This is actually a quote my friend Ross Shaffer uses on stage when he speaks, and it is aimed at leaders…
I normally get up on stage and berate the leaders in the audience to wake up and get the picture that technology strategy is now a critical piece of their organization, and an element they cannot just outsource to others. I harangue them about the fact they often are very slow to use new technologies with their own hands, and that they rarely understand the value of concepts like cloud computing, mobile, or social tech. My intentions are good, but I think I am offending many leaders and I don’t really mean to do that. So instead of berating, I am going to work on motivating from this day forward. Instead of telling them they are failing to do a critical element of their job, I am going to point out the great opportunity they have to make a difference…
In fact, this might be a time in history that leaders have the greatest opportunity to reach into a magical toolbox and do creative and innovative things to prosper. Never before has there been a toolbox full of free tools, inexpensive tools, and extremely powerful tools, with more tools coming every day. The marketplace provides a worldwide piece of property and people provide the raw materials. We are seeing growth and innovation like we have never seen before in the economy. It is not just the explosive growth of companies like Google or Facebook, it is also the examples of small companies that now use Internet technologies to expand their customer base around the world. Or, to leverage workers from around the world to help them produce products or services for less money and with more creativity.
It is tragic that with this magical toolbox of social, mobile, cloud, integrated, virtualized, and intelligent technology, many leaders focus more on details that provide less value. I have come to observe that there are three reasons why they fail to take action:
- They don’t see the value so do not feel there is a good return on investment for them to spend any time understanding new technologies. Of course, how would they ever equate value if they won’t invest a little time to learn how a new concept even works. You can never actually be wrong if you just remain ignorant I suppose.
- They are comfortable with the way things are going now, and they believe that their current success will go on forever. Intellectually they will agree that dynamics change, but in their behavior, they do not seek to invest any energy in changing their current methods unless they are forced to through negative consequences. For example, they won’t do anything new unless they start losing money, then they thrash around trying to find new ways to operate. As opposed to finding new ways to operate BEFORE they are forced into it.
- They feel it is someone else’s job to figure out how to apply new technologies. They have convinced themselves that they have outsourced these decisions to other leaders, or vendors, and if there was something important enough to change in the organization, someone will bring it up. Of course this defeats much of the purpose of a leader being a leader. The very definition of the word leader means that you have a point of view on where to go and you are leading others.
So I will be on a mission from this point forward to motivate leaders to be willing to take personal responsibility to open up the technology toolbox and drive change into the organization where change might have value. I want them to know that they have the opportunity to do great things if they will just invest a little mindshare into learning about the new tools. Extinction is a painful consequence for the failure to open the toolbox…
Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com