A good CIO needs to know the Scotty Principle
July 3, 2008 by Tris Hussey
Filed under Business News
I had a good chuckle over this article in CIO about why IT might think their CIO is clueless. This point clicked with me, because I think it makes a pretty interesting point: to be a good CIO you have to grok geek culture:
8. The CIO collaborates to death.
Whether it is the character flaw of being indecisive or some middle-school notion of democracy, you are in charge. Collaboration is critical, but you also need to make the right decision at the right time. Collaborate like Captain Kirk. "Spock?" "Bones?" He gets opinions from his experts but there is never any question about who will make the final decision. And, if you never watched Star Trek then you shouldn’t even be a CIO. Source: 9 Reasons Why Application Developers Think Their CIO Is Clueless - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership
I think to really lead geeks well you need to have watched the shows we watched, read the books (and comics) we read, movies we watched … you have to know where we’re coming from.
Whether we like to admit it or not, we’ve been heavily influenced by Roddenberry, Heinlein, Asimov. They have helped us form and conceive of the world around us.
To be able to relate to geeks, developers, sys admins, etc. you have to know this stuff. Really you need to grok it.
But most of all you need to know the Scotty Principle.
Does this mean that, to make an omelette, the old-style executive officer broke some eggs, whereas the 2.0-style executive officer states that he is “only an egg,” and then proceeds to hatch the next big thing? :-)
You so almost had me … I had to probe the dark and cobwebby portions of my brain to get the reference. Whew, my geek cred is safe!
lol, I’ll tell you a story about “Stranger in a Strange Land” sometime — it has nothing to do with the book, but it’s kinda fun anyway…!