Wolf in Cio's Clothing

Consider this situation as described by a Wolf CIO: “I became the CIO of a dysfunctional not-for-profit charity where all the staff had been there for a long time. They refused to do virtually any work, and had no sense of urgency. I had worked at other charities where staff worked hard to execute the mission, and were innovators and positive contr

An auditor is a force multiplier with a spreadsheet Daniel, a CIO at an international grocery company, was faced with the possibility of accidentally deploying a WMD. He agreed to take the CIO job fully aware that the scope of his role included having control over only half of the IT budget and staff. The other half of the IT staff was not accounta

As Machiavelli noted, the best strategy is often the one that no one believes you will undertake because it is either so high risk or so destructive that it is hard to imagine anyone actually implementing it. But sometimes, there is no alternative.

decided to take over business process improvement. I didn’t ask permission, and I didn’t tell anyone, I just did it and it became so. Many of my team had experience in this area from being in IT for so many years.

Areas such as innovation, business process improvement and information management often fit into the grey spaces. When I asked one group of CIOs what they do when they encounter a grey space, one entertaining CIO emphatically responded: “We put a server in it!”

Grey Wolves move into the front with the grey space and take over Adventurous Wolves expand their battlefronts and territories well outside of IT by taking advantage of opportunities that others tend to ignore. What do you do as a CIO when you encounter a grey space that no one in your enterprise seems to be in charge of? Most enterprises have many

Wolf CIOs choose to fight the wars no one thought to fight The most effective war fighters are innovators at heart who take the actions that no one expected to deliver previously unimagined value. Penny, the CIO of a property management group specializing in theaters and arenas, is such a Wolf.

Scale up your capacity by always fighting on multiple fronts, but not too many Succeeding in warfare requires knowing when to go beyond fighting the wars on the fronts that we have been asked to fight, and fighting the wars that need to be fought. As Machiavelli explained, generals who fight battles with a single battle line will collapse as soon a

Remember: There are three ways to create alliances; the lower the cost, the greater the risk Dolphins create alliances of equals that disintegrate on the dark side Sharks favor the all-or-nothing power play, which results in all or nothing Wolves use multilateral strategies in federated environments Wolves maximize the minority to maintain a durabl