Leadership Elephant

As the CIO of your company, it's your job to stay on top of all of the different forms of technology that the company uses to accomplish its business goals. This task is made even harder by all of the changes that are always occurring in the various technology fields. As the CIO you need to be understand how to pick the correct type of database to be used on projects. You need to watch the rollout of other large-scale IT projects and learn from them: what went right and what went wrong.

During a negotiation a lot of promises and agreements are made by both sides of the table. This is all well and good, but the ultimate goal of any negotiation is for both sides to agree on a deal that they can live with. As a negotiator, it's going to be your job to take a look at where things stand in the negotiation and then package up the agreements so that they can be included in the final deal.

It turns out that most negotiations are over even before they begin. The team that has spent the most time planning for the negotiation, doing their homework, and collecting the data that they'll need is the one that's going to walk away from the table with the best deal. Wouldn't you want that team to be your team? Planning is what happens before you sit down at the negotiating table. There are no negotiating tactics or tricks at play here. It's just a matter of you doing your homework.

So just exactly what is innovation? It turns out that innovation is doing something new. It can be a new method, a new idea, or even a new product. In the world of IT, we have the ability to solve just about any problem. However, how we go about solving problems can become outdated quickly. What we need to do as CIOs is to find out how to bring the spirit of innovation into our IT departments.

In order for any IT manager to be a success, the team that you are managing has to learn how to work together. All too often what IT managers don't realize is that your team may not know how to work together and they are going to need you to show them how to do this.

Who was it that said "It takes a village…"? They may not have been talking about being a product manager, but they might as well have been. Life has become so complex that product managers can no longer make their product a success just by their own efforts. Today it takes the help of one or more partners to get your product to where it needs to be. Are you going to be ready to work with those partners?

All negotiations have to come to a close. When your next negotiation reaches this stage, you want to make sure that you are going to be able to walk away with the best deal possible. In order to make this happen, it's going to be what you've done during the negotiations that will determine what your outcome is.

An IT manager is only as good as his or her team is. This means that one of the most critical skills that an IT manager has is the ability to build the perfect team. The better a team that you can build, the better your team is going to make you look!

In order to be successful as an IT manager, you need to be able to show the company that under your leadership your team is able to deliver high quality products on time and under budget. If you want to have any chance of being able to pull this off, then you are going to have to discover ways to build a high performance IT team.

As product managers, we all want to become better at what we do. However, sometimes we can find ourselves in a rut: we've solved the immediate problems, our product is doing well, and we've just lost that drive that we need in order to reach the next level. This is when the power of competition comes in. We all like a good challenge. When we are faced with a situation in which we might not be the best, or we might not know exactly what we should do, that's when we can become our best.

How do you measure the success of a product manager? Ultimately it comes down to how successful their product is. The more units that get sold to customers who have decided that your product is what they really need, the better job you have done in creating a solution to your customer's problems.

There are a lot of bad guys out there. For some odd reason, a lot of them seem to want to break into your company's networks and applications. As the CIO, it's your job to make sure that this does not happen. As much as we like to spend our time looking outwards in order to detect the next threat that our company may be facing, perhaps we're looking in the wrong direction. Just as important may be the insider threat that lurks within the company. No matter where it comes from, cybercrime is your problem to deal with.

The key to being a successful CIO is making sure you have a good understanding of just exactly what a CIO does. This means you have to take a look at what CIOs do and then learn from them. In order to be a successful CIO, you may decide you need an MBA. There are a lot of different ways to go about getting this degree - which one is the right one for you?

Product failures are never something that a product manager wants to talk about. We all live with the secret dread that someday the product that we are responsible for might turn out to be a failure. It turns out that we're all missing an important learning opportunity. Products do fail, and they end up failing for a wide range of reasons. Every product failure is loaded with fantastic learning opportunities for product managers. We just need to take the time and open our eyes to see what we can learn from each failure.

What is a product manager without a product? Nothing. That's why it's so very important that when a product is being developed that the product manager be involved. Now exactly how best to go about doing that is an entirely different question. The process from having an idea for a product to actually having a product is a long and treacherous road. So many things can go wrong that either cause the schedule to have to be extended or cause a product with the wrong features to be developed.

When you find yourself in a leadership position, you'll want to make the most of it. This means that you want to be viewed as being both powerful and effective. In order to make this happen, you need to have a good understanding of what leadership is really all about.

The art of negotiation depends on your ability to successfully communicate with the other side of the table. An important part of this communication is your ability to signal to the other side what your intentions are. Likewise, they will be signaling to you what they want to accomplish.

The job of a product manager is made even more difficult by the simple fact that it really does not come with any clear instructions on how to do it correctly. As product managers we are constantly searching for ways to become better. One of the things that every product manager quickly realizes is that their career success is very closely tied to the financial success of their product.

Congratulations - you are an IT manager and you've been given a budget to work with. Oh, oh, now what? Oh, and if you're going to want any money next year, you had better learn how to ask for more money. This budget stuff can be tricky. The fact that we talk about budgets using a vocabulary that most IT managers probably don't have (or at least don't use every day) makes it just a bit harder.

In the end, it all comes down to what your customer wants to tell you about your product. However, how many of us have been taught how to listen to our customers?