In that post, I mentioned the Boy Scouts of America and how their magazine group uses WordPress.com’s VIP hosting platform for Boys’ Life magazine’s Boyslife.org website.  Wordpress is open source…but as far as I’m aware, this is the only example of open source platforms being used at the National office of the BSA.

This story isn’t about boyslife.org though or just about the BSA…its about how important it is to embrace whatever community you have.

Boy Scouts & Open Source

Now…before I continue, you should realize I worked at the BSA national office as an employee for ~ 1 year and as a consultant for ~1.5 years. I know the organization very well.

The Boy Scouts of America has over 1 million volunteers. These volunteers come from all walks of life with many of them being new volunteers with young kids in the programs.  Out of 1 million volunteers, I’d estimate that the BSA could reach out and find 1,000 people who have  a strong computer background. Out of those 1,000 people, I’d be willing to bet that 100 of them would be willing to give a portion of their time to various IT related activities (software development, etc).

So….here’s an organization that has a dedicated volunteer community large enough to include a few people (maybe even a few hundred people) willing (and eager) to help develop new and interesting software platforms for the organization.  Is the BSA reaching out to embrace this community?  They are reaching out, but not truly embracing them.

Failing to embrace the community

Back in 2008 there was an open source initiative announced within the BSA.  On the surface, it looked good…even Eric S. Raymond (former president of the Open Source Initiative and former Scout) was excited about the announcement.

Like I said, on the surface it looked good. Here we had the BSA reaching out and embracing their large volunteer base and providing yet another way for those volunteers to help the organization out.

The CIO of the BSA hired a consultant to come in and build an open source strategy and program.

What did this program consist of?   A website, a forum and an open source ‘strategy’ document was created and published on a website.    The act of publishing that document and website was considered the ‘last step’ of the open source program and the consultant went on his way.

The website and forum actually got some decent traffic…within days of the announcement there were 10 to 15 people on there announcing their interest in helping the BSA.   From what I saw, these volunteers were extremely interested in helping, extremely comptetant in their fields and full of ideas of how to bring open source into the BSA.

But….those people were ignored. After 6 months, the forum was closed down. There were zero projects undertaken.  There was zero communication from the BSA IT group to these volunteers.  There was no embracing of this community.

It was sad really.  Watching these people comment over and over on the forum about how they were wanting to help.  Some even started up projects independently of the BSA National IT group but as farm as I know, those projects never went anywhere. The Boy Scouts of America’s IT group had no idea how to reach out and embrace these volunteers.

The open source initiative was an excellent idea, especially for an organization with over a million volunteers ready and willing to help.  The only issue – the BSA didn’t really know how to embrace their community, at least on the technology side.

The Boy Scouts of America hasn’t quite figured out how to embrace their technologically advanced volunteers…and I don’t know that they ever will be willing to reach out for help within the IT space.  There are a ton of security issues to worry about at the BSA due to the large amont of data on children…but there are many options for an organization like the BSA and even more for other organizations.

What could you do with One Million Volunteers?

Just imagine what you could do with a million volunteers.  Imagine having a million people beating down your door to help in any way they can.

That’s what the BSA has…and they’ve done a good job of utilizing those volunteers…but have they embraced them?   On the technology side of the house, they have not.

Here we have an organization who has an IT group that is understaffed and overworked and has a hard time getting anything done quickly. Now…add to that a large group of volunteers willing to help in any way they can and you’ve got a recipe for success….but those volunteers have to be embraced.  Right now..they are kept are arms length.

Imagine if you had had a group of people willing to help your organization out.  Maybe not 1 million people…but what if you had just 10 or 15 people willing to help you with your project and/or initiative? You can have that if you build and embrace your community.

This is the power of something like open source.  You’ve got people wanting to help. You’ve got people willing to help.

Whether you’re the Boy Scouts of America or a small business with 1 employee, you’ve got a ton of ‘volunteers’ out there waiting to help you out in the open source world. You just have to be willing to reach out and ask for help…and understand how to embrace those folks that are willing to help.

Of course, there’s times when you can’t (or won’t) opt for open source platforms….but odds are that there is a community out there willing to offer assistance.  Take a commercial content management product like  Sitecore for example. Sitecore has a fairly large community of developers on the Sitecore Developer Network who offer advice and propose solutions to problems.  Take advantage of communities like and embrace them when you can.

Whatever your community looks like, embrace them.  If you don’t have a community, build one.  You may be surprised to find what your business / organization can do when you open your arms and embrace those around you.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Boy Scouting in America Celebrates 100 Years (prweb.com)
• Open Source, The Enterprise and The Community (ericbrown.com)

Embrace your community is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
Read more about Eric...

Related posts:

1. Open Source, The Enterprise and The Community
2. Boy Scouts CIO Interviewed on Enterprise Leadership
3. Sitecore, Me and the Boy Scouts
4. A techie in a marketers world
5. The New CIO: Social Media and the Enterprise

In one of the best forewords I’ve read in a while, Covey speaks about “insufficient resources” as an issue affecting business when he writes:

For some forty years I’ve have worked with organizations that were grappling with “new demands, insufficient resources”. I have become convinced that the biggest leadership challenge of our times is not insufficient resources per se, but rather our inability to access the most valuable resources at our disposal.

Emphasis mine.

Pretty powerful statement, especially when you think about the ‘do more with less‘ attitude that pervades most organizations today.

Doing more with less

If you’ve spent any time in business over the last few years, you’ve no doubt worked long hours over many days (and nights perhaps) to get your job done. You feel like you’re doing the job of 2 or 3 people and you don’t see any end to the work that comes your way.

Everyone in the organization feels the same way as you. Everyone’s overworked and overloaded.  There’s just too much work to do.

Many managers talk about how they’re ‘doing more with less‘ these days.  Some of these managers even brag about how much work their teams have and how few people they have to do it.  Some companies have even added “do more with less” to their core values, as evidenced by Zappo’s statement here.

It seems like there’s even a badge of honor that many managers like to show off to their peers.  In fact, I used to work for a CIO that loved to tout his experiences cutting costs (via cutting people) and adding additional technology functions. This CIO required the following paragraph be added to his corporate bio:

He’s well known for his ability to bring productivity and efficiency into an organizations’ IT group.  In his current role, he’s famous for adding functionality to the organization by increasing the number of IT platforms from 3 to 6 and cutting costs by decreasing IT headcount from 100 to 60 while maintaining the same level of service across the organization.

This statement, by itself, is quite impressive.  This CIO was extremely proud of his accomplishments and received a ton of ‘kudos’ from his peers, including being named to CIO Magazine’s Top 100 CIO’s list one year.

Good for him right? Reducing headcount by 40% and doubling the number of IT platforms is a heck of an accomplishment….but as you’ll see shortly, it isn’t the entire story.

Managing in the time of constraints

When you’re asked to do more with less, what’s the first thing you do?  Think about how to implement processes? Think about what technologies to use?  Or…do you take a second to ask a few questions of your manager to see what the real driver is behind the changes and /or new projects and determine the right priorities?

Do you accept the constraints blindly and do your job or do you stop and look at your organization to truly understand the available resources to determine how best to get those resources aligned to get everything done?

The CIO mentioned above took the first approach.

He was forced to to cut costs while at the same time deliver the necessary technology platforms to take the organization into the future.  He took a look at the objectives handed down from the CEO and board and ran with them.  This CIO saw an opportunity to use technology as a way to cut costs by replacing people.

Not a bad approach…not one I would take if I were in his shoes, but worth looking into right?  There are many places in business where technology can create efficiencies and/or allow cost cuts.  And the CIO’s job is to use technology to solve business problems correct?

That said, you can’t automatically equate new technology with “X” number of jobs; which is what the CIO above was trying to do.  In fact, according to his calculations, he could get rid of four people after the implementation of a newly implemented content management system (his exact words to me one day were: once you are done with this CMS implementation, which four people can I fire).  I’ve never figured out where he got that number but it seemed to be the approach to his job: new system = “X” people replaced.

Take a look back at the CIO’s bio where it talks about doubling the major  IT platforms and reducing headcount by 40%.  This CIO did a a wonderful job doing what he was asked to do.  He cut costs and kept the technology initiatives moving forward. But…if you look past his statement and get closer to the organization, you’ll see a different story. You’ll find an IT group who are overworked and extremely stressed out. You’ll find people who are looking for any way out of this organization.  You’ll find an IT group (and an entire organization) who are beaten down by the motto “do more with less.”

Look further than the IT group and you’ll see an organization who can’t trust IT to get anything done.  You’ll see an organization who’s tired of excuses about why technology projects aren’t getting done. You’ll see an organization who look everywhere but the IT group for technology and technology projects.

The CIO did as he was asked.  He cut costs and managed the constraints.  But…he turned his IT team into a shell of its former self.  He implemented technology to replace people….and you can believe the people left know they only have a job until the CIO can find a piece of technology to replace them.

Managing the constraints or leading the people?

Back to the Covey quote from earlier:

I have become convinced that the biggest leadership challenge of our times is not insufficient resources per se, but rather our inability to access the most valuable resources at our disposal.

The CIO I mentioned above has taken the road that many take.  They are confronted with the challenge of constrained resources (cost cutting, low / no budgets, etc) and try to ‘manage’ their way through these challenges rather than step back and think about how best to lead their teams through those tough times.

You may argue that the CIO above was leading his team.  He was providing the ‘tough leadership’ required to make it through the rough times, and you may be right.  Because I know this CIO personally, I know this isn’t the case; this man was managing his way through this crisis by trying to find ways to replace his people.  He was managing the constraints…not leading his team.

If he were leading his team, he would’ve realized that there were people working for him that had a tremendous amount of organizational knowledge, passion and commitment to the organization and to their job.  Rather than listen to that team and finding ways to allow them to help the organization cut costs and implement the requisite technological changes, he removed a good portion of those people and absolutely destroyed any passion, commitment and drive that the remaining team members had.

If you focus on managing the constraints first, you’ve allowed those constraints to own you.  If you lead your people, you’ll allow yourself, your organization and your team to own the constraints and find creative approaches to overcoming them.

Lead your people first and the constraints will follow.

Are you managing the constraints or leading your people? is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
Read more about Eric...

Related posts:

1. Leading by saying No – The New CIO Series
2. Small Business CIO – Manager of Constraints
3. Linus Torvalds on Managing Software Projects
4. Interesting application of the Theory of Constraints
5. CIO’s – what’s your team’s story?

• Markets are fracturing
• Everything’s social
• Technology is moving away from IT

These three tips are excellent and worth doing a deeper dive into, but I’d like to look at the third tip in more detail.

Technology is moving away from IT

Mark writes:

Technology is no longer the unique purview of IT.  Increasingly technology services are available via public markets either in terms of hardware, network connectivity and applications.  While these go under fancy names like cloud, SaaS, managed services etc, you have to recognize that you are no longer the only source of IT services and capabilities.  Unlike outsourcing, which was largely an IT administered decisions, business leaders can provision their own technology.  Business leaders have choice.

Absolutely true.

I think it would be hard for anyone to argue that any function of business could not go around the IY team for any of their technology needs.  So…for IT to remain relevant in the future, what can we (IT) do to be the provider of choice?

For one, we can stop acting like a vendor and start working with the business to deliver true value to them.  Let’s start with that and see what happens.

Mark McDonald on IT Planning for 2011 is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
Read more about Eric...

Related posts:

1. Improving IT Planning in 2010
2. The diminishing role of IT and the CIO (?)
3. Can we stop trying to run IT as a business?
4. What would you do differently?
5. Innovation or Imitation?

I enjoyed this book.  Not only is the subject matter interesting, but the way in which Li presents the material is fresh, interesting and engaging.

The main premise of the book is that in order for organizations to use social tools and technology, they need to be able to operate in a more open manner.

I do have to say that when I first saw the title “Open Leadership”, I was perplexed. I thought that Li had somehow decided to move away from her area of experience and expertise in the social space and move into the realm of ‘leadership’ books.  The subtitle helped assuage that fear though and after opening the book and starting to read, I realized that the title made perfect sense.

In this book, Li declares open leadership to be a vital factor in whether an organization succeeds using social media.     She argues that by becoming more open, organizations will be able to build real / honest relationships with their employees, clients and vendors.

This is a good thing.  Building long-lasting and valuable relationships with people (whether they are clients or employees) is the entire reason for moving into the social space.  Having a culture of openness within an organization helps tremendously with building those relationships.

Li argues that the old ‘command and control’ structure that most organizations have used (and still use) will not work in this more open environment.  While this argument is made fairly successfully, there are many places in the book where Li tries to assuage those who still prefer the top-down command approach with her ‘controlled’ open-ness approach. When I first ran across the idea of a controlled ‘open’ environment as Li discusses, I was a little disturbed, but after thinking about it and reading more, I realized that Li wasn’t really advocating for continuing the command and control approach; she’s arguing for processes that help shape the open environment.  As long-time readers of this blog know, I’m all for processes as long as they don’t hinder the ability of the business to be ‘human’.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in social media, social technologies, customer service and marketing.  There are a lot of really great stories & case studies that highlight how organizations are using social media to get closer to their customers and the problems those customers are having.

If you liked Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies (affiliate link), a great book in its own right, you’ll like this book too.

Open Leadership – Book review is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
Read more about Eric...

Related posts:

1. Book Review: Toy Box Leadership
2. The Leadership Test – A Book Review
3. Book Review: Change by Design by Tim Brown
4. Book Review: Succession, Are You Ready?
5. Groundswell

I’m in Atlanta this week on business.

I decided to stay at a nice little boutique hotel in midtown called the Artmore Hotel.   The price was the same as the other hotel I was planning to stay in…and the hotel looked much more interesting than the Courtyard.  A Courtyard is a Courtyard right?  The Artmore isn’t a Courtyard.

The Artmore touts itself as a unique hotel that “prides itself on delivering a personalized guest experience, not previously seen in a Midtown Atlanta hotel.”  Now…I’ve not stayed at any other Midtown Atlanta hotel…but the Artmore definitely lives up to being unique….in a good way.

The hotel lives up to the hype.  This is a great little boutique hotel that can make travel much more comfortable and much more enjoyable.

Does your company / team live up to the hype?

I’ve recently had an experience with a local Dallas company who claims to be the ‘best’ at what they do.  They have plenty of testimonials and lots of things on their website that say ‘we are the best’ and ‘we guarantee satisfaction’.

The only thing is…they didn’t satisfy.  Sure…they did the job they said they would…but it wasn’t done in the way they claimed it would be nor was it completed quickly or without issues (their hype).

What about your company?  Do you have hype behind your service / company?   Do you live up to that hype?

Hype and the IT group

Of course I’m going to tie this topic to the IT group…you know I have to

You know the last time I saw an IT hype their services…that hype was around how great the IT group was in delivering projects “on time and under budget”.  It was great hype. But it was far from the truth.  I don’t believe there was a project delivered on time or under budget (or even meeting budget) during the years I worked with them.

Can you live up to the hype of your team and your company?  Can you really deliver projects on time and on budget?  Can your IT team do what they say they can or what you tell people they can?

If not, perhaps you need to revisit your project approach to figure out how to turn your hype into reality….it’s not really hype if you can back it up.

If you tell people your IT group is going to drive innovation….are you driving innovation?

Are you living up to the hype…or just creating hype?  There’s a difference there.

Make sure you can live up to your own hype… is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
Read more about Eric...

Related posts:

1. CIO’s – what’s your team’s story?
2. I hate consultants
3. Values and The New CIO
4. I can, but should I?
5. Do you know your team?

Why?

Because both terms normally convey a sense of importance upon the IT group that really isn’t there.

Think about it this way:  Have you ever heard anyone in finance say ‘we need to run finance as a business’ or ‘we need to run finance like a business’.  I’d bet you haven’t.

What about HR?  Ever heard anyone within your HR team say they need to ‘run HR like a business’?  No?  There are some proponents for running HR ‘as a business’…if you google that term you’ll find a few results for the term in books/ articles.  In reviewing those articles/books, the writers are really saying the same thing I am…take a business approach to HR (and in our case, IT).

So why do we IT folks think we need to ‘run as a business’?  Shouldn’t we just ‘run’ as part of the overall business?

What is really being said with ‘IT should run as a business’?

Normally when I hear this term from someone, they are trying to say something more along the lines of ‘IT should be more business-savvy’ or ‘we need to take a business approach to IT’.

What these people are really saying is that they understand that IT isn’t delivering the value that it should to the organization. They understand this and are they trying to find ways to change it.

But the key isn’t to run IT ‘as a business’.  You don’t have ‘customers’….you have business partners.  Treat people like customers and you’ll be treated as a vendor.

Look at it another way….do you (in IT) pay for the services the HR function provides you?  Do you pay for the functions that finance / accounting provide you?    Perhaps in a shared services environment you might pay for these services, but the shared services approach is one that is another bad idea in my opinion.  More on that level of hell in other posts perhaps.

What to do?

The first step is to go read Bob Lewis’ InfoWorld article titled Run IT as a business — why that’s a train wreck waiting to happen and then go read Chris Curran’s Run IT like a business, not as a business.

Interesting reading, right?

The takeaways from those articles?  Stop trying to be a business and start working a partner to the rest of the business.

Step away from running IT as a business.  Move toward a more integrative approach to working with your business partners within the organization.  Stop worrying about what you can out-charge and to whom and focus on delivering business value.

If you continue to run IT as a business and focus on costs and out-charging your ‘customers’, you’ll continue to be seen as a vendor.  Vendors aren’t part of the business…they are a necessary cost to doing business.  The instant a better (e.g., lower cost, bette quality, etc) vendor comes along, you are toast.

How do you do this? Stop being seen as a vendor.

Stop trying to get that $180 out-charge for moving a network drop from cube A to cube B and start wondering how you can help the people in those cubes do their job better.

Can we stop trying to run IT as a business? is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
Read more about Eric...

Related posts:

1. Do it or Don't….just stop talking about it
2. Mark McDonald on IT Planning for 2011
3. Values and The New CIO
4. Building Tomorrow’s Organization – without today’s IT?
5. The Small Business CIO

I wonder if there are any CIO’s and IT leaders out there that read that and wondered about their story?  Their personal story…and their IT group story.

Have you thought about what the story is for your IT group?  Are you the team that ‘gets things done’ or are you known as the team that’s hard to work with.

Do people within your organization come to you first for projects….or are you the last to hear of new projects?

Are you the group driving innovative ideas…or the group that causes innovation to falter or fail?

What’s your IT group’s story?

CIO’s – what’s your team’s story? is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
Read more about Eric...

Related posts:

1. Do you know your team?
2. CIO’s – Are you hearing your team say No?
3. Make sure you can live up to your own hype…
4. Photography is tough
5. Goals, Priorities and The New CIO

• You Too Can Be a Strategy Consultant: Three Secret Tools Revealed by Charles H. Green on Trust Matters

  Quote: The art of general management and strategic consulting lies in the mastery of a few simple tools. Now, despite the inevitable threats against my person made by parties who do not want to see the Truth revealed, I am about to share with you, Trust Matters readers, the Three Strategic Secret Sauces. Guard them carefully.

• Success, Commitment and a Choice by Danny Brown

  Quote: The problem is, while you’re being unsure of commitment because of the uncertainty over success, your competitors are enjoying success because of the certainty in their commitment.

• Why Controlling Bosses Have Unproductive Employees by Andrew O’Connell on Harvard Business Review

  Quote: In fact, if your employees consider you a controlling person, even an unconscious thought of you can have a negative effect on their performance. If, for example, they were to happen to subliminally see, out of the corner of their eyes, your name flash for 60 milliseconds, you could expect them to start working less hard. Even if they didn’t intend to slack off.

• What’s the Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work? by Andrew McAfee

  Quote: Enterprise 2.0 is sometimes a too-well-kept secret, despite the best efforts of the executives, trainers, curators, and others who want it to succeed.

• Know when to skimp and when to splurge by Christopher S. Penn on Awaken Your Superhero

  Quote: Are you skimping and splurging in the right places for maximum quality of life on the same fixed budget?

• How to Hire for Cultural Fit by Michael Haid on Great Leadership

  Quote: It’s not what you know, but how you fit in the culture that results in accelerated performance. While technical skills generally can be taught, cultural and motivational fit involve innate characteristics that can be difficult – or impossible – to coach or develop. The clear implication is that leaders need to hire employees who, in addition to meeting the technical requirements for the job, naturally have the right qualities that mesh with the overall organization or team.

• Learn Leadership By Riding the Subway by Simon Sinek on Re:Focus

  Quote: It turns out you can learn a lot about leadership by riding the subway. The subway systems in London and New York, for example, have a lot in common: both serve the largest cities in their respective countries; both systems are over 100 years old; both are shining examples of an effective, modern public transportation system — but only one of them acts like a leader.

• Four reasons why Lady Gaga has fans and you don’t by Mack Collier on MackCollier.com

  Four reasons that your social media efforts might be failing

Links for May 30 2010 is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
Read more about Eric...

Related posts:

1. Links for May 23 2010
2. Links for June 27 2010
3. Links for May 9 2010
4. Links for June 20 2010
5. Links for June 13 2010

• You’re Just the Founder « Steve Blank

  A great reminder to everyone that what you do today might just come back around to bite you in the future.

• Applying Behavioral Economics to Reduce Project Failures by Chris Curran on CIO Dashboard

  Very interesting take on using Behavioral Economics Theory to help with Project decision making. Great read

• The Most Important Leadership Quality for CEOs? Creativity | Fast Company

  Quote: For CEOs, creativity is now the most important leadership quality for success in business, outweighing even integrity and global thinking, according to a new study by IBM. The study is the largest known sample of one-on-one CEO interviews, with over 1,500 corporate heads and public sector leaders across 60 nations and 33 industries polled on what drives them in managing their companies in today’s world.

• All Things Workplace: Managers and Self Leadership by Steve Roesler on All Things Workplace

  Quote: We teach leaders how to design and execute change, how to let go of things, and how to delegate. We don’t often teach the other people how to “hang on” through all of this. What gives a manager the biggest payoff during these times? Self-leadership.

• Mind the gap by Don Sull on Don Sull’s Blog | FT.com

  Quote: The human mind is hard-wired to reinforce existing maps, even in the face of dis-confirming evidence. Psychologists have documented a depressingly long list of cognitive biases that distort how people process new information and prevent them from noticing when established mental models break down. The “confirmation bias” refers to our tendency to notice data that confirms existing assumptions, and while ignoring or discrediting information which challenges our assumptions. When faced with data that doesn’t jibe with existing assumptions, people typically ignore it, discredit it, or force it to fit their model.

• Why Startups Should Train Their People by Ben Horowitz on ben’s blog

  Quote: Almost everyone who builds a technology company knows that people are the most important asset. Properly run start-ups place a great deal of emphasis on recruiting and the interview process in order to build their talent base. Unfortunately, often the investment in people stops there. There are four core reasons why it shouldn’t:

• Tech Support *is* sales by Jason Cohen on a smart bear

  Quote: For most of your customers, tech support is the only human interaction they’ll have with you. Are you really going to leave that up to your worst-treated, least-paid, least-qualified employees?

• Warren Buffet on Envy and the Seven Deadly Sins by Charles H. Green on Trust Matters

  Quote from Buffet: If you’re going to pick a sin, go with something like lust or gluttony. That way at least you’ll have something to remember the weekend for.

• Want to Get to Know Somebody? Understand Their Story by Donald Miller

  Quote: We are much more than our work and even our family. These formulaic questions evolved from the need to make conversation more than the desire to get know somebody. What results is we begin to think that people are fairly boring. But it’s not the case.

Links for May 23 2010 is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
Read more about Eric...

Related posts:

1. Links for June 27 2010
2. Links for May 30 2010
3. Links for August 15 2010
4. Links for May 16 2010
5. Links for August 8 2010

I’m currently reading “Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation” (affiliate link) by Sally Hogshead.

I picked the book up on my kindle on a whim while waiting to board the flight from Dallas to Chicago.

While this book is focused on approaches to marketing, the concepts in the book could easily be applied to other aspects of the business….and I can easily think of ways that CIO’s and IT leaders can apply the concepts of the book in their organizations.

Question for all the non IT folks:

When’s the last time you were fascinated by your IT group?  When was the last time you were enthralled with what your organization’s IT team were doing?

I’d wager you’re answering ’never’.

Why is that?

The answer has to do with the focus of  most information technology groups being an operational one.

But….what if, in addition to an operational focus, the IT group begins to use some marketing approaches to improve service and understanding within the organization?

What if we were able to use the 7 triggers outlined in Sally’s book to fascinate the organization?

Add a Marketing focus  -  7 Triggers applied to IT

The 7 Triggers and brief explanation of each are:

Lust – creates a craving for sensory pleasure

Mystique – lures with unanswered questions

Alarm – threatens with a negative consequence

Prestige – earns respect through symbols of achievement

Vice – tempts with “forbidden fruit” causing rebelling against norms

Trust – comforts us with certainty and reliability

Now…don’t get all puritan on me when you see ‘lust’ and ‘vice’ and the like.   Think about the triggers above….are you using any of these in your IT organization when communicating?

You probably are without really know it.  Think about the last time you had a person within your company ask for a new computer and told them no. That person then notices the Director of IT (and many other people within IT) with brand new top-of-the-line computers.  What does that tell that user?

That user doesn’t realize the IT folks have these new computers to test them out before ordering 1000 more to outfit the company…that user only knows that they have a 3 year old computer and can’t get another one and “everyone” in IT has new computers.

You’ve just used Lust, Mystique, Vice and Prestige negatively.  And you’ve damaged the trust that the user might have had for your IT group.

What if you used these 7 triggers to develop a better message for that user? What if you showed them the new models you’re testing and how cool the new features and operating system is and that they’ll have one of these new machines within a few months?  What if you let that user (or at least a subset of users in the company) help test these models with the IT group?  You’ve now just used Lust, Mystique, Vice, Prestige and Trust to help that user better understand why they can’t have a new machine, when they can expect one and how that wait will pay off for them.

In scenario one (using negative triggers), you’ve got a user who has very negative feelings toward IT. Using scenario two (using positive triggers), you’ve got a friend for life in that user.

According to the author of Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation, these triggers are meant to assist in creating a fascinating message and Sally provides a glimpse into he hallmarks of a fascinating message are:

Provokes strong and immediate emotional reactions

Creates advocates

Becomes “Cultural Shorthand” for a specific set of Actions of Values

Incites Conversation

Forces Competitors to Realign It

Triggers Social Revolutions

Think about those hallmarks….do you find any of them in any messages from your IT group to the rest of the organization?

I think most IT groups already provoke strong and immediate emotional reactions…but for the wrong reasons!

Has your IT group created advocates throughout the organization?  Have you been able to incite positive conversation about IT and IT’s service?  If not, it may be time to rethink your approach and begin using things like these 7 triggers to help change the perception of your IT group.

Fascinate or Die?

Of course, you won’t die if you don’t fascinate your organization, but you may be out of a job.

Think about your approach to communicating with the people within your organization?  Are there ways you can use the 7 triggers to create a fascinating message?

Or…will you continue to enforce IT processes and procedures using IT language and continue to evoke the negative reactions?

Perhaps these 7 triggers aren’t perfect for you and your IT team…but some method of changing how you communicate with your organization should be reviewed.

I’d highly recommend picking up Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation and take the message within the book to heart…you might be surprised to find that you can communicate better with your organization.

Related articles by Zemanta

• We’re Fascinated with Sally Hogshead (800ceoread.com)
• How to add fascination to advertising message (thestar.com)
• Do You Fascinate? (ducttapemarketing.com)

CIO’s need to fascinate to survive is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
Read more about Eric...

Related posts:

1. CIO’s – what’s your team’s story?
2. I finally read "Good To Great"
3. CIO’s: Consider This…
4. Agility and The New CIO
5. Links for Jan 31 2010