Relationships

Today’s reading is “The Hiring Manager Interviews:  Harvard Business School’s CIO Builds Trust and Respect Among His IT Staff by Involving Them in His Hiring Process” which you can find at  <http://www.cio.com/article/358465/The_Hiring_Manager_Interviews_Harvard_Business_School_s_CIO_Builds_Trust_and_Respect_Among_His_IT_Staff_by_Involving_Them_in_His_Hiring_Process>. Here, Amanda Brady, associate director of executive search firm The Alexander Group, reports on a recent discussion with Stephen Laster, CIO at the […]

During a 2005 guest lecture at MIT’s Sloan School of Management the following question was asked:  “What should you be learning in business school?”  Jack Welch answered:  “Just concentrate on networking.  Everything else you need to know, you can learn on the job.”  In this week’s reading, “Great Leaders Build Off Great Relations”  <http://www.cio.com/article/152451>, John Baldoni talks […]

Early last month, I was talking with with a businessman who is now the president of a small college in New York. In the course of our conversation, he noted how rude his faculty were to one another.  I couldn’t help reflecting on the rudeness I had observed among IT staff members during my two decades […]

In “How to Make Nice,” Susan Cramm addresses the issue of influencing others.  She begins by noting that “Getting others to do what you want them to do because they want to do it is the ultimate test of leadership skill.”  Cramm then focuses on rebuilding relationships that have been damaged — who hasn’t gotten themselves […]

In “Web Rage:  Why It Happens, What it Costs, How to Stop” authors Daniel Goleman and Clay Sinsky point out that most forms of electronic commnication – i.e, email, IM, and telephony – cannot provide those subtle, mainly non-verbal clues that help us form our interactions in those conversations.  Without these signals we may speak (or […]

In “The Power of Persuasion“, Susan Cramm  Cramm argues that persuading and inspiring others starts with your character and credibility which you have established through personal interactions.  She believes that effective leaders get things done through others and, in doing so, are able to create a powerful role for themselves, their organizations and technology.   In […]

Several weeks ago I was pointed to UBS’s Knowledge Center and a short piece True Leaders Must “Walk the Floor.”  This piece reinforces the importance of communicating with staff.  It notes that many leaders have found that interacting with their staff by walking around can build relationships, help staff understand their leader’s goals, and provide […]

Today’s reading, Seven Strategies for Attracting and Retaining Top IT Talent, which comes from the January 4, 2007 issue of CIO, is just as applicable to other fields as it is to IT.   Business 2.0 reports what seems to be an amazing data point:  For every two baby boomers who retire in the next […]

Today, we welcome the participants in Group VI of the IT Leaders Program who are starting their first workshop.  Welcome to the Tuesday Readings, gleanings from my readings that I hope you might find interesting, provocative, and otherwise useful. Today’s reading is a review of Eric Bonabeau’s “Hunch Engine” which appeared in a recent Technology […]

Today’s two-part reading takes the once-common practice of communal barn-raising where everyone in a community worked together to benefit a single farm family.  Given the right task, good planning and organization you may find a community approach gets the right result and has the benefit of generating new relationships that represent a real added value. […]