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Why Don't More CIOs Become CEO?
jcatcw writes "Thornton May is mystified by the very small number of Fortune 500 companies that led by former CIOs. "Knowing what we know about CIOs — that is, that most are smart, hardworking, supremely aware of how the business works and increasingly savvy regarding the workings of external customers' minds — the failure of more CIOs to become CEO has to be one of the biggest mysteries of our age.""
Obviously Thorton hasn't been around to smell the aftereffects of an all-night coding session.
How about, they can be productive, stay on the cool technology, and get good pay with only a fraction of the corporate governance bullshit.
As long as board members are choosen from the non-technical, management side, those same board members will pick non-technical peopel to head their company.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
We wouldn't be geeks if we didn't enjoy working with the new equipment.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Good to know this has replaced 'how do all the socks disappear in the dryer?' as the greatest mystery of our age.
"most are smart, hardworking, supremely aware of how the business works and increasingly savvy regarding the workings of external customers' minds"
.... PHB.
Which is exactly opposite of what is required by CEOs, who almost by definition should be stupid, lazy, unaware of anything let alone the business they are in, and have complete disregard for customers.
There is a reason we call them
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
It's because CIOs, being smarter, tend to be females and thus artificially kept down by the glass ceiling! Die patriarchy!!twelve!!1
the failure of more CIOs to become CEO has to be one of the biggest mysteries of our age
Not at all. CEOs are hired by boards of directors, the vast majority of whom are not comprised of current or former CIOs. It's the same reasoning that has lead to the grossly inflated paychecks and bonuses that we see CEOs getting today: many members of the board have apirations to becoming a CEO. It's a continuation of the "old boys' club" on an even more pervasive scale. Until shareholders start demanding different behavior by voting with their investment funds, the situation isn't likely to change.
Given that most CEO's come from a financial background (accounting), and the position of CEO typically mandates this knowledge, it's probably one good reason why the transition to CEO from CIO is not as less common than from other positions.
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
Most CEOs are former SALESMEN. Check out their careers. You'll see that most, if not all, were in Sales or Marketing at one or more points in their careers.
Boards NEED someone at the top of the company who understands what Sales and Marketing NEED. After all, no matter how superior your product is *cough*betamax*cough* if it does not sell, your company goes down the tubes. Not the internet tubes, the other kind.
No big conspiracy here. Just boards doing what they have always done.
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
The CIO is basically the manager of a technical function. The CEO probably got to be the CEO by being very good at back room politics and perhaps by being a bit psychopathic. In a fight between the CEO and the CIO, the fight is over before the CIO knows there is a fight. It is beyond naive to think that a CEO got to that position merely by being a really good manager.
Most board members are chosen by the CEO. So, chances are excellent they don't want to report to an underling at the board meeting.
One of the major misconceptions most people have is they assume "the board" keeps the CEO in line. That's the exception, not the rule. It's a club people.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Most CIO's are burnt out and the perception that CEO's must come from the business side of the house.
Most CIO's are asked to the impossible these days and they only last about 4 years in their job.
Keep costs low, keep talent without raises, outsource-insource, keep up with the Jones's, make thing
more efficient, work with all areas of the business ( but other areas of the business doesn't want to
work with you.)
Who wants that for very long? The pay is nice for so long until you pull your hair out and look out
the window and think that installing sprinklers is a lot easier and you get the winters off.
It's a catch-22. To be a good CIO you have to spend a lot of time working on understanding technology. That cuts down on the "face time" you have with people who pick CEO's. CXO's (X!=I) have jobs in which "face time" is most of the job. Besides a good CIO is too valuable to be squandered as CEO ; any self serving slob can be CEO as long as she/he gives content free sound bites. Finding a good CIO who will keep you in a position to seemlessly meet future needs while not spending you into bankruptcy is hard.
They are paid to manage IT, not run a company. It's a big leap from one to the other.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
You're absolutely right.
CEO's come from a company's profit centers- sales and marketing. COO's come from a company's cost centers- operations, production, and IT. COOs rarely jump to become CEOs. The board that picks the CEO is almost always interested in maximizing profit, never interested in minimizing loss.
What a strange bird is the pelican, his beak can hold more than his belly can.
Perhaps being intelligent, hardworking, and having a thorough knowledge of the company and how it works are not the most important factor in being CEO?
The similarity between CEOs and sociopaths has been pointed out before. From a Psychology Today article
More music, fewer hits
"Knowing what we know about CIOs -- that is, that most are smart, hardworking, supremely aware of how the business works and increasingly savvy regarding the workings of external customers' minds -- the failure of more CIOs to become CEO has to be one of the biggest mysteries of our age."
I don't really see it that way. Unlike the CEO, CFO, President, board members, etc., the CIO's focus is internal rather than external. The CIO's "customer" is generally his or her own company itself. Why would a company risk promoting someone who's focus is inward-looking into a position where they have to look outwards as well?
The job of a CIO is to paint an honest and true picture grounded firmly in reality, and protect it from those who would engage in wishful thinking. The person who becomes a CIO is the person who has made it their lifes work to operate in this mode, and achieved the trust and respect of their peers by their effectiveness in doing so.
The job of a CEO is to paint a glowing and radiant picture firmly grounded in the hopes and dreams of investors, and protect it from those who would engage in critical thinking. The person who becomes a CEO is the person who has made it their lifes work to understand what others want and convince them it is just around the next bend, thus eliciting their ongoing co-operation.
Someone who has forged themselves into CIO material is most likely not going to be very good or happy at the CEO job for that reason. They require different personality strengths.
I often contemplate how we as a society can structure things so the guy who is telling the truth is a more effective organizational representative than the guy who likes to spin lies and half-truths. No answers yet..
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
IT is considered a "support function", making it difficult from people from that department to break into the top offices.
It's why you only see fighter pilots at the top of the Air Force and past carrier skippers at the top of the Navy, etc. You could be a great transport pilot, sub driver or the logistics guy that ran the Berlin Airlift, but you'll never make it to the top.
Why? I guess you could call it "Institutional Bias".
Look Out Above!
...the failure of more CIOs to become CEO has to be one of the biggest mysteries of our age.
Not really. Most CEOs are pathological liars and most CIOs can't think that far outside of the box.
...Doom 3 is not considered a mandatory CEO skill.
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
In the UK a lot of Finance Directors (CFOs in the US I suppose) in fact become Managing Director (CEO equivalent) it's the main reason that accountancy is so popular amongst graduates.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I'd rather choose a person who know business than one who knows computers to lead a company. True, a LOT of businessmen are incompetent and don't know squat about anything, but at the end of the day you have to see a business through a businessperson's eyes. That means taking into account issues which might not be regularly considered by other experts.
Look, I'm a computer guy and I despise the fact that many people cannot understand the difficulties in my profession, but I do know that you have to get your shit straight to negotiate with salesmen, accountants, and clients, while projecting the ideas of a company and making sure that all specialties within a company are working fine. Like computer professions, business has aspects that are more art than science, and talented people can squeeze it for all its worth.
The two most likely answers for all of this kind of question are:
Because {X} don't want to.
Because {X} didn't contain enough individuals with the correct aptitude.
In this case (rarely enough) there is a plausible third answer:
Because finance directors know where the skeletons are buried and sales directors put them there in the first place.
But I'm still betting that nearly 100% of the reason is caused by the first two generic points.
Beep beep.
When I'm in meetings with CEOS, bankers, "investors" and other purely "business" people, with no production merit, they usually roll their eyes whenever someone mentions something technical, or even just relating directly to the technology, as if it were important to the business. These businesspeople have social skills, even if limited to boardroom power games, and sometimes technical skills in finance, marketing, or the law. But they never let their own "techinical" skills or jargon show in these meetings with "outsiders". They have instead learned to dumb down their expertise to talk purely colloquially with nontechnical people.
Pure technologists rarely learn to dumb down like that. Partly because the knowledge itself is the most valuable, not the person who has it. Partly because tech is a language itself, which suffers from obfuscation and euphamism. So do the other technical communications, like finance and management, but those execs have long ago learned to ignore the imprecision and downright coverups, unless they feel their own power directly threatened by it.
CIOs are much more like other execs than like other technologists. The most successful ones are those least competent in tech itself, preferring instead to work on social competence like the rest of the execs with whom they deal. But the other execs still don't trust the CIOs, because they are still more likely to tell the truth about the core business, or just something else the rest of the execs don't understand, which would make the majority of the power holders look bad.
Eventually CIOs will become as disconnected from the technology and its culture as are the rest of the execs from wherever they draw their power. Then CIOs will become CEOs more often, like CFOs and CMOs (though marketing execs hide their pedigree for exactly the opposite reason, confirming the duplicity). Eventually no one will know what they're talking about when they spout expertise, but they will know each other very well. CIOs will win, and the products, the company, and the customers will all lose.
--
make install -not war
The CIO skillset is, in some ways, more valuable than that of a CEO. What qualities would we find in an almost-CEO-ready CIO? They can accurate forward-project costs and revenue, they understand market forces and build their plant to be scalable to those forces and their variances. They respect the value of marketing, sales, finance and operations in the context of their job.
Guess what? There are very few such CIOs. If you find one, would you really want to "promote" them to the CEO position, and potentially destroy the productivity engine that they have created?
I have served in the role of CEO, VP Engineering, CIO and CTO. Sometime I feel my strongest value is understanding computer science, software engineering and project planning, so hearing a plan I can confidently say "that's a reasonable thing to do" or "the vendor says you will spend only $1M on that, but I can assure you it will balloon into $10M."
So that begs the question: With so much of the company riding on a good information architecture and good IT decisions, should such a person be the CEO, or left where they do the most good? Maybe the right answer is just to compensate that person like a CEO, since their value in that role is so high.
As simple as this: CIOs don't have enough experience selling (if they have any).
The CEO is your marketer-in-chief: (s)he's selling how good the company is to your stakeholders, clients, and even suppliers (want a better, big, deal? ask 'em to talk with your CEO).
CIOs are not trained for that.
mootion.com - Never underestimate VCs stock options (was: Web 2.0)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"Knowing what we know about CIOs -- that is, that most are smart, hardworking, ...
... supremely aware of how the business works ...
... and increasingly savvy regarding the workings of external customers' minds ...
... the failure of more CIOs to become CEO has to be one of the biggest mysteries of our age."
No argument there.
No, they are supremely aware of how one segment of the business works. An important segment, but still a limited view.
No, that would probably be sales/marketing or operations depending on the nature of the business.
I'd suggest pondering a company that has been an aggressive and pioneering user of IT since 1969, Wal-Mart. Despite being one of the most consistently successful firms with respect to IT, their long term strategy has been that IT is a temporary assignment. That managers are "merchants first", something else secondarily. Now a side effect of this is perhaps to spread IT knowledge throughout management.
I would argue that business success is largely based upon stategy, and IT is more of an implementor of stategy, not as much a formulator of strategy. IT skills are valuable, but being a people-person, a motivator, a leader, is critical for a CEO. I'd wager that if we took a close look at those CIOs who rose to CEOs we would find a lot of experience outside of IT. One long term stategy for becoming a CEO is to take stretch assignment outside of one's comfort zone, to work in more than one discipline within the company. I expect that CIO was merely the last such assignment, not that someone spent an entire career in IT and became CEO.
You've just hit the nail on the head, at least for my company. Here, it's the salesmen whose careers are more upwardly mobile, while us peon engineers sit at the bottom. It makes a lot of sense - they're good at spinning reality and selling themselves, regardless of the veracity of their managing ability. So because of personal appeal to their superiors, they tend to get promoted. (and upper management is always claiming that we're a meritocracy - yeah right!)
I have lots of misgivings about this, because in my particular company, the manager who's really great at sales, is good at pitching the product in untruthful ways. I suppose that might be good for our company, because he brings in business (sometimes unprofitably), but when he starts "selling" to us employees, we may initially be happy, but we become very unhappy, and later disenfranchised when we find out his pitch is really only bait and switch. And because he's not an engineer, he makes lots of stupid decisions. The morale of my company is now at an all-time low, and I'm about to start losing coworkers left and right.
I've become accustomed to distrusting salesmen. My opinion is that, to be a successful salesman, they really can't be 100% honest. Their goal is to do what is best for the company, which is not necessarily what is best for the customer. And from my experience, it's a personality thing - not something they can turn off and on. As a developer, you really can't sell your design to another developer (or the computer) if your design doesn't have merit. The developers that I know have always been more straightforward and honest than salesmen. And much more in touch with reality.
CIOs have been unable to escalate to the CEO position because they cannot synergize the corporate enterprise environment into a sigma six solution in a manner that evasperates the board and homogenizes the company.
I'm pretty certain I made up a few words there, but if I said that to a CEO s/he'd likely nod and say "Why, you're absolutely correct!"
And that's why CIOs can't obtain the CEO position.
CIOs are nerds. CEOs have to be able to deal with people.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
To misquote Shakespeare: Kill all the politicians.
Being a CEO isn't as much about knowing the nuts and bolts of a company as it is about knowing the BUSINESS of the nuts and bolts of the company. The CEO is managing, not micromanaging. That's what the COO and CIO are for: to take care of the details while the CEO is schmoozing and networking and doing strategic planning.
Not only is your post accurate, at the risk of stealing some of your thunder, it's not even news. My question, why are people still wondering why few CIO's become CEO's?
Same reason why the mail boy will never be CEO... The American dream is a lie
It's the same reason that CFOs rarely rise to CEO. The CEO is almost always the head of a major profit center before becoming CEO, CIOs and CFOs are cost centers, so no matter how talented the manager might be, they'll almost always be over looked. If you are a CIO and want to become a CEO, either start your own firm or follow the path's of other CEOs.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Alot of CIO's aren't seen as trustworthy by other management staff. The fact that they control such a vital part of the business that others know nothing about is frightening. Also they tend to be blamed for others' lack of technological knowledge. People think their IT departments are poorly managed.
the best CEO's seem to be former sales people. They can promote the company and aren't shy about asking customers for money. Many CIO's lack extensive P&L experience as IT, in most companies, is a cost center. Without that critical P&L experience, making the transition to CEO, especially at the Global 2000 level is difficult.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I would agree with that, but they must be more than just sales skills. They also need:
- business and financial acumen so they know how to structure the business and deals
- tech savvy (or the savvy of whatever product they are working on) so they can talk about it intelligently
- leadership skills so people will follow them into battle.
It's a complicated, stressful job, especially in smaller companies where you have less support. I've seen a few CEO's burn out in my time, maybe the CIOs have see that firsthand and avoid it.
You had me at merlot
Because they tend to have a conscience and feel bad about screwing people?
Sure many CEOs are smart, hardworking and zero bullshit, but the majority of successful CEOs are more concerned with being figure heads that articulate well and improve investor confidence.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
You become CEO bcause of who you know.
Hi, Yale! Hi, Wharton!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
>Most CEOs are former SALESMEN. Check out their careers.
c hive/2006/11/27/8394334/index.htm
i nfo/FromPersonIdPersonTearsheet.jhtml?passedPerson Id=940473
I agree this is the most common path for CEOs. To reach CEO you have to make a lot of alliances and sell a lot of B.S. to everyone about the company even when the compnay is in bad shape. In a perfect world, rational, clear thinking, no nonsense people would be CEOs. But to get noticed the need to have lots of face time with other "visionaries" and B.S. ers. Hence it mainly a culture problem.
Take a look at John Swainson. While CA was screwed up before John became CEO, John has taken it to new lows.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_ar
Notice that his background is in guess what "sales".
http://www.forbes.com/finance/mktguideapps/person
What CA needs is someone who founded thier own company at some point. Someone who knows how to analize and fix real problems and not just make empty statements about how the company will grow. But hey as long as the majority stock holders are Wall Street Mutal Funds, he only has to suck up to them to get by.
"Most board members are chosen by the CEO"
I sorry, what? AFAEK, the Board hires a CEO to run the company. Members of the board themselves are elected by the general meeting of shareholders.
I don't have a sig.
now that all the CEO's are in jail.
"...the failure of more CIOs to become CEO has to be one of the biggest mysteries of our age"
When it comes to CIOs, there are at least two types of individuals involved. [a] Those that did this, that & the other, eventually finding themselves as CIO's [b] Those that did the very same things, came from the same backgrounds, had the same basic skill sets, etc., yet never served as CIOs, eventually finding themselves as CEOs.
An assumption/expectation that a CIO's next step is to CEO, is analogous to saying "My cat was old and slow and got eaten by large dogs. Why don't more old cats end up being eaten by large dogs? I mean, since they're old and slow, they seem to be prime targets for such a demise. I'm shocked!" Some do, some don't - some die from natural causes...some die from unnatural causes, but mostly, many never get old because they die before joining that particular club. The forking occurs much earlier than this guy thinks, that's all.
The problem there is that often the Sales and Marketing side of the business doesn't understand just what the Technical side can and can't do, and in what amount of time they can or can't do it. So they start promising the moon, when the Technical side can produce maybe the Rocky Mountains. This creates all sorts of worthless and stupid demands on Technical side. (Many of them wind up on TheDailyWTF)
The reason a CIO can't be a CEO is the same reason the CEO you described shouldn't be a CEO- they're too one-sided. A good CEO has handled all parts of a company, from overseeing a development project to handling sales of things to international relations and maybe even helping to clean the bathrooms once or twice. Unfortunatly, too many CEOs (and other members of the board) wind up as you describe.
Also, I put forth that you don't need superior Sales and Market if you have a high quality product. I have never seen a single advertisement for Pez, yet those things sell like... well, like candy. Even the tie-ins with comics or games or movies don't get any advertising from Pez themselves.
It's purely random who applies for and gets what job. It couldn't be a result of discrimination, or a lack of multiculturalism and perversity. Just ask Eric Cartman. This second guessing and conspiracy stuff has got to stop.
Exactly. Most CEO's are preeminently salesmen, an activity which definitely has distinct personality characteristics. These are not at all the standout personality characteristics of good CIO's.
And know better than to jump from the warming plate into the oven.
President's positions also have a short half-life, if they other reasons don't mean much.
>most (CIO's) are smart, hardworking, supremely aware of how the business works and increasingly savvy regarding the workings of external customers' minds
WTF does any of that have to do with being a CEO?Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
CIO stands for: Career Is Over
Most CIOs are even more socially backward than most CEOs.
On the other hand, remember Ted Turner saying the AOL acquisition by Warner was "better than sex". Every company I know suffers from the CEO's lack of technical knowledge.
Maybe there are some socially skilled CIOs. However, there is VERY little respect for technical knowledge in our culture, so they are not likely to be considered.
--
U.S. government violence in Iraq caused more violence, not peaceful democracy.
"One of the biggest mysteries of our age?" Give me a freaking break.
(%i1) factor(777353);
(%o1) 777353
Same reason why Good Surgeons are not good pediatricians and vice versa.
I remember reading in TIME: An entrepreneur is more valuable than a PhD guy because of the single reason an entrepreneur has to deal with multitude variables, be diplomatic, generally be a jack of all trades, while a PhD just needs to be master of one.
CEO jobs involving massaging the egos of a hundred bankers, suck up to the board, be stern with unions, talk to the chinese factory manager to make sure he is not selling on sly, look at the stock price for quarterly financial projects, discuss with CFO about outsourcing versus insourcing benefits, buy a yacht or the condo in Vegas...there are a million things to occupy a CEO and yet keep smiling.
CIOs need to b e PhD. CEO's are not and don't need to be. Heck you don't even need to graduate from college, claim that "640K ought to be enough for everybody" and yet be a CEO.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
It's the same reason that the VP of Facilities or Chief Counsel doesn't become CEO... these are roles that are fundamentally not core to most businesses. Marketing and financial shenanigans are 80% of what a corporate entity is about.
...and CIOs are also, each and every special one of them, pretty and/or handsome, excellent athletes, superb musicians, and they have beautiful handwriting!
(This article is more self-serving than most political rallies....)
Clearly it's I before E *except* after C. Duh
The article rests on Tom Peters' criteria for a CEO. The problem is, Peters made up the 8 criteria first and then fit the data he had (there was also a supposed "admission" in Fast Company Magazine in 2001 that he faked some of it) to those 8 criteria. The book's methodology has been thoroughly discredited, so there's not much point in debating why your CIO doesn't fit 8 made-up and kinda vague criteria when we can't really prove any other CEO lives up to them either.
Your CIO isn't CEO because IT isn't your company's core business. Why doesn't your head groundskeeper get promoted to CEO?
It's the nature of the beast. If we slashdotters were to take the Myer-Briggs test (sp?), probably 80-90% would be INTP, if not more. And as we know, INTP types are not natural born leaders. A reputable IT guy won't tell you a bold faced lie to your face. A CEO will. They can. They have that mindset.
"No, no, no, don't tug on that! You never know what it might be attached to."
Think about it, if the Fortune 500 companies each chip in $100,000 and institute a Document Exchange Format and Protocols Institute and write the spec and own the spec and level the playing field for all their IT vendors, they can reap enormous benefits. Competition benefits the consumer. They are the consumer. They should encourage competition. Thank God, these bunch of morons dont often become the CEOs.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Politicans are there to fill a role we as society asked them to fill by creating it, wielding power we gave them by our continued participation.
Part of the answer involves making them obsolete as a role.
The general idea I have is to:
a) allow people to vote on every issue if they wish, and give them the necessary transparency of process to allow them to do so to the best of their abilities.
b) allow people to delegate their vote to anyone they trust, not just those who signed up on the ballot.
c) allow those who have votes delegated to them (ie they were voted for) to cast their vote on issues the same way before, but add the weight of their personal electorate to their votes.
d) allow people to revoke their vote for a person any time they feel their values are being betrayed by those they elected, allowing them to either cast it themselves or re-assigning it to someone else.
This deals with the two major issues facing modern democratic process:
1) Sometimes there's no one to vote for that you trust but they get to speak for you anyways regardless of if you vote or not.
2) Sometimes the person you voted for betrays you and you have no way to remove from them the power of your support for several years without overthrowing the system.
Like I said... I'm still working on it...
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
It's like saying brain surgeons are smart. You have to be smart to fly a plane. So, why aren't all brain surgeons pilots?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
CEO's (should be) are outward focused. They steer the ship where, if they are correct, it is supposed to be to return the most value, blah blah. That's their job and their responsibility. It's not just about the product, but also about regulatory and personnel issues, accounting, and competition, all significant hazards to be avoided. Yes, of course it's about "the customer," but not in the belly-button staring sense most customers think. "The customer is always right" means the customer knows what he or she wants to buy (including services and treatment) therefore the corporation must produce products and services and treatment that the customer will buy in advance of their doing so, in the hopes that they will, e.g. iPhone.
The CIO, on the other hand, is very inward focused or, if recently enlightened, certainly has an inward focused background. It's about code and deadlines and infrastructure support. These are the guys who oil the pumps and valves that keep that whonking 100,000 HP steam engine in the bowels of the ship working. They don't stear the ship. They don't decide where it's going to go. They don't even have to know the mission. They are responsible for making sure it gets there in good shape. In many cases, they don't even have time to go above deck and look outside.
It is very rare for an engineering officer to make Admiral, even rarer for a supply officer or personnel officer, or, for that matter, a medical officer or JAG. These are all support roles, and if you've done your homework, you KNOW THAT IN ADVANCE. Admirals come from the surface warfare officer community or, in the case of carriers, through the aviation route. It's the same in the army: Schwarzkopf was an Infantry Officer, not a technician, who, incidentally, in the lower ranks is ALWAYS subservient to an infantryman of the same rank.
If a potential CIO is interested in doing the CEO thing, the best thing for him or her to do is make sure he or she gains significant experience outside the CIO ladder. A significant stint in accounting, personnel, or an "assistant to the CEO" type position will show significantly in the bid to become CEO. Narrowly focusing on just IT will never get you to the Board Room.
I know many of you don't like this. From an idealistic point of view, it's "wrong." because, as anyone here knows, IT people are the smartest, sharpest people ever to walk the planet who KNOW how the world works, REALLY. They deserve to become CEO, and if they don't, there's something wrong with the system, not them, and certainly not their attitude. But as a Board Member (or head hunter) I'm not really interested in whether you know C++ or even if you have managed to keep the servers online 24x7. (Can you imagine a bid for CEO: "I know C++ and Open Source is the way to go and Linux is cool and Bill Gates is an idiot capitalist pig dog.") The fact that you are a proven manager of infrastructure issues is great. That's what is expected of you. Keep doing that. Swap out my PC any time you want. But I want someone who knows precisely where the ship is going for CEO.
The bottom line is that there's a heirarchy out there that exists in every walk of life. Laws to fix heirarchy are artificial; the heirarchy is still there. If you are not the CEO then either you didn't want to be (not always a bad thing?) or you screwed up in your perception of what was necessary to get you there. Whining about it is not going to "fix" anything. Perhaps a little introspection will.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Since IQ is based upon median intelligence (100 = median), wouldn't the list continue to expand as the lower end is knocked off and the median rises? Or is this the clever joke you were constructing? The only way to stay alive would be to maintain vastly more intelligence than the next most intelligent person, but that would only work until you're the last person alive, at which point your IQ would be 100 (based on a sample size of one) and you'd have to jump off a building. Or somesuch...gah!
Now I have a headache, thanks a lot.
Mutant Freaks of Nature: "Frighteningly Addictive"
No seriously. CIO's can't do martini lunches.
Think that's a friviolous comment? You haven't worked around senior management.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
... promotions to managerial positions is the way Nature has found to take morons from the productive chain.
So say we all
Seriously, CIOs generally come with a tech background. To be CEO, you need to know how to make money, because that's what Wall Street demands. And in the real world, your typical publicly traded high tech company isn't really about high tech, it's about profits. You don't often get that kind of experience with a CIO on your way up the ladder to CIO, while the VPs in sales and finance do. Sure there are exceptions, but I don't think we'd need a study to figure out the obvious here. I mean really, how often does the VP of HR, or facilities get to become CEO?...sheesh.
Just another day in Paradise
The CIO position has been around for less time than the CFO and other positions. CEOs are often taken from people that served EVP/CxO level for a few years, and CIOs are still new. Give it a generation and ask the question again.
Learn to love Alaska
Hmm, many of you have stated how engineers are often inferior businessmen, but Microsoft, the world's most successful software company (IMO) has been run by one of its former programmers for many years. Apple, WalMart, and Microsoft are run by very technical individuals. Being a good CIO doesn't necessarily make you a good CEO, but having the traits we idealize in an engineer has lead to the most successful companies in the modern era because they exploited technology to their benefit. I'll pick a competent visionary any day to a good salesman.
Parent is right. This is why most CFO's or CAO's don't become CEO's.
Even though Wall Street likes to say that CEOs have some quality that is in high demand, we all know that quality can be summed up completely with the word "connections". They have no skills. To be a CEO is to have well placed family members or friends. Look at what happens when a CEO gets fired. They generally temporarily put another employee of the company in charge, until they can find another jackass with well placed family members or friends, they almost never promote from within. You don't get promoted to CEO. The only way to get into the CEO game without highly connected family members or friends is to start your own company. And small companies don't generally have CIOs. So that should answer your question.
CEOs are taller and have better hair. CIOs are short and generally balding. EVERYBODY knows short, balding men (and women) don't make good CEOs!
For some, there is more power in the '2nd Seat' as it were. The old adage is that the King does not rule, rather, the closest advisor(s) rule, by feeding the King the information and suggestions that will best influence a decision toward the direction the advisor wants. This insulates them from anything that actually goes wrong, as they simply advised, it was the King that decided.
Because we're too busy making the company work to spend all our time golfing and attending social functions.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
My guess is CIOs tend to have at least a passing familiarity with reality, which disqualifies them for the CEO role.
Will someone please mod the parent up and mod down the grand parent. His information is flat out wrong and it is obvious he has no understanding of how a corporation is ran.
Maybe they're just not spending their marketing dollars on the consumer. They know that if you put a rack of Pez dispensers in the supermarket checkout line, they will sell a bunch of them. So they probably spend their marketing resources making sure they every supermarket has them in every checkout line.
I know from my time in retail that some vendors expend a lot of resources selling their product to retailers and working with retail salespeople.
Don't know why IT types are locked out, but having an MBA is no guarantee either. Check it out, you can count the number of MBA's running Fortune 500's on one hand.
From what I know, this whole line of thought is wrong. If you look at the CEOs of the Fortune 500, the majority of them were CFOs or CAOs with a lot of COOs thrown in. I don't know where this prevalent thought that marketing and sales become CEOs comes from. Maybe in certain industries this is true.
There are many tongues to talk, and but few heads to think. -Victor Hugo
Many geeks aspire to be rich, famous, or powerful. Achieving this without becoming a manager - especially without becoming a CEO - is success, you fail when you have to resort to sleazy trades like sales or management in order to acheive your end goals.
Who wants to be a CEO of a publicly traded company with THAT monster around?
Michael Capellas. When I worked in IT at Compaq, he was my bosses boss. Makes a good case for not having tech people as CEO. he was a very nice guy though.
The three I listed above are what it takes I guess nowandays to make a good CEO. Granted there are some good CEO's out there, and rarely do they get what they deserve. There has been many articles about it on msn money as well. A CIO's job nature is built on trust, and CEO's do whatever it takes possibly to get where they are. A CIO simply does'nt strive to be CEO because of these facts.
The answer is simple. It is because 70-95 per cent of a CEO's job involves sales, sales promotion, or just plain promotion (leadership, goal-setting, etc.) CIOs are usually not charismatic enough to do well in the top sales role.
Note: 70-95 per cent of all statistics are made up on the spot.
Our CIO's job is to do the bidding of the CFO. CIO's policies do not aid the forward progress of the company through technology, but act to hold IT costs to the CFO's predetermined target of 2% of revenues. CIO has promoted outsourcing to the point where no project can get done in a timely manner anymore, which means competitors can beat us to market more easily.
CIO is just a puppet of CFO. Puppets don't become CEOs.
Today's root password is... default!
b) How 'bout if the person isn't qualified for the office (non-citizen, ex-felon, non-resident, termed-out, etc.)? Should the "people's choice" be elected anyway?
d)Hmmm. Rescinding votes. How far back can we go with this? If someone who voted for a bill that has already become law and rescinding that vote changes the outcome, will that earlier vote stand and, if not, will the law be invalidated? If you're from West Virginia, this'd be endless fun! Robert Byrd has been a Senator since 1958 - think of all of the legislation that you'd get the chance to review: the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and every other anti-discrimination law. The Americans with Disabilities Act. Sarbanes-Oxley. You could even vote to impeach President Clinton (he voted Not Guilty)!
Someone who has forged themselves into CIO material is most likely not going to be very good or happy at the CEO job for that reason. They require different personality strengths.
I was with you clear up until you called the dishonesty of the CEO a "personality strength". This must be some strange meaning of the word strength of whick I have not previously been aware.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I found May's utterances utterly superficial and very old-fashioned. First of all, though not many CEOs come from the post as CIO, many top executives have had a stint in the IT part of the organization, learning about what the technology does and how to think about the company as a value producing system. As for the use of Peters and Waterman's book as a sort of criteria for what constitutes a good CEO, that is laughable - the book refers to companies, not CEOs. And it has been utterly debunked many times.
May's article would have been right on about 10 years ago. Back then, the reason CIOs did not make it into the top spot (in fact, 40% of CIOs were fired, and the average tenure was about 2.3 years) was because they did not understand that the skills that got you into the top IT position were not the skills that would keep you there.
In CSC, we conducted a survey of CIOs in the top 1000 corporations in the world, and got a surprising result: Of the 40% of CIOs that were fired, only a few were fired for "not producing cost-effective IT". The rest went because they could not communicate with the top management group, were ineffective change agents, or could not contribute to business strategy development. In other words, when you are a CIO in a large corporation, you are no longer the IT organization's representative into top management, but the other way around. If you cannot make the transition to thinking about the whole company as a system, you are toast.
There are actually quite a few companies where technical competence is visible in top management. Royal Bank of Scotland comes to mind, with one of the most effective IT strategies in the world. At RBS, a central "manufacturing division" handles transactions, IT, HR, and call centers, leaving the branch network - and they have more than 50 brands - to serve customers and grow the business. UPS, Wal-Mart, Amex, Wells Fargo, Royal Bank of Canada, some of the large airlines, Dell, quite a number of telcos, some insurance companies (I particularly like a German one called AMB which runs many insurance companies off the same systems) and many others have top management that understand the impact of IT and think of the whole company as a system. Does that mean that they come from the position as CIO? Not necessarily, though some of them do.
Being a CIO is about information, not IT. For that, you have a CTO or a CIO office that handles the technical pieces. Most of the top CIOs I know worry about the customers and the customer experience. One CIO of a large hotel chain I met worried about the speed of the in-room Internet connection - and whether the ventilation in the bathroom was good enough that you could shave after taking a shower without the mirror getting fogged up.
IT is a tool. It is an important tool, but it is what it does for the customer that matters. And the role of the IT organization is not to make IT elegant - it is to make business elegant. If the tools happen to be boring and the CIO not very visible - so what?
Espen
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that there are many corporations where the chairman and ceo are separate.
Furthermore:
1. The shares of stock in a corporation that have the ability to vote is usually a separate class of stock. Please examine your stock certificates carefully!
2. Major chunks of voting blocks of stock are held by select few in the average corporation. General meetings are practically meaningless.
3. Corporate charters typically forbid the collection of more than a meaningless block of voting shares. Certainly not enough to control a seat on a board.
4. Finally, a corporation that actually would cede control to public markets is the surest sign of an imminent valuation death spiral. This is one reason insider trading is followed so closely.
Textbook examples of corporate governance are that. They have nothing to do with real life. Sadly, you and the moderators believe that's how it actually works.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Speaking as a CTO that moved into a COO role (not of a fortune 500 company)...
CIO/CTO roles are often staffed with technical people. CEO/CFO positions are often staffed with "business" people, more to the point, business people that have affluence. Now affluence is a tricky thing. More often than not, it means you come from money, you are connected with money, you went to an Ivy League school, and participate in organizations to where affluence festers.
I was specifically told by a CFO (CMA in background) that shareholders would never accept me as CEO because I came from a technical school; regardless of how well I knew the business. In a public company, after all, it is the shareholders that elect officers that the previous management/boards put forward. Typically the majority shareholders, the ones that count, are big financial institutions and/or trusts (comprised of that festering pot of affluent people.)
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
New word? A combination of exasperate and evaporates? Meaning to... exasperate until nothing left?
Surviving the corporate culture is just like any of the survivor games ... The inferior competition votes off those most likely to survive first, to improve their own chance of survival. Ask anyone who has been on a show, or just watch one of the series. Also explains why it seems a bunch of dummies are always trying and failing to run the world.
Who would actually create the laws that are voted on?
... they don't have good hair.
"The job of a CIO is to paint an honest and true picture grounded firmly in reality, and protect it from those who would engage in wishful thinking."
ORLY?
You're new to IT, aren't you?
Funniest thing I've heard all day.
"strength" != "virtue"
Someone can be a good liar, but that's not a good thing. Get it?
... most CIOs are NOT "smart, hardworking, supremely aware"?
IT guys are too grounded in reality to take up the bullsh*t marketing crap that a CEO has to do.
Most CIO's couldnt insert a floppy/cd without help. And the FIRST M$crap saleman through the door gets the Contract. They Never ask their tech's what their opinion is! Just ask the IT staff for the State of Alaska. The Governor and his CIO Bud singlehandedly ordered a 6 mointh push to decommission all in place Tech and replace it with ALL Microsoft Solutions And ordered it done before he left office (He was voted out by his Costituents for suspected kickbacks?) And now these are the guys we want running the Company? If they cannot make a "Informed decision" in IT how are they gonna do it on a Top dog Level?
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
Well, the obvious solution to this is for colleges and universities to offer courses in innovation, and to require that CIOs have at least a minor in innovation.
Now I doubt this is going to go over will on /. but when I was in university we noted a - completely non-scientific - pattern that I'll try to sum up as succinctly as possible:
e land.html
'Those who want to work for someone else go into engineering/IT; those who want others to work for them go into the arts.'
If you don't believe me go check out the Forbes 500 richest people list and see how many of them either dropped out or have liberal arts degrees. http://www.forbes.com/lists/2003/02/26/billionair
Now excuse my while I go round up some flame-retardant clothing.
S.
"most are smart, hardworking, supremely aware of how the business works and increasingly savvy regarding the workings of external customers' minds "
What part of that sounds like a CEO?
> I have lots of misgivings about this,
you do? Then you can always vote with your feet and stay true to yourself.
Information technology doesn't take part in revenue generation for most companies, and is viewed as a necessary cost that needs to be minimized. Marketing, sales, and even finance are viewed as revenue generating areas for businesses.
Because a business is striving to grow revenue and improve profits, marketing/sales/finance are viewed more highly for business leadership positions. Also, these guys don't do as much work as CIOs, so they have more time to devote to climbing the ladder. Also a significant portion of their jobs is people-related, so they can form more connections, while CIOs spend more of their time keeping up-to-date with new technologies.
b:
The only thing on your list that even makes sense in this scenario is the "non citizen" part. Everything else seems invalid for this suggested form of republican democracy. Ex Felon? Who cares? Non Resident? Again, who cares? _you_ are the resident. You'd be giving him _your_ vote. Term Limits? You think that there would be term limits here? There aren't even TERMS, let alone term limits.
d:
Isn't it clear that if you pull your support from somebody that it only applies going forward? I mean, every state in the union has a method for recalling a candidate. It's not exactly rare. Every one works the same in this respect.
Look, I don't think it's a very good idea. But you seriously look like you just criticized his post for the sake of criticizing.
Perhaps it's you that should spend a bit more time?
I see a lot of people here putting down there (mis)conceptions about what makes a good CEO.
t hers/dp/0066620996/
The book Good to Great describes the research done by Jim Collins (Built to Last), in which he and his team sorted through a list of 1,435 companies. They focused on the filtered down to the companies that managed to transition from Good companies to Great companies. I'll let the amazon info/reviews give you more detail:
http://www.amazon.com/Good-Great-Companies-Leap-O
One interesting point in this book is that the CEOs at the good to great companies are very different from the image of the Big Bad CEO that everyone buys into. A lot of the CEOs were quiet, shy, self-deprecating individuals that managed to take these middling companies and make them grow like gangbusters.
P.S. reviews mention silver bullets, which triggers some sort of warm fuzzy feeling in my head. hopefully it's not a hemorrhage.
Knowing what we know about CIOs -- that is, that most are smart, hardworking, supremely aware of how the business works and increasingly savvy regarding the workings of external customers' minds -- the failure of more CIOs to become CEO has to be one of the biggest mysteries of our age.
I have never ever seen a CIO with those qualities. If I would become CIO, yes, but not the CIO's I ever worked for. Most of them are just some corporate managers with their heads in their a$$es, believing everything the sales drone for the next best company that presents a nice interface says.
CIO's deciding to move to Vista as fast as possible, CIO's deciding what company-wide software to implement next (even though all the engineers clearly have a lot of work and the new software doesn't add any value). Aargh.
I currently work for a very large company so I don't have contact with the C** anymore but I still sometimes wonder what they're smoking.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Any human being who wants to.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
>If you look at the CEOs of the Fortune 500
Taking the F5 as a representative sample is flawed. There are many, many corporations. There are only 500 in that sample, and represent only the ones with really big volume. It is not necessary or even realistic to be superlative in order to be successful.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I am a CIO right now, of a smallish company (about $50mm revenues projected for this year). I have been CIO of a mid-sized ($1bn revenue) company, and CEO of a small company ($20mm revenue) in the past.
A CEO, at least of a growth company, simply must be the company's number-one salesperson and cheerleader. He or she has to be quite comfortable with all of the risk and uncertainty of entering markets with bigger entrenched players, and the vicissitudes of everything from economic cycles drying up her capital to global competition changing her value proposition by an order of magnitude in ninety days. The CEO must understand all of these risks intellectually, but frankly a great CEO is at least emotionally oblivious to the risks....always believing in the positive outcome. I was told by my subordinates, that as CEO it was my job to absorb uncertainty.
It is my experience that most successful CIOs are master contingency planners -- striving to quantify and avoid or mitigate all risks. Further, they are usually serving internal users, rather than paying, external clients who are protected by contracts and able to fire them.
These two things, in combination, tend to attract people who are not of the cheer leading, external client focused, negotiation oriented, happy to accept rather significant risks everyday mindset that CEOs need.
I think I was a really good CEO. But if I were a VC investing in a company, except in a very few unusual circumstances, I would rather hire a sales & marketing oriented CEO than myself. There are thousands of companies with great products and services, and the difference between success or failure is PURELY in getting the market to accept and pay for their stuff.
Rick.
It's already bad enough that they run an IT department. :p
In all seriousness though, why do people think that a CEO job is just a growth path in a corporate career?
Unless its an IT business, what would make a CIO qualified to run the show? Or by the same token, a CFO, General Councel, etc. if the companies business is not respectively financial services, legal services, or whatever else the guy or girl's background is.
And than I don't want to get started about the MBA types...
Anyone feeling left out???
I guess if you didn't get the point by know you should qualify to be/become the CEO of your current company. I just hope that it is not part of my portfolio.
"Members of the board themselves are elected by the general meeting of shareholders"
That is a pipe dream. In most cases, board vacancies are fill at the recommendation of other board members before a shareholder meeting. New board members are chosen from corporate social networks.
At the next annual election, the new members are put on the ballot and voted into office. Almost 99.9999% of the time, board supported candidates are voted on to the board.
betamax was NOT superior at the time of its demise.
Google and get it right.
If it's an engineering company (TRW, Martin, Boeing...) then an engineer needs to be CEO. He is the one that knows the processes, product, and most important, the customers. In an IT company the same thing holds true, that same level of knowledge, that is the guy or gal that can grow the business. Making someone the CEO from an area that doesn't know those things has been proven a disaster in the past. Classic example: Ford making an accountant CEO. What did Robert MacNamara do for Ford? The Edsel! He was such a disaster there that Kennedy made him Secretary of Defense and he ran the Vietnam war, oh, another disaster!
The CEO of any company needs to be someone from the core business of that company (or one like it) that has a true understanding of the business and the customers. Look at what has happened to companies over the last 5 years, the ones that have been successful and the ones that got in trouble, where did the CEO's come from? The largest number of problems were the companies that brought someone in from a different industry.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
CIO is an overly-important title anyway. Fifty years ago it would be "head of the secretarial pool".
His (or her) job is frequently to buy and babysit the computer systems and not lose the data. The rest of the company does the (to borrow a Glengarry phrase) "man's work" of designing, financing, building, marketing and selling the products/services. If I was going to put someone in charge of my company, I'd want someone with background in those areas. A career-IT "CIO" wouldn't be anywhere near my list.
I mean "operators" in the military context, i.e. the people who shoot the weapons at the enemy.
You won't find a single Chief of Staff in any branch of the U.S. Armed Forces who made their careers in the Logistics/Communications/Medical fields. Why? Because they have little experience performing their organization's primary mission: killing the enemy.
The same holds true in the private sector, although I think the heirarchy is less rigid and its easier for folks to cross career boundaries in the civilian world, but the person you want in the top spot is the one who knows how to make a profit, not outfit a data center.
What?
In theory, sure. In practice, its not so clean. In fact, this is noted in one of the Wikipedia articles linked to the one that you linked, the one on corporate governance, in its section on the Anglo-American model of governance:
"Career Is Over"
I was with you clear up until you called the dishonesty of the CEO a "personality strength". This must be some strange meaning of the word strength of whick I have not previously been aware.
I was referring to the fact that they have the ability to see into the minds of their fellow and know what motivates them.
Being able to rally others to your cause is a strength.
Knowing how to present something that is true and reasonable in a way that focuses on what aspects relate to the listener rather than presenting a set of facts and presupposing that the target will have a "eureka" moment is where the difference lies, I would say.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
that they ascend into the clouds, never to be seen again, before they can be promoted.
This is a good thing, most IT personnel agree
Ah, ok, I misread you:
The job of a CEO is to paint a glowing and radiant picture firmly grounded in the hopes and dreams of investors, and protect it from those who would engage in critical thinking. The person who becomes a CEO is the person who has made it their lifes work to understand what others want and convince them it is just around the next bend, thus eliciting their ongoing co-operation.
I saw this as being dishonest- mainly because I'm not motivated that way. I want the full picture, and without it, I have a tendency to choose my priorities wrong. Drives my management crazy.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I'm about to become part of the management team of a biotech startup. I will report to the Chief Technology Officer (CTO as CIO was co-opted by the Chief Investment Officer in some circles) as the VP of Engineering. Now, my soon-to-be-boss isn't CEO for one simple reason. He doesn't want the job! CEOs are for the most part engaged in business development activities from morning until night seven days a week. Their job for the most part is to represent the company to investors, high-powered clients, and to other companies' CEOs. Beyond that role, they are the top of the literal management pyramid and are supposed to provide strategic direction and vision for the corporation while (in the case of public companies) reporting activities to the company's Board of Directors and share holders.
Granted, work is a relative term. If you've ever worked as a representative of your organization at a major tradeshow in a booth for several hours a day you know that glad handing and interacting with potential investors and clients is very physically and mentally demanding. Now think of doing that 8 - 16 hours a day, every day and that covers a lot of what it's like to be a CEO. Add to that the fact that you have somebody constantly hustling you from one place to another to meet countless people and then have to remember them all, what they said, and where they work, etc. and you've got one hell of a demanding position in a company. Some CEOs are better at their jobs than others. Some are more hands on than others. Some are *COMPLETE* morons! But, their job is *NOT* easy to be successful at.
Boards NEED someone at the top of the company who understands what Sales and Marketing NEED. After all, no matter how superior your product is *cough*betamax*cough* if it does not sell, your company goes down the tubes.
And if you company doesn't have a product to sell, the salesmen don't bring in much profit.
Needed, balance is.
(but you're doing a good job of presenting the Business Caste side of the argument)
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
It may be that they seriously enjoy working more directly with IT than with the business of the business they are working for.
We wouldn't be geeks if we didn't enjoy working with the new equipment.
Do you really know of any Fortune 500 CIO's who are geeks and not MBA's with some exposure to IT?
I'm not saying they aren't there, but I just haven't ever heard of one. I'll go scan the BusinessWeek back issues, if anybody has good recommendations, to learn how a geek managed to break through the technical caste ceiling.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Doesn't CIO stand for Career Is Over? Wouldn't that explain why so few end up as CEOs?
Here's what I know about CIOs (present employer excluded, which is unique):
1. They are religious fanatics when it comes to platforms. If it's MS or IBM, great! Anything else, don't waste my time. Want proof, look at market share. The old saying "nobody gets fired for buying IBM wasn't created by CEOs.
2. Every day you can see the the IT department empty out at about 4pm. They get to work later and leave earlier than most.
3. They often have no clue what the business does or wants but are absolutely certain that they can find the right technological solution regardless.
Of course I could be wrong about all of this. Perhaps none of it is true. Still, that perception alone would answer the question posed.
i would hire a cio to improve efficiency (more profit). i would hire a ceo to sell a product (more profit).
the current balance of power is such that selling trumps efficiency pretty much everywhere except mature markets/companies.
CEO's come from a company's profit centers- sales and marketing.
So why not the other profit centers, like Engineering?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
It pretty much has to be a one-or-the-other type of designation to make accounting easier. Everyone is supposed to keep costs low, but cost centers aren't expected to generate a profit. Cost centers costs are usually allocated to profit centers, and the profit centers have to generate enough revenue to cover the costs they generate plus their allocated costs.
I have worked at places where cost-allocation was totally screwed, and the cost-center/profit-center model was barely within the grasp of the executives. One place even managed to have a portion of one profit center's salaries allocated to a different profit center. Guess which profit center looked better on that company's paper?
Even if IT does generate revenue, the credit will probably fall elsewhere. For instance, if marketing comes up with a web campaign, and IT is responsible for making the web page and backend to ensure that someone visiting the page is aware of and able to purchase the product, those responsible for the sales campaign and fulfilling the orders will likely get the credit. The good news is that IT isn't responsible for ideas that aren't profitable, and won't be penalized for a failure.
Overall, you are right that the current naming scheme is crude. Unfortunately, those who end up running businesses haven't come up with something better. Given the current paradigms of big business that reward sales vice analytical thinking, I don't foresee a change anytime soon.
Because most CIOs are idiots. They interview, make claims of better this, better that and I'll cut costs xx% and get hired. Upon hiring, the first statements are everything is a disaster and worse than I thought. They then make everything worse, cut the good people or the good people leave, everything goes to SH%T and then cut and run before the people who hired them realize what's going on. The people who hired them figure they left because they got a better offer and repeat the process. I'm seeing another one of these occur now. I'm assuming the CIO will be leaving right around year's end or just afterwards. He's moved the "internal" support out of the country where the people barely speak English. I was on hold yesterday for 20 minutes waiting for a support person and fortunately by then the problem had been resolved. Personally, I'd have to believe their IT background was likely they were horrible as developers or systems people and they were shoved out of the way into management and unfortunately were smart enough in the political game to move up.
I find that the most technical people I've met are in Accounting. Sure, engineers and the like can give you physics and scientific information, but it's in the accounting department that holds the glue of the company together. It's the accounting departments that help say what the *company* can do and can't do, rather than what a *product* or *service* can do or can't do. There's a reason why the big accounting firms are so powerful. One of the good points is that they can help management figure out how to maximize the shareholders' ROE. One of the bad points is that it has the capacity to hide very important information from the rest of the world (and even its own department) - Just take a look at the Enron fiasco.
Sounds like many modern Democracies to me :).
And it depends on the kind of salesperson. Bill Hicks said it best...
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
No, they are supremely aware of how one segment of the business works. An important segment, but still a limited view.
To be a successful CIO you have to support the business. The entire business. That's much easier to do if you know how the whole business works.
CIOs have a better view across the business than anybody exception the CFO, and maybe the CEO and COO. Maybe. If they don't, they can not do their job properly.
I'd rather work for a CIO that knows the business and relies on his direct reports for technical recommendations than a CIO that knows technology and doesn't know the business.
Most CIO's preside over an overbloated IT department and have an abysmal success rate since about 75% of IT projects are deemed to be failures.
In the IT shops I've been in (including Fortune 500 companies) they waste enormous amounts of money on
licenses they don't need, buy ridiculously priced hardware when commodity stuff will work just fine, and are in the stone ages when it comes
to implementing processes and standards. In any IT shop in the world everyone knows who the slackers are who add zero value, yet they rarely get fired.
You know who the shitty management is too, yet they are still there going to work tommorrow as a matter of fact.
CIO's rarely trust their own people and instead get raped by companies like Accenture or IBM Global Services and then wonder what happened.
You think CIO's are smart? I haven't met one yet that I would hire for my own company.
No, they are supremely aware of how one segment of the business works. An important segment, but still a limited view.
I am a CIO, and I am looking to make the jump. One of the most critical factors of being a CIO is understanding Business, specifically the business you are in, not just one segment. In order to be proactive, you need to know how sales operates, and you need to be able to show how changes in IT can help sales. You can't just invent something based on the latest technology, you have to to absolutely understand how it can help, and be able to both sell it to the sales head, and make it happen. This takes sales and execution skills, both are critical to a CEO as well. You need to understand each department and how it operates to be successful.
What I find can be limiting is, as CIO, your network of contacts is not as developed as your typical CEO. You still have contacts, but they are related more on the technical side. You also have less experience dealing directly with external customers. Your external contacts are usually trying to sell you something. If you are up to the challenge and are willing to develop in these areas the jump most certainly can be made.
My jump will be to a smaller company in the IT field, where my contact network means something. Many of the vendors I have done business with will become my customers. It is a stretch and a challenge, and I will be taking a substantial hit in pay to make this move (the company is much smaller and riskier). That risk will be balanced with potential reward, but nevertheless, my main driving factor for change is that I want to be able to make a greater difference to the bottom line of a company than I can now. I need the challenge, and though a CIO position can certainly be challenging, it is not enough for me anymore.
After making this move, I will need to develop new skills, but the reason the opportunity is there, is because I have been able to sell myself. Not based on salary but on the board's belief that not only can I get the job done, but I am absolutely the right person to get the job done. A lack of sales experience is certainly a hurdle, but not one that can't be overcome.
The executive summary...
most are smart, hardworking, supremely aware of how the business works and increasingly savvy regarding the workings of external customers' minds
That's your answer right there. Those four qualities are lacking in most CEOs, and apparently not high on the priority lists of the boards who appoint them.
"If it's real, then it gets more interesting the closer you examine it. If it's not real, just the opposite is true." -
This is a bad idea because it fosters populism.
When politicians can be fired from day to day, not every two or four years, they will be even less likely to embark into the long, rough stretch, doing the Right Thing, even though it doesn't seem very popular.
You assume that people care much about day-to-day policy. They don't, and quite frankly, even though I'd like to, I don't think that we can change that very significantly. In other words, Oprah, Howard Stern and Tom Cruise would replace 3/4 of congress (or whatever replacement would be in its place).
CIOs may be very well-informed and very clever, as well as having a good understanding of their company's business and the marketplace in general. In my experience, modern CIOs are quite unlikely to be specially interested in IT as such; it is basic dogma for them that "the business comes first", and they always look to the bottom line (if only because they live or die by it).
But the qualities that mark a great CIO are not those that are best for leading a company. Remember the research that shows optimists live longer, and do better, than realists? Again in my experience, CEOs tend to be extremely confident - even when such confidence is not warranted by the facts and figures. This sheer exuberance helps them create a favourable impression, and carries people with them regardless of the objective reality.
That, I think, is one good reason why salespeople tend to become CEOs, while CIOs do not.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Yes, it did eventually die, but look at how long it took and at how much money was stolen/taken/earned.
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
Enron!
:)
Yes, it did eventually die, but look at how long it took and at how much money was stolen/taken/earned.
Fair enough. My statement was limited to the set of businesses that operate in the realm of sustainability, granted. Dilbert should have taught me better.
The sad part is, as I understand it, Enron had a good little business going before they setup their 700 shell companies. Now, raise your hand if you think that's going to teach a lesson to salespeople to stop selling things that don't exist.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The general idea I have is to [...] allow people to vote on every issue if they wish [...] allow people to delegate their vote to anyone they trust [...] allow people to revoke their vote for a person any time they feel their values are being betrayed by those they elected [...]
This deals with the two major issues facing modern democratic process:
1) Sometimes there's no one to vote for that you trust but they get to speak for you anyways regardless of if you vote or not.
2) Sometimes the person you voted for betrays you and you have no way to remove from them the power of your support for several years without overthrowing the system.
I find your ideas interesting, but there exist other problems the current system tries to deal with, which your system might restore.
The Chartists called for several things (you can read the article yourself) and got all except one; they asked for annual elections. The problem with annual elections would be the government wouldn't have time to achieve anything that took longer than a year. Perhaps they need to cut jobs in a government department, causing unemployment and bad publicity, but in the long term the reforms will increase efficiency. Or perhaps it's a project like the 'new deal'. The point being: A constantly shifting government might make long term projects difficult.
Another problem would be media rule. In the UK, many elections have been won by candidates favoured by the widely read tabloid 'the sun'. It's open to debate whether the newspaper decides the election or if the newspaper just backs the person they think is likely to win. But it serves to illustrate a point: Taking power away from politicians might just put it into the hands of media owners like Rupert Murdoch.
One other problem might be education. Did you know Only 28% of people have bachelors degrees? Consider an example: Should the minimum wage be raised? (Or lowered, or abolished?) Many people have opinions on this, but most people are less informed than, say, Alan Greenspan. There would be wide-ranging economic impacts to any change to the minimum wage. Day-to-day economic issues like this are complicated and hard to understand - and if the majority of voters were uninformed, their decisions might be bad.
You might be interested in reading about Athenian democracy. FTA: "It remains a unique and intriguing experiment in direct democracy where the people do not elect representatives to vote on their behalf but vote on legislation and executive bills in their own right." - I'll let you read more about it yourself, but in short it had it's problems - some generals produced unsatisfactory results, and found themselves executed - and when the people later changed their minds, the people who advocated executing the generals were also executed.
Just my $0.02
Michael
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion