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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The half-life of knowledge in technology is 6 months. Half of what I know sitting here right now will be obsolete in 6 months, that is the speed at which technology moves and why you can never stop learning.

I’m sure there are some people that are tired of hearing me say that over and over again, especially to new technology professionals. This article got me thinking about it again. The author talks about how we age as human beings and discusses the book “Aging Well” and the process we all experience through life. The thing that caught my attention was towards the end of the post when he stated the following:

So what has all this got to do with Learning and Change? I think it gets to the heart of the matter. Firstly, you need to be adaptable, to change as your context does – as Valliant puts it, ” to make Lemonade from Lemons”. To embrace the changes you are experiencing and to explore the new situation – to learn, to go to the Mountain, don’t wait for it to come to you.

That is so true in today’s uncertain economic times and is preaching to the choir when it comes to technology professionals who deal with constant change throughout our career. We need to embrace this change and exercise some of our leadership skills to help innovate and grow both personally and professionally.

I’m a regular reader of Zen Habits and think Leo’s post for today ties into this topic perfectly, you can read it here. Everyone who has been involved in a technology project knows that nothing ever goes according to plan, and being aware and accepting of that is the key to dealing with the project issues with a positive attitude. As much as we might like you can’t control everything and everyone around you, but you can display leadership and guidance. I loved Harvard Business Review’s management tip of the day as well “Don’t let the Recession Halt Development” in which they encourage leaders to continue to challenge your team and provide them meaningful work.

Sometimes life and circumstances do get us down, but especially for technology professionals we can not let our foot off the gas when it comes to learning and development. As leaders we must strive to constantly provide challenging work for our teams and find ways to help them find some meaningful work, especially today. So what are you going to do right now to better yourself and/or your team? I’d love to hear about it.

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The reason why this event took shape into a blog post, however, was the conversation that happened between my friend and I over lunch a couple days later.  We got talking about how the current generation of technology professionals lacked the fundamental skills we had been taught early in our technology career.  The banter went back and forth around not understanding what an nslookup was, or what ipconfig /flushdns did, or why the new crop of technologists never looked at the Event Log on the server.  The decision we both arrived at was that there is a huge lack in critical thinking and troubleshooting skills in current millennial generation of technology professions.  Sure they can come out of school writing apps for the iPhone, but troubleshooting simple network and DNS issues confound them.

The more I considered these events the more I realized that things I learned early on have given me that foundation.  Scientific method anyone?  I have through out my career seen a very strong tie between engineering training and and successful IT/ICT professionals.  Understanding how and why things work is just as important as making them work, sure we have all waved our magic IT guy wand and made problems disappear but we always wonder why (at least I do).  Now don’t get me wrong I am not taking a shot at teachers (especially because the wife is a former teacher!), because teaching is one of the best ways to reinforce knowledge and promote learning, but the move away from teaching fundamentals and more of a focus on mainstream technology “solutions”.  Think about it if you have a good sound knowledge base around software development it is pretty easy to pick up and learn a new language.  The language is just a tool, but the architecture, requirements, business analysis, approaches and methodologies are the key to long term success.  What are you going to do in say 10 years when a new hot language comes out that everyone starts using?  Wait this is technology.. forget 10 years.. try 6 months (the half life of knowledge in this profession).

I have always said that I can teach technology to anybody that has a desire to learn, constantly asks “why?”, and understands the fundamentals of problem solving.  At the end it reminds me of the last time I built a computer, I spent days researching the technology  understanding which motherboard type, processor, memory speed, hard drive interfaces, video cards I wanted.  The specific purpose of this new computer was to run my new media center reality and digitize my DVD movie collection.  I didn’t open any of the boxes until all the components had arrived, I cleaned my entire workspace so I had enough room to work, installed extra lighting, organized my tools, and read all the documentation I could about the components I had purchased.  I spent days assembling the computer (yes I know it doesn’t have to take that long but I wanted it PERFECT) and make sure every connection was made well, the case was well ventilated, the CPU thermal paste was applied properly, and wore a wire around my wrist the whole time (grounding to the case).  All this work and effort and I go to power the computer on for the first time and.. NOTHING.  Yep all that work and it didn’t even post.. recheck all my connections, power, everything still won’t post.  Two hours on the Asus motherboard forum and I discovered my problem, the memory I had installed couldn’t be installed right out of the gate.  I needed to install slower memory in the computer for the first post so that I could get into the BIOS and configure the motherboard to accept my newer, faster memory.  I grabbed some older memory I had out of another system, installed it into the new system, and presto it posted like a champ.  Reconfigured the BIOS, shut the computer down, installed the faster memory and I was in business.  Fundamental training, troubleshooting, Internet research, and a don’t quit spirit where the recipes for success.  Every time I tell that story someone always says.. “Dude why didn’t you just buy a Dell”, and I answer “Passion to learn and build things”.  I guess I should start answering that question with the following “Just wanted to exercise my fundamentals”.

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