by Mark P. McDonald | May 1, 2013 | Submit a Comment
How can you tell the difference between hype and reality? This was the question the President of a Business Unit asked me in front of the corporation’s entire leadership team. Answering this question was a matter of professional and credibility risk. After all Gartner knows a lot about hype. Gartner has been known to foment [...]
Category: Leadership Personal Observation Signs of weak management Tags: Leadership, personal musing
by Mark P. McDonald | April 22, 2013 | 2 Comments
There is much to talk about in last week’s news of the Free Fall in PC sales, IBM’s results and potential sale of its server business. Coupled with prior misses at Oracle, Dell’s dilemma and HP, it is easy to describe these events as evidence of a fundamental and tectonic shift in technology. (Link to [...]
Category: Management Personal Observation Signs of weak management Tags: Personal Observation, sales, Signs of weak management
by Mark P. McDonald | March 18, 2013 | 2 Comments
We have been living with cost control strategies for so long that it is easy to lose sight that there are other strategies beyond doing ‘more with less.’ Recently I have been in a number of meetings with executive team’s where despite their best intentions, they are leading their company via cost rather than strategy, [...]
Category: 2013 budgets Management Signs of weak management Tags: 2013 Planning, Economy, IT budgets
by Mark P. McDonald | July 18, 2012 | 3 Comments
Here is a prior post that generated significant comments to enjoy during the summer hiatus. I may get in trouble for this but here are some personal observations about management going on in companies. This is all personal observation. Stress brings out the best and worst of people and organizations enabling you to see either the [...]
Category: Leadership Management Signs of weak management Tags: Management, stupid management tricks
by Mark P. McDonald | June 4, 2012 | Submit a Comment
Organizations face a silent crisis when good people play the wrong role. This crisis is different then Jim Collins’ admonition to get ‘the right people on the bus.’ That advice reminds organizations that hiring the best people and putting them in the best organizational role really matters. The advice is obvious and to some extend [...]
Category: Leadership Management Signs of weak management Tags: Leadership, Management
by Mark P. McDonald | May 25, 2012 | 2 Comments
Organizations are in crisis and many are unaware. Crisis in the sense that organizations are facing developments that will lead them to an unstable and dangerous situation which they all recognize, but few know why and even fewer know what to do. The crisis is silent driven by its absence rather than the presence of [...]
Category: Leadership Management Signs of weak management Tags: Change Management, IT management, Management, Strategy and Planning
by Mark P. McDonald | March 3, 2012 | Submit a Comment
If information is power, then information is more equal than others. It can be difficult to separate the strong from the weak, particularly in todays modern media world where everyone is an expert and every media outlook is looking for a talking head. What follows are some examples of concepts, responses and way of thinking [...]
Category: Leadership Management Personal Observation Signs of weak management Tags: personal musing, Personal Observation, Signs of weak management, Strategy, stupid management tricks
by Mark P. McDonald | February 6, 2012 | 1 Comment
Every business book you read says that you need to have ‘executive sponsorship’ for any major initiative. Fail to involve the executives and you are likely to fail. That advice has become so prevalent that it is almost worthless. Getting executive sponsorship is not what matters; it’s the quality of the sponsorship that makes all [...]
Category: 2012 Change on the cheap IT Governance Leadership Management Personal Observation Signs of weak management Strategy Tags: 2012 planning, amplify, Leadership, Management, Personal Observation, Signs of weak management
by Mark P. McDonald | December 5, 2011 | Submit a Comment
I was at a large conference recently and I noticed a very helpful ad hoc tool a team had developed. The tool was a list of people and rooms taped to a wall so people could see where their peers were without having to stand in line and ask a coordinator to direct them. Now [...]
Category: CFO CIO Leadership Signs of weak management Tags: Business Leadership, Business Management, CEO, Signs of weak management
by Mark P. McDonald | November 16, 2011 | Submit a Comment
Project management performance and capability is a perennial issue among IT leaders. Project management is critical to the success of IT and the organization. Given the dismal rate of project success, one can call the competence of project managers into question. Just about every, conversation I have about project management centers on what is wrong [...]
Category: Management Personal Observation Signs of weak management Tags: IT Leadership, IT Project, personal musing, Signs of weak management
