Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
– George Santayana

I have heard that quote numerous times throughout my life and I must say that I have generally listened to the advice. There is nothing wrong on occasion with dusting off “Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire” to assist in falling asleep when your wife is snoring. I’ve got some great feedback on the blog and thank everyone that has been following (and pushing me) to continue down the road. It was one of these messages that asked me what the turning point in my career was and how I got here. I thought I’d reflect on my journey and view of leadership in this blog post. So keeping with the history theme the analysis of this problem domain must start with a journey back to the Renaissance.

The what??! No I didn’t mean the Renaissance period.. I was referring to an article that I read in 2002 called “Creating the Renaissance CIO” that I discovered during my journey. I had the opportunity when I moved back to Pittsburgh in 2000 to join a company called TechRx as the IT manager running a small technology group with two offices (Pittsburgh and Birmingham, AL). Not long after I had arrived and got myself acclimated to the people (the GREAT people), the company went on a buying spree tripling the locations and employees and I was thrust into a role managing the transition and integration. I was forced to make decisions that I didn’t have enough information to make, like how much bandwidth do we need between offices, how are we going to handled the phone systems, networks, and infrastructure. The business didn’t even know how the business was going to operate let alone the systems they were going to use, yet here I am trying to build an infrastructure to support the effort. It was during this time that I learned three very important things about technology, business, and probably life:

1. Indecision is a decision
2. Suck it up, drive a stake in the ground, and move on to executing
3. Expect that you will get it wrong out of the gate.. and plan accordingly

I knew we didn’t have all the answers and that the face of this company in two years was going to be drastically different than it was today, so I planned accordingly. When we built the WAN out we over designed a little to leave half of our network equipment empty to allow us to evolve, we tackled the really hard things like centralizing Active Directory, Email, and telecommunications first knowing that communication and collaboration was going to be key moving forward, and I went on a road tour to visit every single location and started to build key relationships that would pay great dividends down the road. I had some great mentors on this journey, a stellar staff (most of whom I continue to work with in other companies or stay in touch with personally), and more grey hair than when I began.
Once the dust settled and the company started humming along I learned another very important lesson:

4. You need to give it away to keep it
5. Managers are supposed to empower others

“The mark of a master is how many masters he leaves behind, not how many followers.”
– Dinesh Senan

I was burnt out and couldn’t keep up with my workload, but realized (more it was pointed out to me) that my problem was that even though we were successful I really hadn’t built a team I had pretty much used my force of will and work ethic to pull off a difficult project. It was at this point that the light bulb went on and I realized my mistake. I spent the next year paying for it and fixing that mistake. It is about now that Randy Pausch comes to mind:

Brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want something badly enough. They are there to keep out the other people.
- Randy Pausch (1960-2008)

See up until this time I was focused on myself, and my career, and what I learned, not on my team (which had grown by this time) and what I could do to empower them. This is a fundamental mistake that I’ve seen plenty of managers make, and probably would have continued to make if I didn’t have the help of two really good mentors that forced me to see the problem and helped me correct it. This is really tough work to those that haven’t experienced it, and I think especially technology professionals. We always want to jump in and prove we know how to solve the problem and just get it fixed, but in doing so we never give the people around us the opportunity to learn and grow themselves.

That is probably the greatest “gift” I received during this evolution, the fact that I had to evolve and put my stamp on it, nobody was going to hand me the keys to the kingdom. I learned about “process” (and to truly do it justice you need to think of the word process spoken by a Canadian! Thank you Ken!) and started to embrace the ITIL way of running a service oriented IT operation. I continue to chuckle with all the press lately about the comeback that ITIL is making with version 3, it was great 8 years ago too! This brings us to the next things I learned:

6. Mentors are put there to guide you and unlock the door, but you need to be the one that takes the first step through
7. Continuous process improvement comes in various shapes, sizes, flavors, and religions, but they all share the same philosophy.. Never stop improving
8. Information is not power it is the knowledge derived from it and given away freely that gains power

Whether it is yourself, your team, your technology systems, your business process you can never stop improving it and making it better. You are the one that needs to take action and drive the stake in the ground to take that first step forward, learn something new, better yourself, and more importantly make the lives of those around you better. Leadership is not giving orders, or tasking people to do work, it is about empowering the people around you to be there best, and the Renaissance CIO article does a great job of describing it:

Renaissance CIOs make themselves highly visible within their organization, building relationships and trust with peers, working persistently and facing boldly the tough decisions that go with the job. They lead without controlling, without simply telling people what to do. Traditional IT leaders were trained to control, and systems were the medium of control. The common term “control systems” now appears quaint, however, perhaps even sinister. Today’s organizations are part order, part chaos—what Dee Hock, the founder and CEO emeritus of Visa International, calls “chaordic.” Visa’s IT systems produce and assist at least as much chaos as they do order. Leaders in a chaordic organization decide when to lean in toward chaos and when to steer toward order, and the Renaissance CIO is a master at navigating the straits between the two.

This advice is timeless and in my opinion this is even more important now than it was when I first read it. Twitter, social media, collaboration, portals, etc. have continued to evolve this chaordic trend. If you haven’t read Dee Hock’s book “Birth of the Chaordic Age” I’d highly recommend it and purchased it shortly after reading the article. Andrew Grove’s book “Only the Paranoid Survive” is another must read for any technology professional and especially for those who aspire to become CIO’s one day. It is especially relevant to this section of the Renaissance CIO article:

In keeping with their managerial style and active management of information assets, Renaissance CIOs must not only be smart leaders but wise leaders—a more complex and subtle task indeed. Smart leaders see only the “technology trees,” though they can count them precisely. But the wise leader sees the “information forest.” Smart leaders are focused on speed, responding rapidly and driving for fast turnaround. A wise leader looks for the long waves of change, beyond the momentary pressures. A wise leader can also be fast, but the speed is part of a larger, longer-term strategic context. Smart leaders are tempted into habits, done over and over again to increase speed, while losing sight of their original purpose. The wise leader creates practices—activities he or she performs in a variety of circumstances that improve with experience.

I was very blessed in my career to not only have the opportunities I did, but the people that guided me in my journey. One of the skills I learned along this journey was that I need to leave someone with a call to action.. so my call to action to everyone who reads this article is to find a mentor that can give you the same hard love I received and LISTEN TO THEM we can always learn from “history”.

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This bridge will only take you halfway there
To those mysterious lands you long to see :
Through gypsy camps and swirling Arab fairs
And moonlit woods where unicorns run free
So come and walk awhile with me and share
The twisting trails and wondrous worlds I’ve known.
But this bridge will only take you halfway there –
The last few steps you’ll have to take alone.

- Shel Silverstein

That poem is pretty much committed to memory for me right now as I regularly read “A Light in the Attic” to my girls before they go to bed, and we always end with a reading of that poem.  Today, however, it carried a new meaning as I was working with one of our project teams at work.  We were analyzing a customer’s business process and I started to educate them on some UML and software design elements for breaking down the business process into components.  I introduced concepts such as actors, componentizing of classes such as customers, sales person, and the properties or metadata that applied to them.  Really I was trying to get them to look across the mass of Excel spreadsheets that the business was currently using to run its internal operations and break it down into class diagrams, activities, state changes, and use cases.

There are a few things that seemed to linger with me after the initial exercise and meeting in which I was trying to communicate these concepts I had learned through years of IT and development projects.

1.     Many of these concepts were foreign to the team (and sometimes I felt like I was speaking Greek to them.. although it was probably just “Geek”)

2.     None of the team members had a technology background or education (mostly MBA’s and finance backgrounds)

3.     The intern of the group related to the concepts faster than the other team members

4.     Once they “got” it they immediately understood the benefit of the exercise I was taking them through

So here I sit reflecting on the process and scratching my head as to why more disciplines are not getting exposure to some of these concepts that us technology oriented people have lived and breathed for years.  I read every day on Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, aligning technology to the business, how technology can create new business opportunities, but the very core methodologies that make these efforts successful are not even being mentioned to the millennial generation.  It doesn’t matter if we are talking cloud computing, Web 2.0, social media, etc. successful business process modeling techniques are still very important skills to learn in the business world.  Honestly I believe they are even MORE important in this day and age of technology than they were when I first learned them.  With information being stored across systems and network infrastructures keeping with my core tenets of a successful IT program becomes harder every day.

Over the years I have found that my “career upbringing” has armed me with some very powerful skills as I moved into the business leadership roles I’ve been in as of late.  System design, object oriented programming, process modeling, focusing on core capabilities, thinking outside of the box are all skills I’ve learned as a technology professional.  The evolution or revolution as I call it, has been that these methodologies and teachings have great application to the business world.  I learned about continuous process improvement from CMMI, process modeling through development and UML concepts, problem solving and communication through system administration and help desk, and collaboration and “networks” in my hardcore “router head” days.  All of these concepts I apply and probably more importantly teach regularly in my current leadership role in the organization.

So technology professionals your training and background has more application than designing proper software systems and architectures, and business people your technology professional has more to offer in these times than making sure the email server is running.  But no matter which “role” you play in an organization for people and a team to grow around you and see you as a leader you need to build the bridge for people to be able to take those last few steps.

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