Next Generation Data Center –Requires Next Generation Leadership, Guided by Principles, to Manage the Transition of Change.
One of my favorite journals is the Harvard Business Review. There are so many insightful articles on leadership, happenings within various market segments, and especially authentic interviews with leaders. These interviews always take the most simple day to day experiences in life –and relate them into making our complex professional goals easy to attain.
For example in the November issue of 2008, an interview with John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco –explains ways that he reads market trends several years in advance –by relating it back to a childhood memory of a fishing trip with his father.
How does this relate to taking the data center into the next generation? Recently in the January 2009 issue, Julia Kirby interviews Chuck Wagner –Ringmaster for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Imagine this… Wagner is tasked with directing the attention of 20K+ people during a modern day show while balancing 138 years of tradition for the organization. Do you ever feel like that you share this type of burden within your organization?
Are there lessons we can learn as leaders in IT & Business from these 3 points made in the article? Let’s find out. (Keep in mind I edited these, to make the focus on CIO concerns –not just CEO concerns).
1 – Chuck Wagner performs a balancing act that many IT leaders will relate to. The IT leader must be the standard-bearer of his company’s / data center’s revered past while also serving as a visible part of its reinvention.
2 - It helps to be so well versed in the history of the organization that the leader feels he can channel the spirit of the founders—who were innovators, after all, and not traditionalists, in their own time. Be a student of your organization. Share it’s passions.
3 - Change can be consistent with heritage if it respects the founders’ philosophy of your organization. For the circus, that means understanding what constitutes run-of-the-mill and always delivering larger-than-life.
For the data center, that means change can be consistent with heritage –by respecting your founder’s philosophies, and innovating your data center the same way the founder’s innovated under guiding principles. We do this with my team, by giving you tools and methods to turn IT into a revenue stream from a cost center. By cutting operational and capital costs. And by saving money, so that your spend / investment shrinks the more your performance and availability increases. Bring new value to your information, and leverage it’s value, by managing it’s existence through a life-cycle approach. Often this happens through the consolidation of storage, servers, applications –and the de-duplication of data, so these elements’ foot print actually shrinks… enabling you to turn IT into a serviceable offering that pays for itself (and hopefully contributes to your organization’s growth). Deliver Larger-Than-Life in all that you do.
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