Leadership Lessons from the Performing Arts - 2

I am passionate about the profession of management consulting - and not ashamed to say so.  I’m especially passionate about business-IT maturity, and how IT organizations transform themselves to bring the highest possible value to the businesses and communities they serve.
I’m also passionate about music - both as a listener, and as an amateur performer.  As [...]

Does Your IT Organization Embrace the Future?

I talked in my last post (Business-IT Maturity: Theory of the Case - Part 1) about IT leadership either being “victims” of the trends and drivers around them, or leveraging them for advantage.  I want to expand on that thought today.
I’m afraid if history is any indicator, the natural behavior of IT leaders is to [...]

Reaching Level 3: The Ambition Factor - Part 2

In my last post I raised the question from a real life consulting situation as to whether an ambition to reach Level 2 Business-IT Maturity is sufficient to really engage and motivate employees in what is undoubtedly painful change.  And it’s not just about enough motivation, it’s also about the proper end state vision.  If you [...]

Reaching Level 3: The Ambition Factor

I’ve been working with a new (to me) client on leadership development for their IT leadership group.  The company is large, complex and global, and going through a major transformation of their IT operating model.  A fundamental question arose in a workshop I was facilitating.  For a whole bunch of very good reasons (including many [...]

Leadership Styles

I very much liked this post on Leadershipjot.com distinguishing the traits of the Technician, Manager, and Entrepreneur.  This resonates with my experience that the kind of IT executive who can successfully lead an IT organization through the lower levels of Business-IT maturity (technician or manager) is often not effective in leading it to the more mature stages [...]

IT Leadership and the Level 2 Sticking Point

I want to address a controversial aspect of IT Leadership, and why I see it being a relatively common contributor to why IT organizations get stuck in the middle of Level 2 Business-IT Maturity.
Many years ago, while leading a multi-year longitudinal study of IT organizational transformations, the research team hypothesized that the leadership style and [...]