Staying the Course as a CIO: How to Overcome the Trials and Challenges of IT Leadership

CHAPTER 6 Strategy Schizophrenia

“In real life, strategy is actually very straightforward.

You pick a general direction and implement like hell.”

(Jack Welch)

Strategy” is one of the most wonderful corporate words. It can mean many things to many people because it is so wonderfully misunderstood by so many. For example, it is possible to create a fuzzy warm feeling amongst your acolytes just by lowering your spectacles, nodding your head in a sage-like fashion and quietly uttering the words “I have a strategy”. In my experience, many people in the IT industry have absolutely no idea what “strategy” actually means, but they'll feel good if they think they've got one.

This type of ignorance shouldn't come as a big surprise to us in the IT industry. We are a community which eagerly consumes the latest fads and fashions. This has not changed across the decades. In the eighties, for example, we had our “CASE tools”, which apparently was some sort of space-age concept that would ultimately render every programmer redundant. In this world, code could apparently “write itself”. In the nineties, I recall the excitement about “object-orientation”, and “structured methodologies” where everyone started to talk about Darwinian inheritance, data-flow diagrams and various other sexy terms. The noughties and twenty-teens have brought us terms such as “agile” and “cloud computing” (Bloomberg, 2013), (Kavis, 2014). Let's wait to see what history has to say about them. Certainly I can confess ...