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Mon, Mar 3, 2008 19:10 EST
Are You Loyal to Your Company or Your Profession?
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Posted by: Michael Hugos in Questions Topic: Personal ManagementBlog: Doing Business in Real Time
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What’s the best way to rise to the CIO level and beyond? Is it best to get broad-based business experience or more in-depth IT experience? At last month’s SIM luncheon here in Chicago the speaker was a former CEO of Baxter International and now is a partner at a well known private equity firm named Madison Dearborn Partners. He talked about the CEO – CIO relationship and how to climb the business career ladder.
His name was Harry Jansen and he based his remarks on his own successful career; he made the case that broad-based business experience is the best way to rise through the ranks. I want to agree with him, but a lot of what I’ve seen in the last several years causes me to pause and reconsider. Maybe things have changed; maybe traditional assumptions need to be updated.
Harry spent 23 years working at Baxter. He started out as director of corporate development and instead of trying to rise through the ranks in development and finance, he opted to hop around to different Baxter business units and take positions in marketing and operations as well as finance. He told us how one of his bosses in finance said he was making a big mistake when he left the finance group and took a position as an operations manager. But this allowed him to get in-depth understanding of the company and build a large network of personal relationships, and it all helped him to finally be appointed CEO in 1997.
Now when he does private equity deals he looks for senior executives who have similar business experience, not just deep vertical experience in a function like finance, or sales or IT. This all sounds very logical but given the way the world is these days, it also raises some questions. For starters, how many people actually have the opportunity to stay at the same company for 23 years anymore? Most people only stay at a company 3-6 years (even if they want to stay longer, odds are good they’ll be taken out by downsizing, outsourcing, mergers, layoffs, firings, forced resignations, etc.).
So given this reality of the almost constant job search, does it make sense to be a specialist or a generalist? It seems like a lot of CIO job descriptions emphasize that the candidate needs to have very specific technical skills. How many times do you see requirements like needing to have extensive implementation and operating experience using SAP or Oracle or some industry specific application package? This says something about what lots of companies are looking for and the kind of experience they think is valuable.
If the odds are you’ll be leaving whatever company you work for now sometime in the next few years, then where do your loyalties lie? Are they with the company or with your profession? Is your company or your professional skills most likely to be the source of your next career advancement?
advancement, career, generalist, specialist
Michael,
One of the things that I would keep in mind is the company (Baxter) that Jansen worked for. Medical Device and Products companies are probably one of the last few bastions of old-style company loyalty structures so I'm not entirely certain that outside of his industry, his career path would be the best example in much of today’s World.
Personally I think that both Company Loyalty as well as Career Loyalty can co-exist in your career path as long as you understand that both are separate objectives that ideally are convergent during one's tenure with any employer. When they are no longer convergent is when one has to ask the question of whether it is time to move on or not. The smart (and successful) person is the one that can make that call at the correct time and moves on when Career and Company loyalty come into conflict and are unlikely to change.
To Thy Own Self Be True really should be ones’ attitude at the end of the day. This does not mean that you should walk into every career opportunity with a purely mercenary attitude, but you should periodically evaluate your relationship with your employer and recognize that the day may come when your goals no longer can coexist with theirs. Good employers also should recognize this fact and either offer employees new goals that can coexist or a graceful way out.
Easier said than done I know…
In regards to the diversity question for CIOs (or CxOs for that matter), I think a diversified background is the wave of the future for those that wish to excel. A good CIO is going to be someone that knows I.T. and the I.T. process inside and out and if that is all they have spent their career doing I believe it is still possible for now and the near future to be successful.
However a GREAT CIO is going to the person that understands not only I.T. but all (or nearly all) aspects of the company they lead I.T. for. This makes a diversified skill-set almost a requirement.
Companies looking to fill true CIO positions (as opposed to I.T. managers that are simply given the title) are doing themselves a disservice when they post job descriptions that force them job search into narrow categories of specific products or platforms (and yes I’ve seen all too many of them as well and personally would not apply for one) as the CIO should be a strategic position that lifts a company up and outside of the box, giving them a unique competitive advantage.
Michael
It's a long, long time since I did any programming but I remember one of the early lessons why my programs didn't behave as expected was that OR is not mutually exclusive.
These days I work with many companies as my clients. Am I loyal to my company, my profession or each of my clients?
Yes.
Of course, sometimes there are tensions between these things. But so far, thankfully, I've been able to reconcile them without ever concluding that the three loyalties are mutally exclusive.
Perhaps, though, the clue to the predicament you pose is what someone regards as their profession. For example, is being promoted from - say - CFO or CIO to CEO a significant change of profession? I would say so. So is being promoted from - say - VP of IT Service Delivery to CIO.
Which begs a serious question of every CIO. Do you see yourself (or do others see you) primarily as a member of the 'IT profession', the 'corporate executive' profession, or is being a CIO a unique profession all of its own?
Chris
MEK and Chris,
Your comments raise more questions, like why do companies post job requirements for CIOs that specify such narrow technical skills? Does that mean those companies consider the CIO as just the head technician and not a senior executive?
It's a good question about whether CIOs see themselves as corporate execs or as technical professionals. I like to think the CIO is an executive who employs highly efficient strategies for exploiting IT for business gain.
Yet the frequency of narrow technical requirements being applied to the CIO position puts aspiring CIOs and existing CIOs on the horns of a dilemma. Do they get broad business experience and hope companies will recognize the value they provide, or do they go for the security of narrow technical skills in this unpredictable job market? How lucky do you feel today?
Michael
I think one of the issues you run into with this question is that the higher one moves up the chain, the more generalized the skill-sets need to be.
Or perhaps that is an inaccurate statement.
I think that a more accurate statement would the higher one moves up the chain, the broader the skill sets need to be and as a consequence of that broadening, the shallower the specialized skill sets become. A subtle but important difference.
As someone who is at the level immediately below the CIO, in an enterprise that is transitioning from a regional operating model to a global one, I find that I am performing many of the duties of a traditional CIO; while the true CIO is very much a strategic operations leader, with far more experience in overall business operations than in “hard” Information Technology. Does that make him/her a better CIO? For the role that they are playing within the company, I believe the answer is yes.
But would they be a good programmer or systems administrator being 20 years removed from the nuts and bolts I.T.?
Would I?
I’m much closer to my origins in my I.T. career, and am in a position where I’m already finding myself farther removed from that hands-on kind of I.T. that moved me up the ladder in the first place. Yet I find myself looking at some of these posts for CIO openings and many seem far more focused on whether someone can code for SQL or set up a Redhat Server than whether they can decide on the technologies that will make their enterprise more competitive. This is the fault of the enterprise that is searching for a CIO, less a fault of the individual looking to rise to that level.
As for the answer of what someone looking to rise up to a CIO level should be striving for in skill-sets I think that ultimately it depends on what kind of company you wish to work for. I can only speak for myself in that the occasional inquiries and poaching attempts are more frequently for someone who is more strategic in view, with a broader, shallower skill-set in more traditional I.T. disciplines. But these inquiries generally involve positions in larger enterprises than in smaller ones. I think smaller and more traditional operations are still looking for a CIO that can write C# in their sleep or replace a RAID controller at 3:00am.
Or as many posts have pointed out here @ CIO, the CIO position is most certainly in a state of transition.
Companies must meet their objectives - both short and long term. Most often, someone other than the CIO or senior technology person (vendor, peer, board of directors) suggests to the CEO that she must consider or move to particular technology or direction because it has worked so well elsewhere. When the executive team chooses to search for a new "professional", they decide to place restrictions on the person they seek based on the idea that this new "hot" solution solves their problems. They do not seek a partner at the executive round table but a "hired gun" to implement this new "hot" solution. They do this with no regard for their present position or the effectiveness of the staff. This is why ones loyalty must rest in the profession. The best CIO anticipates this move and stays current - even if the company provides no clear direction and moves to new "hot" solutions on a whim.
The global economy has a life of its own, it lives in real-time, and we are all part of it. Hello brave new world.
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