Hunting Bad CIOs In Their Natural Environment

onehitwonder writes "Bad CIOs are a blight on the IT profession, the organizations that employ them and the IT staff who toil under them (usually cleaning up their messes). Yet bad CIOs manage to migrate largely undetected — like the mythic Big Foot — from company to company. In the process, these bad CIOs lay waste to businesses and information systems, destroy staff morale, pillage budgets and imperil shareholder value. To help rid the world of this scourge, CIO.com has compiled a list of behaviors common among bad CIOs that recruiters, hiring managers and IT staff can use to identify them during the recruiting process."

Comments

Learn from the bad CIO....

[Himring]

Blake Edwards said it best when receiving his oscar for life-long achievement: "I want to thank my enemies too. I couldn't've done it without the enemies...."

I reported to a bad CIO for years. First off, the mind of a politician isn't much different from that of a corporate-climber. I found the same mind in my experiences with attornies. It's enough to make anyone appreciate the misanthrope Jonathan Swift. At the core of all these folks is a basic deceptiveness invented, grown and maintained with one single goal: power.

I've read Ringer and I've read Lewis. Ringer says, "Look out for number One." Lewis rebutes (although he wrote this before Ringer by decades), "a life devoid of virtue is simple a life looking out for number one.... and void of its purpose...." Or something to that effect.

I could write a novel containing my thoughts and experiences on the bad CIO, but in short I believe being absent any real talent, being totally goal-oriented and power-hungry, they practice basic machievelian manipulations and mob psychology to intimidate people into staying in line.

In my experience, any true and honest person that happened into an officer position at a corporation is quickly devoured by the meat-eaters.

If you want a life and job filled with honest work, non-game-playing individuals and good sleep at night, then read the signs and minds of those around you, build yourself, bend the questionable intentions of those around you into tools that form who you are, and, as Shakespeare put it, "to thine ownself be true." Eventually, you'll find that job and slowly realize "yes, I'm here. I can just do a fulfilling job and get paid."

Trust me, it happens....

The ego train

[HangingChad]

The cult of personality CIO is probably the most destructive and wasteful of all of them. They're particularly dangerous in government. The last big contract I worked had one. He brought in "his" people to manage projects. Some of them were, in my opinion, charity cases. A couple had qualifications that included boarding their horses at the same riding academy. They had unproductive jobs and were bossy and abrasive on top of that. I watched them waste millions of dollars, produce nothing tangible or productive, then get promoted. The talented people took other jobs and left.

It's very demoralizing when you're trying to do the right thing for the customer and be cost effective, then see someone ride in with his toadies, blow millions on something that never had a chance of working in the first place, then get moved up the chain. Makes you question if there's a margin in being practical and productive. I always thought that if you made good business decisions in IT, the customer would eventually come back to the value proposition. But it doesn't always work that way and I'm starting to question whether that's naive.

I certainly have several first-hand experiences where the incompetent, impractical and wasteful have flourished.

Updward Feedback

[Tablizer]

I think a big problem in most organizations is insufficient bottom-up feedback. A CIO may be a great kiss-up to the CEO, but may otherwise be a crappy manager. If a formal process was put in place such that underlings ranked their supervisors, then the bad ones would either have to shape up or ship out.

One interesting approach is a list of about 15 traits, and employees pick the top 3 that the manager needs to improve on. This avoids a "blunt" ranking that many organizations dislike, but at least gives the top layer feedback on the biggest problems.