Here’s a short video of someone talking to my favorite speaker, Patricia Fripp. She is right on. You don’t have to be a keynote speaker. You just need to be able to learn how to speak in front of a group of people. Learning how to create a speech and give it will be the tipping point for your career. She mentions Toastmasters as a great first step. I couldn’t agree more. Don’t wait until the new year…start creating a tipping point today!

1. Taking this simple step will help YOU engage with technologists, coworkers, executives, family, and friends.
2. Taking this simple step will help YOU write better.
3. Taking this simple step will help YOU lead your teams.
4. Taking this simple step NOW will prepare you for success in 2010!

Imagine Leadership by XPLANE & Nitin Nohria

This video presentation below is a result of XPLANE teaming up with Nitin Nohria and Amanda Pepper of Harvard Business School’s Leadership Initiative to stimulate a discussion of the value and importance of leadership. I found the video from the PresentationZen blog. It is worth watching…more than once.

You are the “Project Sponsor” for a big, mission critical project for your company. You’re the main contact for approval of tasks, budgets, and business requirements.

As a “Project Sponsor” are you a leader or manager?

Well, if you micro-manage the technology group (or your own business staff), the name of which represents your style is in the right there in the description. It is impossible for you to micro manage technology people when you do not have the technology skills. Remember your role…you are the project sponsor. That means you are there to “LEAD” both the business and technology team to achieve the goals of the project.

Leadership means:

• Clearly defining the objectives.
• Get people EMOTIONALLY involved in achieving the objectives.
• Rid any roadblocks that prevent anyone from achieving the objectives.
• Teach what you know. You don’t know technology but you do know the business. Or else, you know someone who knows the specifics of what the technologist needs to understand. Make the connection for the technologist.
• Be a coach. Again, not in the technology but in engaging. Business people have a better sense of how to engage people through relationships. Illustrate how to do this by setting a GREAT example. Engage the technologist. Coach them on the personal skills that you take for granted.
• Finally…be a leader: Encourage and inspire … is a continual process not a kick-off task.

If you are part of a mission-critical project, does it have a name? Does it have a tag line? Does the entire team (that includes the technology people) know it?

According to Seth Godin’s book titled: Tribes: We Need You To Lead Us, tribes are a group of 3 or more people working towards a common goal. As the business person leading a project, you need to have all of the projects participants feel like they are part of the “tribe.”

One way to help simulate the specialness of a ”tribe” is to have a uniform. People proud to be part of a tribe will wear a “uniform” that lets others know they are part of the special tribe (of course you need to continually make sure people are proud to be part of the project).

Why not create a t-shirt with the project name and tag line. It’s easy to produce with the online stores like Zazzle. Purchase one for each member of the project/tribe. That includes the technology people. It will help make technologists feel part of the team, appreciated, and committed to success of the project.

I still have many T-shirts and Sweatshirts from the mission-critical projects that I was involved. Unfortunately, most of them were given to me at the END of the project. What a mistake. If they provided them at the beginning…I would have felt more appreciated and not just used.

When brainstorming ideas to solve problems with a product or service, don’t discount your technologist. In fact, call him or her in. Technologists are trained to solve problems. It’s in their DNA!

Problems do not necessarily need to be technologically focused. The problem doesn’t need to be solved only with technology.

Express the problem to the technologist. Ask him or her for ideas that both involve technology and do not.

You’ll be surprised … technologists can solve non-technical problems too.

Peter Drucker once said, “Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes.” 

What commitment is your technology community making?

• Is it to complete something by a certain date?
• Is it to produce a specific quality of product/service?
• Is it to respond to your phone calls within a specific amount of time?
• Is it to keep the network up by a specific percentage?
• Is it to spend only so much money to deliver a project?

Let me repeat: Peter Drucker once said, “Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes.” 

I do see many technologist give lip service to commitment. Each manager agrees and then misses every commitment (which is really a broken promise).

Things do happen. What needs to be determined is if meeting commitments has a higher percentage of occurence over broken promises. If it is the latter, you need to obtain a stronger commitment by:

• initially defining what it means to the technologist to deliver on the commitment (personally involved commitment adds an emotional tie and increases the possibility of the commitment being kept)
• providing regular signs of encouragement for the technologist to deliver on the commitment (you can’t just get a commitment and forget about it until the commitment is to be met)
• take personal responsibility to assist the technology any way possible to deliver on the commitment (remove any other roadblocks)
• plan for setbacks (real life does happen)

Commitment is a two way street. It requires your involvement to help the technologist meet a commitment made to you. Otherwise, it will end up being a broken promise.

Let me start with one of Napoleon Hill’s famous explanation of people…

There are many people who-perhaps with the best of intentions-make promises they somehow never get around to keeping. These folks have usually developed a number of perfectly plausible explanations for not meeting their commitments; they have become experts at explaining away their failures.

If your technology interface is one of these individuals, your project is on the path to failure. Have a talk with this individual and his/her manager. Make sure you counter-balance this person with two people who understand what it takes to succeed. Let me explain the impact with the rest of Napoleon Hill’s quote:

Successful people, though, are those who accept responsibility for their lives. They know that talk is cheap; actions are all that really matter. The world is waiting for men and women who seek the opportunity to render real service-the kind of service that lightens the burdens of their neighbors, the kind of service that 95 percent of people do not render because they do not understand it. When you provide a truly useful service, enthusiastically and in a spirit of genuine helpfulness, success will automatically follow. The world seeks out such individuals and rewards them accordingly.

If you want your project to succeed, make sure you have an overwhelming number of technological people who understand what it takes to succeed.

Seth Godin wrote an excellent post on hiring the right people. The method, which he has used successfully over and over again, is to provide a sample project for the person to perform and be judged against. Read Seth’s entire post to see the value in this approach. This approach can be used when talking with technology people. The project should be consist of:

• Asking thought-provoking questions.
• Rely what they heard (from you or others)
• Produce a written account of the discussion (to see how they will provide status to you)
• Describe an idea in a way that YOU understand what the person is talking about.

I’m currently reading Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne. The book is full of ideas to help you think differently about your business, products/services, and developing a new profitable market. The point I enjoyed the most…don’t fall in love with the technology…your customers won’t.

This easy to read and use book is complete with clear steps to help you reach new conclusions.

From Publishers Weekly (via Amazon):

Kim and Mauborgne’s blue ocean metaphor elegantly summarizes their vision of the kind of expanding, competitor-free markets that innovative companies can navigate. Unlike “red oceans,” which are well explored and crowded with competitors, “blue oceans” represent “untapped market space” and the “opportunity for highly profitable growth.” The only reason more big companies don’t set sail for them, they suggest, is that “the dominant focus of strategy work over the past twenty-five years has been on competition-based red ocean strategies”-i.e., finding new ways to cut costs and grow revenue by taking away market share from the competition. With this groundbreaking book, Kim and Mauborgne-both professors at France’s INSEAD, the second largest business school in the world-aim to repair that bias. Using dozens of examples-from Southwest Airlines and the Cirque du Soleil to Curves and Starbucks-they present the tools and frameworks they’ve developed specifically for the task of analyzing blue oceans. They urge companies to “value innovation” that focuses on “utility, price, and cost positions,” to “create and capture new demand” and to “focus on the big picture, not the numbers.” And while their heavyweight analytical tools may be of real use only to serious strategy planners, their overall vision will inspire entrepreneurs of all stripes, and most of their ideas are presented in a direct, jargon-free manner. Theirs is not the typical business management book’s vague call to action; it is a precise, actionable plan for changing the way companies do business with one resounding piece of advice: swim for open waters.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 

Strongly recommend this book.

Enterprise Architecture coordinates all the strategies and knowledge about the Enterprise. For example:

In understanding your specific company (knowing that the ‘enterprise’ could be larger in scope and go beyond the corporate boundaries). It includes understanding about the organization and how it operates to support the business. How the technology supports the business. How the business interacts with its customers, business partnerships, community, government and it employees. This is important to uncover growth opportunities and the roadblocks that prevent you from achieving your objectives.

Its a very involved process. It is not just a business strategy or a technological architecture. It is much larger and holistic.

I’ve added a bloglink to the list of blogs. Tom Graves is someone who studies and talks a lot about the holistic view of enterprise. He challenges the thought on “what is value” and “what is an asset of the enterprise.” His posts are deep and an enjoyable. Yet, it may hurt to think that deep but Tom is always careful to provide as much information as possible about the topic at hand.

One thing Tom Graves blog is not is an IT-Centric view to Enterprise Architecture…which is why I would recommend this to business executives like you.