Alternate Reality Games: Games That IT Leaders Know How To Play

As an IT Leader, you’ve got some challenges facing you. You’re managing a diverse and potentially distributed work force of highly skilled and talented IT professionals. You need to find a way to keep them challenged, and yet at the same time enable them to find ways to work together. Have you considered Alternate Reality … Read more

Google’s Staffing Problems Can Teach IT Leaders A Lot

If you could go to work for any company out there right now, which one would it be? A lot of us would say Google – everything that we’ve read and heard about the company makes it seem like a great place to work. However, it turns out that even Google is not immune to … Read more

Should An IT Leader Follow His/Her Dream Career?

I bumped into one of my longtime friends last week, Mark, and he told me how unhappy he was at his IT job. He was feeling a great deal of guilt over this because his firm had just had yet another round of layoffs and he had been spared. He still had his job, but … Read more

IT Leaders Know That It’s Not All About Them

Please put your hand up in the air if you are a micromanager. Is your hand up – if it is then good, you have a pretty accurate picture of yourself. If it isn’t , then I bet if we talked with the people that you work with, we might get a different answer. By … Read more

5 Characteristics Of Hard Core Gamers That IT Managers Need

As yet another generation comes to work in the IT department, IT mangers are being confronted with another management challenge. More and more of the new wave of workers are coming from the world of multi-player online games. These games consist of large, complex, social systems that are constantly evolving. Games like World of Warcraft … Read more

Mirror, Mirror On The Wall, Who’s The Best IT Manager Of All?

Those boys who get locked up and do work on behavior neuroscience continue to come up with new and interesting discoveries all the time.  This time around they’ve made a stunning discovery that will have a long lasting impact on how IT managers do their job. Do I have your interest yet? Daniel Goleman and … Read more

What Should An IT Manager Look For When Hiring Employees?

Talk about confusing! IT managers are responsible for bringing the best and brightest into your organization. However, in the field of IT, just exactly what this means is difficult to pin down – we keep changing our minds! IT departments today look nothing like the IT departments of the 80’s, 90’s, and even early 2000. … Read more

An IT Leader’s Guide To Managing “A-Type” Personalities

So we’ve talked just a bit about the dangers of having players in your department / on your team who get so caught up in something that winning becomes everything to them. It’s almost as though you were attending an auction and it got down to the last two bidders on something and they both … Read more

What Is An IT Leader To Do When Winning Is EVERYTHING?

So here’s an interesting issue that I’m sure that most CIO’s and IT managers would love to have: how best to mange over-the-top “A-Type” personalities? Hey, we all know folks like this (put that mirror down!) These are the people in our company / department / team for which winning can become more important then … Read more

IT Leaders Have Two Of These But Do They Use Them?

About a year ago I had a chance to sit down with a member of an IT team that was working for me in order to have a heart-to-heart with him. We’ll call him Tim. Tim was a project manager on one of my teams and so far he had been a steady performer. I’d … Read more