Well…that’s actually a bit misleading…I was a physics major…so partying was really more like sitting around with the other Physics and Chemistry majors, having a few drinks and talking about wormholes, time travel, music and just generally hanging out.

I met some great people in college…and I have some really great stories…many of which aren’t really appropriate on this blog  - but if I ever have a beer with you…I’ll share a few

I do have one story that I’d like to share.  The story is hilarious (at least to me and the two other people involved) but also provides a nice moment of learning and has stayed with me ever since.

Ready? Here we go.  Warning – if you get sick easily, you may want to skip this post.

This story involves me and two good friends from college – I’ll call them W and S to protect their innocence (or guilt!).

In case you don’t know, college was Southwestern Oklahoma State University in Weatherford, Oklahoma…and there was zilch going on in that town. So, to get into any trouble, we’d have to drive to Oklahoma City (about an hour drive) (aka ‘the city’).

One night we decided to drive to the city to hang out and do some bar hopping.  We all climbed into my Geo Storm (yes…I had one of those 90HP beasts) and headed to the city.

We hit a few bars and quite a lot of beer was consumed by W and S. I was driving so I didn’t drink too much and I spent the evening making sure W and S had a good time and didn’t get into too much trouble.

After a long evening of drinking and carousing, we all loaded back up into my Storm and headed back to Weatherford. I was driving, W was in the front seat sleeping and S was in the back seat stretched out snoozing.

Me – I was rocking out with the stereo turned up pretty loudly so I wouldn’t fall asleep and was enjoying the drive back.   Out of the corner of my eye, I notice W moving around so I glance over at him and see him looking at me and trying to say something.

I can’t hear him over the music but I assume that he’s telling me how great the Metallica song is and to turn it up…so I throw him ‘the horns’ , nod and say something like ‘rock on’ then commence to turn the music up louder and continue driving.

Seconds later I notice the window rolling down and the cold air rushing in (it was winter…and starting to snow a bit).  I then see W hang his head out the window and I realize that my assumption was way off…he wasn’t talking about the music…he was telling me to pull over. Now…he was hanging his head out the window and ‘releasing the evil’ to say it politely

I was doing 80 miles/hour down the highway at 2:30 in the morning…so there wasn’t much traffic to worry about so I quickly pull over to the side of the road and slam on my brakes. W continues with his business while i sit there feeling like a moron for not listening and realizing what W really needed from me.

While sitting there with the car door open and W hanging out the car, I hear some rustling in the back seat and I hear S say “Do you have a napkin”. I’m a 21 year old college student…you think I carry napkins in my car? No.

So…what do I do?  I scrounge around and find a piece of plastic that came off the CD that I’d bought earlier that week.  I turn to S and say – here’s a piece of plastic.

He takes it and I hear plastic rustling and ask him ‘what are you doing back there?’.

His response, which has become a classic in the annals of Eric’s Life , was: “I’ve got caca in my hair!”

Apparently, the ‘evil’ from W was affected by the 80 mph wind and made its way back onto S.   eeeeeeeewwwwwww!    :)

After a few minutes of me laughing, W finishing his business and S trying to clean up with a piece of plastic, we were back on the road.

I drop them both off at their respective dorms and W tells me that I should think about washing off my car.  I take a look and sure enough..I need to go to the car wash.

So…the night ends with me at the car wash at 3AM in 30 degree weather with it snowing and me washing my car.  And it wasn’t one of those automatic car washes either…it was a good old-fashioned hand wash.   Man it was cold.

It got better (or worse…depending on your outlook). About halfway through washing my car, a police officer pulled up.  He sat there and looked at me. And looked at me.  And looked at me.  He rolled his window down with a stern look on his face.   Then…he said ‘you missed a spot on the back’, laughed and drove off.  Whew!

So…other than just sharing a story from my wild college days, what’s the purpose of this post?

Its pretty a simple one – but one that we often get wrong.  The moral – pay attention when people talk. Listen to what they say.  Don’t assume you know what their trying to say.

I assumed that I knew what W was saying and I ended up washing puke off my car at 3AM while staring down a police officer.

If you assume that you know what your team or coworkers are doing or trying to say, you may end up cleaning up a pretty nasty mess.

Open up your ears and listen.  Or…don’t…and wait for the mess that will inevitably come your way.

Image Credit: listen closely By twenty_questions on flickr

They’re chasing their competitors. Chasing their industries. Chasing their perceptions of their future as well as chasing their past.

Many people within companies are chasing too. Their chasing the approval of their leadership team. Chasing the approval of their managers and of their peers. Some are even chasing recognition from their industry.

But..chasing is dangerous.   Chasing destroys focus,  burns resources and forces a never-ending chase for ‘next ‘.

Chasing and Trading

I’ve mentioned in previous posts that I’ve been working on improving my investing  / trading skills (see Are you ready to accept failure?,  How project management made me a better trader/investor and Revisiting Process – what is the ‘right’ process? for a few examples).

Over the months that I’ve been trading, I’ve learned a lot and  made some money…lost some money too.  Last night I spent some time reviewing my trading journal for the last year. During this review, I noticed  my most profitable trades have been those that have come via my trading system research and from one of my trading mentors.  More importantly, the least profitable trades and/or those that lost money outright were those that I took while chasing something or someone.

My best / most profitable trades have come from a mixture of various trend following trading systems and  methods that I’ve been learning (Check out Michael Covel’s Trend Following books and the Darvas Trading method for examples). With my trend following approaches, I’m able to spend a few minutes a day reviewing trading setups and managing them if needed. These methods have clear entry and exit rules…so it makes it very easy to determine what to trade, when to enter the trade and when to exit the trade.

Additionally, I’ve had great success following the advice of Ron Roll (aka Goat - @gtotoy on twitter) who runs DayTraderBootCamp.com. The one thing Ron always talks about is not ‘chasing’ a trade….don’t throw your money into a stock just because everyone else does. Ron takes his time and teaches everyone else to do the same…focus on those stocks that are setup for your trading style / approach and when its right, pull the trigger on the trade.   There are others out on the web and twitter that I’ve learned from over the last year but Ron has been the biggest help to me in understanding how to “Plan your trade, trade your plan”.  So..a special “thank you” to Ron for the lessons I’ve learned.

As I mentioned, my worst trades have come while chasing. I’ll see someone post something on twitter about a stock ‘moving’ or being ‘on fire’ and think ‘yes…I need to catch that!’.  The majority of the time, this approach ends up with me losing money – because i chased someone else into a trade.   In addition, the time that I spend reading tweets and trying to ‘chase’ these recommendations is time away from focusing on what my next step should be in my trading plan.

For me and my trading style and abilities, chasing kills my profitability and my focus.  Looking through my trading journal, I couldn’t find a single ‘chasing’ trade that made me money.

Chasing is Dangerous

Looking over my trading journal it was very apparent that my best trades were those that were planned out. They were  thought through with entry and exit criteria and I know exactly what i’m getting into. I managed my risk and set everything up to ensure that I gave the trade the best chance for success.

This happens in business too…we plan out projects, manage the risk within those projects and we try to give that project the best chance for success.

Or do we?   We should…but a lot of times, we don’t.

We spend our days chasing status reports.  Chasing resources and money.  We spend our days chasing projects and people. We chase strategies and tactics that are supposed to help us improve.

Stop chasing.

Stop chasing your competitors and your industry. Stop chasing your friends and colleagues. Stop chasing the latest / greatest technology, methods and best practices.

Find out what you and/or your business needs to succeed and make it happen.  Focus on your strategy, your people and your approach. Focus on what it will take to make yourself and/or your business better.

Stop chasing. Start focusing.

Image Credit: chase By rahuldeebee on flickr

Airport bookstores are crowded with books on leadership, and each one seems to promote a “leadership lack.” They’ll each begin with phrases like “The most pressing issue in organizations is that leaders lack integrity…or empathy…or strategy…or even humor. These books continue by laying out the author’s simple framework for developing the perfect leader. On and on the dialogue goes to the point where readers become be confused because the 21 Unassailable Edicts of Leadership are different than the Seven Routines of Really Efficient Leaders.  It would be a poor move to add to this confusion. With this in mind, we will admit that we do not believe our “leadership lack” to be the most pressing issue in organizations, just the easiest to fix.

Leaders lack an understanding of leadership theory.

These airport leadership books provide decent advice that is easily digestible. And because it is easily digestible, leaders continue to gorge themselves on it until there is very little room left for real, solid theory. Most see theory as complex and hard to digest. When leaders think about leadership or organizational theory, they think back to the 400+ page textbook they had to buy in business school. “Seems like quite an undertaking,” leaders think. So they cheerfully hand their money to the cashier and board the plane with the latest, pocket-sized “leadership” book.

Leaders lack an understanding of leadership theory because it isn’t presented in pocket-sized form.

But leadership theory isn’t some kind of rocket surgery. Attaining a true understanding of theory isn’t difficult, if it’s presented right. We’ll survey the major leadership theories. Our intent is to present them in the same easily digestible, pocket-sized form as the airport bestsellers.

Why Theory?

During WWII, Allied bomber losses were high, so high that the British Air Ministry undertook a rigorous analysis in hopes of finding a solution. Their engineers set out to eyeball every bomber they could, gathering data on each bullet hole. After analyzing the results, engineers decided to reinforce the areas that had the highest concentrations of holes with armor plating.

It didn’t work.

Perplexed, the engineers assumed that the extra plating had made the planes too heavy, and that the difficulty in handling the planes was offsetting the protection of the armor plating.

Enter Abraham Wald.

Wald, a mathematician, suggested that they simply put extra armor plating where the bullet holes weren’t. The idea was simple: if the planes are returning with bullet holes, obviously those areas can be struck without causing the planes to crash. The planes that weren’t returning, Wald theorized, are the ones that are getting hit in different areas. The engineers’ error was so significant, statisticians decided to name it: survivorship bias (the tendency to include only successes in statistical analysis). Any time you only examine just the successes, you will skew the results.

If we return to the airport bookstore in our minds, we see the shelves littered with survivorship bias. We love reading about successes. That’s why books by celebrity CEOs and leadership gurus are among the best sellers of any list. We’d much rather read about the brilliant company leader who started working out of his garage and ended up dominating the industry. However, when this is all we consume about leadership, we succumb to survivorship bias. While a celebrity CEO may reveal the secrets he used to climb to the top, how are we to know they work in every situation?

This is where theory comes in.

Leadership and organizational theories are constructed and tested by examining not just the successes but also the failures. Good and bad leaders, successful and failing change efforts, all get included in the analysis and the resulting theories spare us from our survivorship bias. If we want to grow into outstanding leaders, we must know how and when to utilize the knowledge provided by the existing body of leadership research.

Good leaders focus on where the bullet holes are; great leaders consider where they aren’t.

Application Modernization….only two words…but two words that denote a big undertaking for most organizations.

I’ve touched on the subject of modernizing applications and infrastructure, in a few posts in the past (see here and here).  In my consulting efforts, I’ve run across many CIO’s and IT professionals who would love to do nothing but focus on modernizing their legacy systems to be better prepared for the future.  Most have failed at making the case for these modernization projects – namely because the organization sees them as ‘plumbing’ projects.

People see these ‘plumbing’ projects as something that don’t necessarily need to be done  – re-plumbing the organization won’t really deliver in new value or competitive advantage they argue.  They see these projects as being something that can be scheduled when the IT staff has downtime…but we all know there’s little downtime for today’s IT.

I’ve been asked by a few CIO’s in the past to help them justify these modernization projects…and I have to say that its one of the hardest things an IT team can do today. The reason its so hard – because most modernization projects are attempting to replace or improve something that is working just fine today.  Many organizations don’t see the value in spending millions of dollars on a perfectly capable application.

Let’s look at an example. Imagine you’ve been tasked by your CIO to put together a business case for a revamp / rebuild of your data center.  You put together spreadsheets that show costs for new equipment and infrastructure.  You provide a reasonable argument about what the redesign needs to take place.  You use charts, numbers and lots of language to try to build your argument.

After spending days (or weeks or months) putting this business case together, you present it to the CIO and IT leadership team. They are blown away with your research and presentation. You are feeling on top of the world….but then the CIO asks one question that deflates your ego quickly.  He asks the one question that seems to matter the most – if this project isn’t started today, will the current data center be able to handle ongoing operations for the coming year? What about 2 years?

Now…sometimes the answer to that question is no….but many times, the answer is yes.  If the IT staff has done their job, the data center has been keeping up with the times and the current architecture can handle anything the current organization can throw at it.

So…if your answer to the CIO’s question is ‘yes…the data center can hold up for another year or two’…then what chance do you have of getting funded to rebuild said data center? {hint: your chance is close to zero}.

In order to make these types of projects seem valuable to the organization, you must show real value and opportunity.

From plumbing to innovation driver

So….you need to get your application modernization project funded…but you can’t quite seem to get the business to understand why they should spend a few hundreds of thousands (or millions) of dollars to  rebuild something that’s working perfectly today.  Sure…they understand that the money will have to be spent eventually to improve the infrastructure / application at some point in the future…but they know they don’t have to do it today.

So…how do you get a project funded that, according to the business leadership, doesn’t need to be funded?

You’ve got to sell the business on the value of the project.  You’ve got to sell the business on the value of what the ‘plumbing’ project can bring once completed.  Most importantly…you’ve got to remove the stigma of the project as being a ‘plumbing’ project and show why the project is much more important than that.

Let’s revisit that data center project above.  You can throw together charts and numbers all day long…but at the end of the data, your asking for money to upgrade a data center that does what it needs to do today.

But…what if you were able to show how your data center upgrade could help to drive new revenue?  What if you can show innovative ways to use the new hardware and/or new software to drive innovation?

Imagine being able to put together a proposal that can show an immediate or short term payback for the investment? Imagine what the CEO would say if you told her that your investment of $350,000 this year in new infrastructure could lead to new services with the possibility of $1.5 million in revenue over the next 2 years?  Your CEO would have to take a long hard look at your project, wouldn’t they?

If you need examples of companies doing this today, look at Amazon’s additional revenue from their IT infrastructure (AWS, EC2, etc).  Think about your infrastructure and how it might be able to provide new revenue opportunities for your business.  Would your modernization project provide more opportunities for revenue? More opportunities for better service and/or new services?

Whether you’re talking about a data center upgrade, data warehouse upgrade or legacy application rewrite, the modernization project is a tough one to get approved for most IT groups. Next time you’re looking at getting funding for an application modernization project, take some time to think about how that new application / infrastructure can be used to deliver bottom line (or top line) value to the company.

Rather than focus on the money that your project needs from the business, focus on money your project can deliver to the organization in the coming years.  In the end, to get your modernization project funded, you’ve got to show the business that its not just a ‘plumbing’ project. You’ve got to show the roadmap to innovation and revenue…you’ll be surprised at how much more you can get done when people see a return on what had been thought of as simple ‘plumbing’ project.

Image Credit: Plumbing By BodHack on flickr

This post sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.

I receive variants of this type of email quite often.  Most are from agents and PR folks trying to get a review of their clients book.  I’ve started stepping back from accepting offers of books to review, mainly due to time constraints on my side.

So, normally, when i receive these types of emails, I polity decline.  But…this time…I couldn’t decline.

Why?

A few reasons:

• 1.) Todd made the note personal.
• 2.) Todd made the note about me and not his book.
• 3.) Todd included a funny little photo (see below photo) that caught my eye and got me interested in learning more about him, his services and his book.

So…I promptly said I’d take a look at the book.  I’m boy am I glad I did.

While scanning the book, I saw a passage that jumped out at me…and caused me to stop scanning and start reading.

That passage is:

It is a big lie that “managers” and “leaders” are different things! Managers deal with the present. Leaders deal with the future.

Simple statement but powerful.  Think about all the commentary out there in acadamia, the interwebz and in books about ‘leadership’ vs ‘management’.  Sure…the concepts are different….but at the end of the day, a good leader is one who can manage well…and vice versa….or at least it should be that way.

I’ve known good ‘managers’ who couldn’t lead their teams to save their lives.  I’ve also known good ‘leaders’ who could get people focused and moving in the right direction…but the most successful people I know are those who could do both roles at the same time.  They can lead and manage extremely well.

I read through the book twice….once while scanning and again with more focus on the content and I have to say this is a pretty darn good little book.

Is there anything in the book that’s groundbreaking?  Nope. Nothing new either….but the way that Dr. Dewett presents the material is golden.  This book isn’t something you read once and put on the shelf…its a checklist and reference guide combined.  Its something that you can use at any stage of your career to become a great leader.  The book has some great little nuggets of knowledge that will make it worth your time.

Check out Todd’s Fuel for Leaders website and pick up a copy of his book in his shop.  I think you’ll be happy you did,.

From that post, you’ll remember that cognitive dissonance is: an uncomfortable tension caused by holding contradictory thoughts simultaneously.

Cognitive Dissonance is everywhere in IT today, especially in the Project Management side of the house.

I think everyone would agree there are a lot of IT project failures.

Now…there are some arguments made by some about what ‘project failure’ means.  To me..failure means that the project didn’t fully realize the scope of the project, meet budget and/or meet the timeline.  Some argue that failure means only those projects that aren’t completed are failures while the others that don’t meet scope/budget/timeline are ‘challenged‘.   Regardless what term you give it, the fact is that something like 68% of IT projects either fail or are ‘challenged’. That’s 2/3′s of all IT projects that aren’t considered successful.

So….we have a 1/3 success rate in IT Projects….and we continue to follow the same project management processes and methodologies.  We continue to fund projects in similar ways.

That’s cognitive dissonance in action.

We continue to think that projects will succeed although we know that, statistically, the project is more apt to fail than succeed…yet we continue down the same path with an uneasy feeling.

The stakeholders know the project is most likely to fail. The CIO knows the project is most likely to fail.   Heck…many on the project team think the project is most likely to fail.

Michael Krigsman, who does a wonderful job dissecting and discussing project failure on his IT Project Failures blog, recently wrote a short article titled Three simple truths of failure.  The article is based on a Dilbert cartoon discussing complicated project plans and Michael dissects the cartoon perfectly…its woth the jump to read. In the cartoon & Michael’s analysis, the following three truths are provided:

Complicated plans don’t work

Wishful Thinking doesn’t work

The boss really doesn’t care

While I’d like to think that the boss does care, I’ve found that many times they don’t have the time to care.   I know one mid-sized IT group that had over 150 projects on their list…there’s no way the CIO had any knowledge or interest in all those projects.

More interesting than Michael’s article are the comments to the article….anyone with more than 6 months experience in the world of IT can empathize and understand exactly what the commenters are discussing, lamenting and describing….the world of IT Project Management is full of failures.

But…those failures shouldn’t be focused on a person or on a process (or lack of one).  Those failures exist because previous failures weren’t learned from and those lessons learned weren’t acted upon. Those failures exist because of poor leadership.

In an article titled When an IT Projects go right, its simple to make projects succeed…all you need is a clear vision, support and commitment of the stakeholders, an understanding of the problems to be solved and sufficient resources & staffing.

Wow….so THATS all we need to do to make IT projects succeed.

Those are very important aspects of good project management, but there has to be more to it, doesn’t there?

Do we implement a new project management process?  Get people trained in project management procedures?  Get people certified?  Hire more people?  Outsource the project?

I’ve seen organizations build project management groups and fill them with certified project managers…and fail miserably.  I’ve also seen IT groups bring in temporary project teams and/or project managers and succeed beyond their wildest dreams.

So what do we do?

Can it be as simple as clear vision, support, resources and proper understanding of project goals.

I think that’s where we have to start.

Make it clear what needs to be done. Make it clear what the people need to do.  Then make sure the necessary  resources and support are there.

Whether you use an agile approach to projects or the old tried-and-true waterfall approach, without proper vision, clarity of purpose and the proper support and resourcing, your project’s chances of success are approaching zero.

Maybe we don’t “fix” project failures…maybe we need to fix leadership within IT to ensure projects have a better chance of success.

What do you think?

I was about to resign myself to the fact that my knees would ache for the rest of my life or I’d have to have some form of knee surgery, until one day I happened to realize that my feet began to hurt a bit before my knees hurt.  It seemed that the foot pain was a precursor to the knee pain.

I did some research and found that when you’ve got bad foot support in shoes, it can cause knee pain.  About that same time, I saw the Dr. Scholl’s FootMapping Machine and its ability to ‘read’ your feet and tell you what type of orthotics to buy.   I found a machine at my local Wal-Mart and tried it out…sure enough, it told me that my low arches were forcing pressure on other parts of the feet, which is exactly what my research said would cause knee pain.

I bought the recommended orthotics and now…no knee pain.  I’ve been pain free for a few days now.

It would have been very easy for me to call up a Doctor and describe my knee pain and my history.  It would then have been just as easy for that Doctor to prescribe surgery for that knee pain.  And…it would have been easy for me to spend tens of thousands of dollars on medical expenses on something that turned out to be poor support for my feet.

Instead…because I spent some time research the issue, I found that I could solve my problem with a much simpler approach.  For $50 I was able to solve the real problem causing my knee pain.

Much like the current business environment isn’t it?

Many organizations today are in pain and are looking for solutions.  They’re patients looking for a good doctor.  They’ve got a lot of pain, and there’s a lot of people willing to offer medication or surgery for that pain, but very few people willing to treat the real problem(s).

Take social media as an example.  There are problems that social media can treat well.  But…there are a lot of people prescribing social media for many different ‘pains’ and ignore the underlying problems.

For instance…if your organization has a history of poor customer service, would you first take a look at the customer service organization, culture and processes for ways to improve? Or…do you do as many organizations are doing today and join twitter,  FaceBook and other social media platforms to ‘engage’ with your customers?

Many consultants & companies will tell you to ‘get out there’ on the social media platforms to engage with your customers.  These people are treating the symptoms rather than the real underlying causes.  The pain is the blow-back created by poor customer service and many people would argue that by ‘engaging’ with these customers, you’ll somehow magically improve service.

While this might be true in some instances…it doesn’t address the underlying problems. You may improve service for a few people (or few hundred people) using social media but the underlying problem still exists….the problem of poor customer service. Social Media won’t solve the underlying problem of poor service culture or processes.

Of course…treating the symptom works in many cases.  Have a headache…take an aspirin.  No more headache…for now.

But what happens when that headache isn’t the actual problem?

What if that headache is actually just a by-product of meningitis or a tumor?  Without taking the time to really understand all the symptoms, just treating the headache may not treat the real problem.

That aspirin would help the headache today…but it’ll return tomorrow.

So…next time you see a problem in your organization, take a good long look at it and make sure its the real problem before throwing money & bodies at it.

Make sure you’re solving the real problem…not just addressing the pain.

After it was announced that he was leaving, he published a memo on his blog. The memo, titled Dawn of  a New Day,  is an excellent read. In fact, I’m in awe of people who can write like Mr. Ozzie can.

While reading through the memo (yes…I read the whole thing)…i hit upon this nugget:

Complexity kills. Complexity sucks the life out of users, developers and IT.  Complexity makes products difficult to plan, build, test and use.  Complexity introduces security challenges.  Complexity causes administrator frustration.

Powerful stuff.

I think those five sentences fully explain the state of IT today. And…they thoroughly explain the basis for the hatred (or at least dislike) that most people within organizations have toward IT.

We’ve built a world within IT that enjoys complexity.  We’ve built a group that thrives on complexity.    But…that complexity is killing organizations.

That complexity is why Shadow IT exists. That complexity is why many groups within modern day organizations are driving hard toward a time when they own / manage their own technology platforms.  Scott Brinker is making a very good argument for Why Marketing Should Run its own Technology.  Mitch Joel is pointing at Technology is being a major part of the Agency of the Future…but I don’t see a CIO in that agency (and that’s not a bad thing).

Complexity does kill….and is killing the IT group.

What can we do to move towards a more simplistic approach to IT?

The answer to that question will determine The Future of IT.

What type of emotion is evoked when you read it or hear that word?

What do you think of when you think of passion?

Do you think about your job?  The company you work for?  Finishing up the big project you’re working on?

Or…

Do you think about many other things outside of your job.  Do you think about your kids?  The latest movie release?   New York bestsellers…or writing the next one?

Chances are, you think about something outside of your job…unless you’re one of the lucky folks in this world who get to do what they love.  People like wildlife photographer Moose Peterson. People like Chris Guillebeau who have decided to make their own way in the world by doing what they love to do.

Do what you love?

I’m not going to write another article about “Doing what you love.”  Paul Graham has a good one on that subject as do many others.  Gary Vaynerchuk screams about the topic to anyone who will listen. Jonathan Fields has written a book about being a Career Renegada and doing what you love (amazon affiliate link). Penelope Trunk hits the topic from another side saying that its bad career advice to tell people to ‘do what you love.’   I tend to agree with both approaches…if you can get paid for doing what you love, do it…if not, find ways to make a living while also pursuing what you love to do.

This isn’t one of those feel good articles about finding your purpose and your passion.  You can find many of those out in the interwebs. This article is just a quick reminder that passion can play a larger role in making your crappy job a little bit better.  Passion can help your boss be a better boss. Passion can help your company increase profits.  Passion can help you realize that your job really isn’t that bad.

How can passion do all these things?  Find those things that people love to do…and find ways to allow them to do it in their job.

Simple right?  Not really…its harder than it sounds…but worth pursuing.

Passionate Employees are Happy Employees

Zappos is a good example of a passion driven company as reported in Delivering Happiness (amazon affiliate link). There are many other good examples that can be found out there for people in retail,  consumer goods and beer.

Passionate employees are happy. Passionate employees are excited.  Passionate employees are engaged.   The Power of Pull (amazon affiliate link) provides a ton of good examples of how passion has helped organizations.  Great book… you should check it out.

How can you use passion to improve your job, your team and your company?  I don’t know the answer but I can tell you that passion can help turn your job into something a bit more enjoyable and, as a manager, passion can help you turn your unengaged employees into engaged, excited and driven employees.

And you know something…there’s a lot of passionate people working in every organization.  We just have to find what their passion is and then find ways to embrace that passion.  Of course, if someone’s passion is making sculptures out of cow manure, you might want to find other ways to engage that particular person.

Want to know a secret about modern day organizations?  There’s one group of people within every company that has a thriving and driving passion…but many aren’t allowed to fully engage their passion at work due to being overworked and process-bound.

What area is that?  The IT group of course.

Passion – At the heart of IT

Think about it.

How many people working in IT started playing around with computers because they loved them?  How many people took a job in IT because they loved technology?

How many people in IT do you know that hate computers?  Hate technology? I know a few…but they are outliers and not the norm.

Most people that I know in IT absolutely love technology. They love tweaking computers. They love learning about new technology. But yet…the majority of IT workers that I know aren’t 100% engaged in their work. They do what needs to be done to make it through the day. They ‘get by’.

What the hell have we done to our IT employees that has driven the passion away from one thing they’ve been passionate about their entire lives?

Its a heck of a question, isn’t it?

Most IT workers are overloaded, overworked and under-appreciated. Most IT workers dont’ have an opportunity to do anything more than keep the servers and networks running.

Perhaps that’s what we’ve done to our IT employees (and perhaps all employees?)….maybe we’ve allowed our drive to lower costs, improve productivity and increase market share to blind us so that we’ve forgotten that our employees are why we are where we are today.

Its time to bring passion back to the business world…and especially back to the IT world.    We’ve got a gazillion people in IT that used to love their jobs…and they could again.

Find a way to re-energize your IT group.  Find a way to allow them to find their passion.  Then…step back and be amazed at what they will do.

Before I go any further, in the context of this post, I am using the term System in the context of Systems Theory that defines that parts may be independent, they also are interacting. And Process as the routine set of procedures that convert any item or interaction from one form to another.

With those definitions in mind, let me ask you a personal question; As a manager or executive, if you saw some of these traits in one of your team;

a) Things fall through the cracks

b) Regularly missed deliverables

c) Problems keeping up with tasks and communication

Would you recommend some remedial action? perhaps some discipline in personal time management? Improving this personal time management system, or process can be as simple as improving calendaring and that morning checklist.

Is it any different in our business?

a) Things also fall through the cracks

b) Time is lost in complex tasks as no one knows what is next

c) Tasks are repeatedly redone due to errors or omissions

When tasks are performed, and they are performed more than once, they can benefit from a system and process that clearly delineates the next steps, the task responsibility, and they provide visibility across organizational structures.  Similar to our personal time management, systems and processes can provide your teams with a path to follow, provide your teams with the how in the performance of tasks and the visibility into what is next, and they can also show where bottlenecks (or friction) are consuming and wasting time.

Designing systems or processes that improve this interaction can be home grown, or they can be created leveraging existing pratices such as the ISO or ITIL frameworks. The benefits include increasing quality in consistently and repeatedly performed tasks, avoiding those tasks or events falling through the cracks, and provide a view of where friction is slowing the input or output of tasks or events. This friction being time lost, not within a task itself, but in the transfer, or hand-off to the next step of the task.

As an example of significant friction loss, a number of years ago I was assisting with the the implementation of a line of business software tool for a large organization. It took weeks to just get an IP address for a new database instance! Why? Because the network operations team, server team, and database team could not overcome this internal friction. The server team needed an IP Address from the Network team so the database team could bind an instance. But there was zero visibility or recourse as to why that IP address was not forthcoming.

And that was just within their IT organization! What would happen if input was required from operations, facilities, or marketing?

A Question

If process is a routine, Will this routine, this ‘sameness’ kill creativity and vision?

Will we be forcing people into stagnation? Perhaps punishing them for stepping outside the lines?

You could be.

As a respected senior IT executive once told me; if your process or system begins to look like a gospel, or religious zealotry, you have lost sight of all but working on your process – not the benefit that the system or process was supposed to provide.

Many of us have witnessed this zealotry, 20 years ago there were the gospels of mainframe vs. UNIX vs. Novell NetWare. And this has not changed with time, today’s gospels include open source or Mac vs PC.

Systems or processes cannot be written onto stone tablets. A key, but often overlooked piece of any system or process is one question; What are the opportunities for improving this system or process?

To be a living, breathing part of your business, systems must continually adapt to changing conditions, goals, and strategies. To be blunt, they may even need to completely ripped out and replaced. (an improvement in the process of making buggy whips is a low differentiating strategy today)

The Takeaway

In managing our personal time, or business tasks, systems or process can improve quality and consistency, while reducing errors and omissions.

But we must avoid the system or process becoming the end in itself. If the care and feeding of the tool becomes more important than what the tool was supposed to solve, you have lost any benefit of that system or that process.

PS: If the phrase “But that’s the way we have always done it around here” is ever heard in your business, the system,or process has lost its ability to adapt. Rigidly following the system or process has become more important than the benefit they were designed to provide.

About Elliot:

Elliot blogs about business technology issues for non-technology managers in the small to medium enterprise at http://elliotross.wordpress.com.  Elliot has 15 years experience applying technology to support business goals. With experience implementing both ISO 9000 and ITIL process management frameworks. This experience has shown that people, process, then technology is key to the strategic application of technology.