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

Bad Sign #1

[Middle - Adopter]

Pointy hair

Re:A point of disagreement with TFA

[jellomizer]

No, you missed the point. Improving security is a primary goal of the CIO. But the way he approaches it the sign. The example in TFA has the CIO fear mongering to get a larger budget then he actually needs. Most companies today don't need new firewalls to improve security, they need to rethink the process. Putting security in the hands of software and hardware alone is a path to disaster. The CIO should be able to itemize what he really for security explain the tradeoffs to management, and tell the shortterm and long term effort it will require.

Article in a nutshell

[bennini]

Another one of those top-10 articles broken up into 7 web pages with 3 paragraphs each and flooded with useless advertisements & buzzwords like SOA on demand, Oracle Fusion Middleware and "Storage Utopias"...heres the summary:

1. They migrate quickly from habitat to habitat.
2. Selective amnesia
3. Excessive preening
4. A pugilistic stance
5. Sketchy evolution.
6. Dropping names.
7. Bad references.

then a sublist....
Behaviors observers should note when the CIO has settled in his new habitat.

1. They eat their young.
2. Young and old flee the CIO's flock.
3. They use the same hunting and gathering strategies regardless of their environment.
4. Brown-nosing.
5. Excessive hibernation.
6. Intimidation
7. They play favorites with vendors.
8. They act like a wolf in sheep's clothing.
9. They show their teeth and their claws.
10. hey don't finish what they start.

and then there is a sublist within that second main list (in case you werent confused yet):
MORE SIGNS OF BAD CIOS

1. They overpromise and underdeliver.
2. They can't sum up their IT strategy into an elevator speech, nor can they articulate the company's vision.
3. They don't take ownership of critical issues, nor do they demonstrate accountability for problems, but they're quick to take credit for successes.
4. They can't motivate their staff and don't pay attention to building teams inside the IT group. They can't attract and retain IT staff.
5. Instead of working on projects that make meaningful contributions to the company's bottom line, they focus either on projects that will look good on their résumés or on sucking up to executives by giving them Blackberrys and new laptops with wireless Internet connections.
6. They overemphasize project management to the point where 90 percent of the timeline for projects is given over to planning and only 10 percent to implementation.
7. They view project management as a waste of time.
8. They can't prioritize projects.
9. They give staff responsibility for projects but no authority, direction or support. When the individual and the project fail, they publicly berate the individual.
10. They espouse a different management practice every month.

Re:Bad category?

[kryten_nl]

They're certainly not an endangered species. So I would guess you _can_ shoot them. Inquire with your local LUG about the start and end dates of hunting season.

Bad CIOs do not understand the Tao

[sticks_us]

Why are programmers non-productive?
Because their time is wasted in meetings.

Why are programmers rebellious?
Because the management interferes too much.

Why are the programmers resigning one by one?
Because they are burnt out.

Having worked for poor management, they no longer value their jobs.

Re:Bad CIOs do not understand the Tao

[TheRaven64]

You are confusing meetings with communication. Communication is essential. Meetings are a form of communication. This does not mean that meetings are essential.

Meetings between two people are incredibly productive, but their use drops off dramatically the more people you add. Most of the communication in a large meeting is between some subset of the group, with the rest being bored. Another common trap is to use meetings for one-to-many communication. These are much better handled asynchronously, because otherwise the speaker has to go at the speed of the slowest listener. The only time a meeting is the correct form of communication is when everyone invited to the meeting is an active contributor to the discussion. If someone is just there to listen, their time is probably better spent sending them a copy of the minutes later.

I'd thoroughly recommend the book Peopleware to anyone interested in this subject.

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....

Problem not unique to CIO's

[Politicus]

These problems are endemic to executives in general because corporate governance does not work. In theory, the board of directors looks out for shareholder interests and keeps executives in check. In theory, communism is a worker's utopia.

In practice, because shareholder elections are a farce, most boards are compromised by being populated by other executives, typically leading companies in the same or similar industry as the executives they are supposed to oversee. This frees executives from shareholder control, essentially giving them reign over other people's assets. Lavish stock grants entrench executives by giving them share ownership which in turn increases their control over the board.

Freed from oversight, executive goals diverge from shareholder goals. The limits to this divergence are mostly appearance based. You can't appear to be diverging from shareholder goals too much. Image is everything. To achieve this, executives typically vet those they hire based on loyalty. Many employees, while they profess to understand this, do not. So I repeat. To achieve the goal of appearing to promote shareholder values, executives hire first and foremost on the candidate's ability to be loyal to the hiring executive. This results in the typical knuckle dragging tribal culture found leading today's corporations.

Saying that solving this problem is hard, is a major understatement because you are talking about making America's ruling class accountable. Solutions like co-determination do exist, however, but would require the right political climate to implement.

How to spot a bad CIO

[jrothwell97]

1. Keeps pressing the spacebar to get text centred in Word
2. Insists on capitalising APPLEMAC, and spelling it all as one word, and saying that they're rubbish in comparison to Windows because there isn't as much software
3. Asks "what's a linux?" and thinks Tux is vermin
4. Thinks "sudo" is the command to launch the Sudoku game
5. Actually believes M$'s and IBM's marketing rubbish and reads IBM's 'CIO thought leadership pieces' every night before going to bed
6. Constantly sends you E-mails saying "omg bill gates will send u $1000000 if u pass this message to 85000 of ur friends in the next 10 seconds!!!!! omg omg lolz"
7. Fails to find lolcats funny
8. Thinks Whose Line Is It Anyway is a high-stakes dramatic game show
9. Believes having defragged your hard drive once is a qualification to become CIO
10. Probably has a private golf course

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.

Re:A point of disagreement with TFA

[GooberToo]

In other words, security is a process. Security is not strictly a hardware and software solution.

Re:But how do we get rid of them?

[tompaulco]

So, how can we prevent these hoodlums from ruining our lives and get them either not hired to begin with or canned when we see their complete incompetence?
You can't. Once someone reaches "C" level, they have something akin to diplomatic immunity. Even if they screw the shareholders out of billions of dollars and run the company into the ground, the only thing that might happen is they get fired, get a huge golden parachute, and some other company will immediately scoop them up for even more salary and stock.