeholders. They go about it in a certain manner. Its important to work in places where there is a cultural alignment of notions of personal ethics and value system biases with that of the enterprise's. Its quiet naive to blame an organization to be immoral or ethically wrong if personal biases are tangential to that of the organization. Choosing the right organization to work for, actually means choosing the most congenial place to work, where you have alignment on value systems, ethics and morals. I am borrowing a few lines verbatim from a doctoral thesis :

The phenomenon of amoralism: An investigation of the cognitive and emotive roots.

Doctoral Thesis / Dissertation,  2008,  250 Pages

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

1. The Statement of the Problem

It is a common empirical observation that most people take considerations of morality as important factors in making a morally relevant choice. Moreover, such considerations ordinarily override other reasons for actions. To say that a certain act is useful, agreeable, profitable but yet immoral usually means to condemn the act in the strongest possible terms. In the ordinary discourse the labeling of some action-guiding principle or a particular action as immoral gives the ultimate reason for rejecting it. Likewise, one may think of an action as difficult, unpleasant, risky and costly but yet required from the moral point of view.

You cannot preserve yourself if you are at war with the ethics and value systems of the organization, even if you have what is hilariously known as good ethics and best value systems. Step into organizations where there is harmony and homogeneity between your personal belief systems and that of the organization. This is one aspect where diversity does not take anyone anywhere. People who often blame the workplace to be devoid of ethics (when actually, all the while the employee and the organization have their own ethic systems, but have nothing in common), usually forget that they have the power to choose not be part of the game on that particular playground!

Protect and preserve yourself vehemently against habits, virtues, weakness and people with negative influences. One might ask, what is negative? Anything that deflates , demoralizes and puts you down is negative. Sometimes, it is incompatibility with the co-system, sometimes its your sense of perception and values and sometimes its people who dont like either your agenda or you. Some of us might wash our hands off people issues saying we are not political or my organization is not political. The moment there is more than one person in the room, there is politics! People who take up leadership roles need to deal with this with equal enthusiasm as they do with other challenges. If you dont survive, you will cease to exist in a state of power that is needed to carry out your agenda and meet your goals of delivering value to your stakeholders and the community in general.