@bbcomCIO

Have you ever wondered why some projects or groups struggle so much to get things done?  Have you ever been sitting in a meeting wondering why you’re talking about trivial things when there are much larger problems at hand.  If your like almost everyone in today’s high paced world, more than likely you can relate.  generally this is nothing more than a communications breakdown.  Everyone communicates differently and no matter how you might think you’re communicating to them, the reality is you may be missing the target 100%.

Recently I was involved in a similar situation where small things were being escalated in a project and trivial issues were being presented as major risks to the project.  This directly involved me as a roadblock.  The reality was (in the end) it was nothing more than a communication style.  I have a particular way I work within my teams and my organization and the way I do that lends itself to talking about problems before ever presenting the solutions.  This is good unless your working with someone who looks at a problem and instead of presenting the problem to be solved they just throw out their solution.  Tech people tend to want to walk thru the process of understanding the problem before a solution is thrust upon them and I’m really no different.  I usually say “Don’t give me your solution, present your problem and lets work on a solution”.  It’s really splitting hair because another way to look at this might be “Don’t talk about problems, lets present solutions”  neither is wrong they are just differences in communications style.

I like an approach where I’m presented a problem, maybe for my organization, my personal character, etc and then I commit to resolving the problem and getting a solution in place.  Others I’ve worked with over the years like to look at a problem, put a solution in place and present that solution as a step forward.  Both have their values, one tends to gather more information first and get more buy in and the other focuses on moving forward faster and may not be as open for debate.

I’m a big fan of buy-in as I think without it you may drag baggage with you to your destination.  The culture in my team is much the same, and most likely because that is the way I operate as the leader of my teams.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not perfect and I don’t always seek buy-in on every item I have to deal with.  To me (IMO) the  ”here’s your solution” approach can tend to make people feel like it’s a Top Down model and they can become resistent.

How do you communicate?  Do you like to hear the problem first and then commit to putting a solution in place that take multiple things into perspective or do you tend to just look at the end point and present your solutions to getting there?  How does it work for you?

It really boils down to the fact that you have to be flexible and know your audience and the people who work with you on a daily basis or it will cause you heartache and really put stress on your organization.

Do you think your a great CIO, VP, Director…..Manager?  If someone were to survey your teams and your direct reports would you score an A+ or an F ?  This was a question that I wanted to tackle head one.  How could I get an anonymous feedback loop (360 degree feedback) from my direct reports and the teams that work inside the IT department.  It’s simply not enough to feel like your doing a good job, you need to know your strengths and weaknesses.  It’s far better to get real feedback (as honest as you can get it) to guide you and allow you to keep doing what is good for your organization and focus on squashing the weaknesses you may have.

In our review cycles we have our employees go thru a 360 degree review process and I’m no different.  I set out to create a survey that could be 100% anonymous so people in my organization could speak freely.  We have a pretty good track record with that because I like that type of feedback.  The idea was simple.

1. Create a survey with limited but specific questions to get a measurement of how the teams in my organziation felt I was leading / or not.
2. Make sure it’s anonymous and that there is no way to track down who said what.  No names, no IP addresses, no emails, etc.
3. Present the survey in it’s raw format to the team, summarize all the feedback and present a plan for addressing weaknesses I have.
4. Keep this model going over the long haul.

The first part was pretty simple.  Google Docs to the rescue.  I won’t elaborate on it here but it’s trival to build a survey like I wanted in google docs and publish it as a nice, easy to fill out form.  - If you want help just let contact me.

I sent out a few reminder emails to get everyone to fill it out which was great, everyone responded.  Also I had one free form question where I requested at least (1) thing that I could do better.

I then gathered the information, put it into a presentation with RAW data and I setup a meeting and presented it just as I received it.  You might be thinking I’m nuts at this point.  How could I just get up and say here is what you all felt about X and how I’m doing on this or that and that I have weaknesses in “some” areas.

General questions were things such as.  Do I lead with Integrity  (Scale of 1-5), How well do I understand the people in my organization (1-5), Am I helping move our organization forward (Helping/Hurting), How well do I communicate Vision and Context (1-5).

Scales of 1-5 were something like 1 = Not at All and 5= All the Time.

I talked to my team and stated what I can do and where I’ll focus to be a better leader for them.  One feedback item that came back: Your technology bias can tend to drive decisions in a less than objective manner.   I have to admit I sometimes do that….not always, but maybe more often that I should or it wouldn’t have been on my feedback request.  My response – Ask more questions, leave the topic on the floor longer and have more  discussion before throwing out a direction or saying no to something.

So now the big question to you as a reader.  Are you willing to open yourself up to this type of review from your teams and direct reports?  Are you willing to expose your weaknesses to everyone while you stand in front of them?  To me it was an easy decision and one that I take to heart, how can you be an effective leader if you don’t know this type of information.

I’d say you could do this at work, at home, and with your friends.  Don’t we kind of already do that in many areas of our life?

Good luck with doing a 360 and I’d love to hear back from anyone who does it and how it works for you.

Yesterday I had a chance to meet with my entire team followed-up with a couple of my direct reports for a bit of 360degree feedback on my performance as the Chief Geek(aka CIO).  Most of the conversation was what I expected it to be, but there were other aspects of the conversation that I did not expect.

First let me set the stage a bit:

1. I am the type of person that really likes honest and non-filtered feedback (don’t candy coat it for me).
2. I silicate such feedback any time I get the chance (Your not going to get in trouble if your honest and respectful).
3. If your not hearing things that challenge you your most likely not getting the truth about your performance (nobody is perfect)
4. You won’t be able to have a 100% fan club (someone will always think you should do it a different way)

Next up, very honest feedback (brutal honesty is best) and if you get it you know your people are comfortable with giving honest and constructive feedback.  I’m not supportive of a negative feedback loop or a complaint box, in fact it’s just the opposite.  Feedback should be presented in a way that moves everyone involved toward greatness as a team, it should provide solutions not complaints, and it should foster growth and a higher level of maturity in your organization.  If you “As a Leader” are not setting the context for your team and you don’t accept feedback that your missing the mark, how are you going to know how to correct it.

Analogy: I’m a pilot so I like to use pilot analogies.  If I’m flying IFR (Instrument Flight Rating)  I better trust that my instruments are giving me honest feedback or I might fly straight into the side of a mountain.  As the pilot I should also trust that feedback is accurate feedback.  If the instruments are telling me the “truth” but I don’t accept it’s true I’m in big trouble.  As a student pilot working on an IFR rating you initially don’t trust your instruments, you trust your body and how it feels.  Similarly you may not trust your team feedback at first and instead rely solely on your previous experiences and intuition.  In IFR Training you find that you senses can be tricked and ultimately lead you in making bad decisions.  Many hours into the IFR training you learn that your senses may tell you that you’re flying banked left and nose up but your instruments tell you that your level and nose down the question is do you trust the instruments or your senses?   This is the same with your team feedback, at first you have a hard time trusting the feedback and that might be good until you build a model you can trust.  Over time your team gets more comfortable and you hone in the feedback loop to provide honest feedback you learn to trust and navigate.

I’m not making the argument that everything is a committee decision process in management and that everything you do as a leader should be solely based on a 360degree decision process but when it comes to getting feedback you must allow and model a process that provides honest feedback to you and your leadership style and then filter out the parts that are simply just venting vs. constructive feedback.

This of course is only one aspect of feedback and leadership but one I think about often as I prefer an honest feedback system.  In the spirit of getting honest feedback, tell me what you think about this concept and how you give your teams the ability to feedback information to you about you.

To wrap up with the story, I was given thoughtful and direct criticism in a few areas of my management style.  This felt good and it’s a great model if you can muster up the guts to accept it.  I welcome open criticism in all aspects of my management style and I enjoy the challenge to change my approach if my approaches are not working.

The Question is are you open and willing as a leader of people to accept criticism no matter what it might be.  Are you willing to change the way you lead and manage your people?

There are many ways to approaches to accept change, one way is to simply avoid it and hope it goes away, another (much better) is to accept it openly and drive toward making changes that better you, your team and your organization as a whole.

What’s my plan: I’m planning to take action on the feedback I received (as I do on a normal basis).  I will put it in my 90 day plans, put a goal around solving it and what the outcome would be.  Then I plan to share it with the people who gave me that feedback.

Reaching out to the minds you work with and getting input and how something as small as a 1.5 hour lunch can change everything.

Last month I had my administrative assistant setup appointments for me to have lunch with all my employees.  I have a large number of them so I wanted to take two at a time to lunch, each one being in a different team.  I felt this would allow some cross pollination at the lunches and bring an interesting dynamic.  Yesterday was the first lunch and it was an amazing 1.5 hours.  I was able to gain insight from the day to day activities, ask questions, and allow them to be very honest and frank with me as they wanted: no holes bared.

What I gained out of the lunch was a much larger insight into some areas in my organization that need attention.  Areas that the teams support and perform in, in spite of challenges that tend to slow them down.  I asked a lot of questions, questions like; what can we do to speed up things for our teams, what can I do to help empower you and your teams better.  What I got back was some very direct answers that will help me with my roadmap for the department in 2010.  It will also benefit our customers by making our development cycles much faster moving forward.

I also gained insight into their desires to help grow the company, help other people in the teams external to them and overall make the department and the company a success for delivering value to our customers.  This was exciting for me to hear and watch as the conversation continued.

I’m now able to look at my next 90 days in a new way with the input provided from the lunch.

Question: Are you having lunch with your teams?  Are you getting you game on for the next 90 days with input from the teams?  I can tell you my new plan will for sure include that as a model to feed my plans going forward.

I recently updated my Garage band and found that I could once again use my AU’s like they use to work in the older version of Garageband.  I’m a big fan of POD Farm from Line 6 and how it works as a native AU inside of Garageband.  I wasn’t happy however after I upgraded to Ilife 09 and it no longer worked.

Here are just a couple quick tracks I threw together using POD farm.
Jazz-in-it
Slow Burn

What type of CEO, CFO, COO, CIO – EI-EI-O do you work for? Do you work in a company with a Digital or an Analog boss? I read a blog post the other day talking about Digital CEO’s and how they differ from traditional CEO’s of yester-year. Overall, the article got me thinking about leaders in a company in general and how they operate within their organziation. As a CIO I consider myself to be digital vs. analog but I felt I’d better put myself to the test to be sure.

Some of the questions I came up with to validate the digital concept ultimatley revolved around my interaction points, my communiction style, my information sourcing, etc. Here is the list I have so far, please feel free to comment or send me an email if you have others because I’d like to add to the list.

The list below shows a form of doing something on the left (Analog) vs. the same thing on the right (Digital) and if you have a preference. The first example would be how you prefer your admin update you with events throughout the day.

List of contrasts Analog <-> Digital: Prefered models.

• Voice Mail, Memo <-> email, twitter, texting
• Written Memos <->Evernote, iPhone Note Sync
• Long eMail’s <->Twitter, FaceBook group chat.
• Phone Calls <->Twitter, Texting
• Recruiters <->Job Boards, Linked-In, Twitter, FaceBook
• News Papers <-> Twitter, Blogs
• Paper Advertisements <-> Craig’s List, ebay

An excerpt from the blog says this “The business value produced by IT is significantly higher, when the organization is lead by a digital CEO” and I 100% agree with the statement.

As a CIO I also like working for a Digital CEO- A CEO who is constantly pushing for new media outlets, asking about how we are dealing with new technologies, pushing for metrics and better BI, who is passionate about our digital products and consistently challenging the analog. This keeps things exciting and new and it also keeps me on my toes to stay one step ahead.

In today’s business, technology is key to  productivity.  However, unless properly managed it can bleed a company out rapidly with high burn rates.  Having a CEO that is involved in the leadership of IT creates a natural push for a results driven IT organization and fosters trust vs. an IT Organization that is miss understood, mistrusted and most often failing to complete projects required to keep the business ahead of it’s competition.

Today I had a chance to read about a new book from Keith Curtis titled “After the Software Wars” which I promptly ordered from Amazon.  In Keith’s book he talks about his time at Microsoft and his movement toward open source and his migration to Linux.  This along with comments and his blog got me thinking about the impact to all things social.  Why is open source and Linux growing so much?  Why is open office finally becoming a competitor to MS Office?  Why do folks build things like Tweetdeck or Adium only to give them away?   What makes social (open source) software better than proprietary (closed) software?  To me the answer is dead simple; it’s all about Social interaction and communities.  Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, and many others are all growing at a rapid pace because they bring people together to share knowledge, stay informed and to feel like they are ultimately part of a community.  Open source software does the exact same thing by bringing developers and users together to support a community which is vested in a particular need fulfilled by the software they write and use.  One of the most prolific open source projects I’ve been around for years has been the Mambo / Joomla efforts and Wordpress

Joomla is a very good example of value software, software that fills a need in the world and it’s all for free.   Joomla has a very large community with hundreds of add-on’s to the stack created by other open source developers in it’s community.  Many of these plug-ins or add-on’s are free as well as some which offer commercial components.  The greats part about the software is the massive community behind it.

Wordpress would also be another great example of mass adoption and growth through social structure.  Wordpress 2.8 download counter show well over 900,000 downloads of the software. Google finds 5.8million sites containing the string”powered by Wordpress”;  Granted there will be duplicates listed and many that have never even been indexed but the fact remains it’s extensively supported by the masses.

In general the same factors that drive extreme growth in social media tools like Facebook and Twitter ultimately contribute to bigger causes such as Linux, Apache, Wordpress, Joomla and thousands of other software applications or perhaps we could call them social applications or social development teams.  Over the years I’ve worked in many teams in many capacities such as developer, designer, manager, team lead, etc and one thing that always made my job fun was the social aspects of working with a team.  Teams are powerhouses if they function properly, and teams are unstoppable if they all have the same goal.  I don’t know that I really have a point to this post and I’m more or less rambling on and on, but if I were to make a point it would be something like this.

• If you work along you really should on board with some team somewhere (opensource or other).
• If your on a team, be a team player with good listening skills and contribute to your team daily.
• If you’ve never worked in a team or you’ve never been a team player, it’s time to step it up because it will be the most rewarding function of your job no matter what your position.

Long story short (Be Social! and give back what you take and more.  Writing great software and giving it to the community is a “giving back” model and thousands will benifit from you and your teams efforts.

Strange title wouldn’t you say, and a shocking one if it’s you receiving the news.  Just for the record this is a hypothetical post of ‘what if’.  What If – you were told today by your boss that he had just hired a consultant who was a previous (your title here) and that person would be working in your area for the next 90 days.

Would you

1. Freak out and assume your days are numbered
2. Go back to your desk and figure out your approach for the next 90 days and what this person might do if they were given your job today?

That is what I want to talk about in this post.  You’re next 90 days on the job and what you’re going to be doing.  So often it seems that when people are in job for years they get complacent and they do the same thing over and over and never really evaluate what their replacement (should one be hired) would do in the next 90 days.  I ask that question every 90 days to try and keep myself progressive and moving with the company, the CEO and the vision as well as constantly challenging my management and teams to keep getting better.  There is a great book from “Harvard Business School Press” entitled [The First 90 Days] this book is a MUST READ for anyone who is leading in a company, no matter what your position is.

When I get to the office (usually early) I sit down and jot out my notes, look at my schedule, read my twitter feed to get a feel for what’s going on as of late and I put my plan of attack in action for the day and to align with the next 90 days of goals.  I know this seems trivial but it’s key to helping build highly effective goals and teams.  Without goals teams and individuals eventually slip into the normal day-to-day grind.  Goals have many forms: creating a completed user story, a sprint task for development, setting up a router, addressing a problem employee, and just about anything else you can think of could qualify as a goal so long as it fits into the 90 day big picture.   Keep in mind people need to have a goal having a reason, this helps create buy-in and a way to collaborate over the goals or taks and collaboration helps accountability.  The trick, is getting the _TEAM_ or the _PERSON_   setting  goals for themselves in 90 day increments (sometimes 30 days are better depending on the team).

I’m currently re-reading for about the 5th time “The First 90 Days” just because I think it’s THAT good.  There are only a few books on my bookshelf that I feel are like that, another one being [Tactical Transparency] which I just finished for the 5th time also last week.  Why read them over so many times?  It’s like a conference it doesn’t all get into the brain the first time so going over it again and again just like the 10,000 hour rule  [Outliers] helps etch it into the brain as a natural habit.

Here is my typical morning:

5:45 – Up and at the Gym (Running or lifting)
6:45 – At the Office with Starbucks on my desk.
7:00 – TweetDeck open and reading, RSS Reader in the other monitor
7:30 – Catch up  on any emails from day before and last night and respond
8:00 – Write goals for the day that should dovetail into the 90 day strategy you setup
9:00 – First meeting.

Notice I gave myself short chunks of time to be 100% ready to face the day, informed, updated, goals set and ready for that first meeting usually with management teams.

Your day may not be meeting with a management team but it for sure should start with your goals for the day, your road map.

What’s on my goal list?
You might wonder what is on my goal list.  Often it’s the items on my previous days goal list that I was not able to complete due to things that came up ad-hoc throughout the day.  This model is OK because it keeps the goals on track for closure in 90 days.

Do I always complete ALL my goals  in 90 days like I planed? Almost never, but any that don’t get done just go into the next 90 days with new priorities.

What would you’re replacement do in the next 90 days is haunting question, but one that you should be prepared for and working to short circuit so you never hear it.

Going to Boise from San Diego seems to be either thru Utah, Denver, LA or SFO. We took the SFO route with united to get home the soonest. While I was at the SFO airport killing some time between flights I decided to catch up on my twitter feed and see what was the rumbling going on out there in the world. Turns out it was good info (as normal) and that there was some great talk, url’s and general info on the new iPhone 3S. I also found out some great world info, creative sites, etc. 20 minutes later I felt up to date and ready to eat some lunch and head to the plane. On the leg from SFO to Boise I looked toward the front of the plane as I was grinding through an audio book [twitter power] and I saw an older fellow I’d guess about 65+ reading a newspaper. One of the headlines on the page he had exposed to the back of the bus was titled “New iPhone details coming soon”. I kind of had to chuckle because before that ink had even dried I’m sure there were tweets going on all about what the article was only then eluding to. I had already seen photos, read comments and articles and this poor man was just getting his appetite for tomorrows ink. This got my head wound up with several thoughts that I’m going to post here. I don’t think they are anything profound but I hope to get a comment or two about them.

1. How can paper companies survive what seems to be one after another going bankrupt? How can they bring in the social aspects (book: Tactical Transparency – A very good read).
2. What age group reads the paper? How many are currently in transition and just need help making the switch? I’d think it won’t be long.

After thinking about that for a few minutes I faded back to my hotel room for the last week. Every day when leaving the motel room I’d have the WSJ sitting in front of the door as if to say “you should read me”. I would pick it up and toss it in the trash and proceed to get real time relevant news, stocks etc on my iPhone. I would have done much of that on my laptop but the hotel did not offer free wifi! Hey Hyatt, I have an idea for you, are you ready to listen? How about you give me the option when I check in to get WSJ or free wifi? How about you give me the option to have my Sheets changed every 2-3 days and knock off 10 bucks from my 20$ parking fee that we know didn’t cost you anything.

Ok I’m ranting. I like the Hyatt, they are always friendly but always seem to stick it to me with parking and that part drives me nuts but that’s not the topic of this post perhaps another day. I guess I’d have to admit I’ve never read the paper and I’ve always found my news and information online where I can read comments and find out other peoples views (much more fun). Let me know what you think about papers survival and if your a paper reader educate me as to why you are still doing it that way I’d love to know.

So tonight I decided to see if I could get a few things converted over from my last windows XP box I use for recording and onto my mac using garage band. I’ve always been a big user of sonar and I just hated to update again. I decided to take the leap and get the gearbox(line6) and Garage band working so I could try and lay down a test track. Well here it is in all of it’s 25 seconds of glory with me on the tracks. Drums are a loop.

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