When they approach him with ideas, he engages in their enthusiasm, but makes certain to have them fill out a few light proposal forms. If this task is too much, he knows they are not committed. If they pass that hurdle, then he requests more of their time. If they pass that test, then he continues. If they continue to pass each hurdle he places in

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.

CIOs with Lion characteristics often rise to power in cultures that are more aggressive or internally competitive since they can hold their own with other “predators” Even the strongest CIOs have stronger adversaries A Wolf is neither Lamb nor Lion, but both

Doves rush into the burning house and try to rescue the goldfish Consider Samuel, a CIO for a defense agency. It seems that virtually every request that comes into IT is urgent or critical in some way. Samuel suspects that while his colleagues do have legitimate critical needs, many of the requests are not really urgent, and his colleagues could

CIOs with Dove qualities are often very selective about where they work and will strongly scrutinize the leadership of an enterprise and its mission before agreeing to work there. Doves are most likely to gain power when the enterprise is emerging from a period of extreme strife in which corporate ethics may have come into question. A dark-side

When in an order-taker relationship, IT may feel that it is giving while the rest of the enterprise is taking. This kind of relationship often evolves because IT believes it is in a weaker position due to previous delivery challenges, or that this is simply its appropriate role.

The three methods Machiavelli described are: First, form a partnership of equals in which everyone is treated in the same manner, has an equal say in how the partnership is governed and often make decisions by consensus. Second, create a federation, where there is a strong central authority that governs multiple states, which have some authority of

It is not your job as the CIO to be objective; it is your job to tell the story Consider Sheila, a CIO in a media company. On a weekly basis she produces IT status reports to distribute to all of the senior and mid-level managers in the company. First Sheila notes all of the bad news such as server outages, security issues, vendor issues and the

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