(Once again, sorry for the long darkness since my last entry. No excuses; I’m still swamped, but have almost bailed myself out …)
Issue the First: Within the past week or so, both Citigroup and Merrill Lynch have jettisoned their leaders. But perhaps even more interesting is that according to several published and broadcast reports, neither company has a strong candidate successor waiting in the wings.
If this isn’t evidence of failed or inadequate business processes, I’d be very surprised. Effective corporate leadership succession, as Bette Davis famously said about old age, “is no place for sissies.” With shareholders increasingly appearing to demand higher returns every quarter, month, or week, management time cycles are compressing significantly. This means leaders barely have time to effect meaningful change before they’re on the hot seat. Outsized challenges such as the sub-prime mortgage market meltdown only accelerate and exacerbate these challenges.
The lesson for BPM and IT decision-makers: select and begin mentoring your future leaders now, and put effective and well-documented processes into place for identifying and working with those people. With every enterprise almost entirely dependent upon IT to do business, let alone to thrive competitively, no company can afford to miss a beat or make a misstep where IT leadership is concerned. And with more and more experienced IT people retiring, this is definitely a non-trivial challenge.
Issue the Second: Yahoo! has apologized publicly for misleading Congress, and giving the Chinese government information that helped lead to the jailing of dissidents. The company claimed that it had no choice but to comply with orders to deliver to the Chinese government e-mail records and other information that led to the dissidents’ arrests.
Sigh.
The IT-enabled globalization genie is out of the bottle for sure, and ain’t getting back in any time soon. However, as country musician Aaron Tippin said in his first hit song, and as many have said before and since, “you’ve got to stand for something or you’ll fall for anything.” Yahoo! – and every other company doing business beyond the borders of the country in which it was started – must decide what its corporate values are, and live by and up to them, wherever it does business.
The lesson for BPM and IT decision-makers: ensure that values at your workplace and across your company are clearly articulated and consistently enforced. This will not only make recruiting and retention of key staff and leaders easier, it will make it easier for you and your colleagues to sleep well at night – barring unforeseen IT crises, of course...
Michael Dortch has been an analyst, 'information entrepreneur,' speaker, and writer about IT and 'the real world" for the past 30 years. After almost 10 years at the Robert Frances Group (RFG), Michael begins a new position with Aberdeen Group in September.
Dennis Byron is an analyst with ebizQ, focusing on Open Source Software as well as Business Process Management technologies.
