Executive Briefs: September 2003

Leading Edge: The Julius Caesar Syndrome

By Warren Bennis

Organizations and their leaders thrive only when essential information reaches
those who need it. But far too many leaders today fail to recognize and act
on critical information. Just as Julius Caesar, in Shakespeare’s play, ignored
the famous warnings about the ides of March, many leaders—due to arrogance,
hierarchical cultures, fear and isolation—ignore or never see critical
information. Leadership expert Warren Bennis looks at recent examples of the
Caesar Syndrome, such as the debacle at The New York Times, the Columbia disaster
and last month’s blackout, and discusses how CIOs and other leaders can avoid
this trap.



Strong Signals: Tag! You’re It!


By John Parkinson

Despite the technological challenges of RFID systems that can distinguish between
268 million companies, 16 million SKUs per company and 68 billion instances
of every SKU, columnist John Parkinson believes they will be overcome. Key applications
will include asset tracking (allowing hospitals and other big entities to account
for the whereabouts of a variety of assets), RFID-equipped smart cards that
enable personalized shopping, dynamic pricing and targeted cross-selling, and
item lifecycle tracking, which will let companies track the manufacture, location,
ownership and usage of anything forever.

Expert Voices: Michael Treacy Steady as it Grows


By Perry Glasser and Allan Alter

Any company can grow steadily and permanently at a double-digit growth rate, even in hard times, says strategist and entrepreneur Michael Treacy, author of Double-Digit Growth: How Great Companies Achieve It—No Matter What, and co-author of The Discipline of Market Leaders. But unlike the past decade, growth portfolios will be weighted more toward product innovation than process innovation. In a conversation with Contributing Editor Perry Glasser and Executive Editor Allan Alter, Treacy says CIOs and other executives need to understand how to grow companies as well as they understand how to cut costs.



Roundtable: Youth at the Gate

With Marcia Stepanek

The country’s largest generation in history—the first truly digital generation,
which numbers some 80 million in the U.S. alone—is just starting to enter
the workplace, triggering changes in leadership, new types of relationships
between managers and employees, and new cultures, products and workplace design.
How are young people changing our notions of mobility? The idea that people
must “work their way up the ladder”? The concept of listening far more than
they interact? And how will the role of the CIO change when every new hire has
a combination of business and technology skills. This month’s CIO Insight roundtable
takes a spirited and in-depth look at today’s generation gap. Participating
were young technology and business prodigies, leading authors and commentators,
and CIOs young and old. Their opinions may surprise you.

Analysis: The Network Effect

By Mark Roberti

Wal-Mart’s decision to force its top 100 suppliers to start slapping RFID tags
on every case and pallet shipment of the diapers, kitchen goods and discount
clothing products they truck to the giant retailer’s distribution centers and
stores represents a huge breakthrough for sensor technology. The promise: to
whisk the hard work of RFID development out of its laboratory at MIT and into
the mainstream of the business world. But the technology still poses some thorny
cost and technology problems—and now, with experiments that put smart sensors
on individual packages of razor blades and sweaters, privacy advocates are sitting
up and taking notice. Will Wal-Mart’s move to RFID tags help the sensor industry
work out the kinks and bring a whole new wave of automation to the marketplace,
or are the remaining challenges still too tough to work out?

Research: E-Business

By the editors of CIO Insight

The majority of the 500-plus CIOs we polled in this month’s survey say they are moving more of their core business processes to the Web. It hasn’t been easy: CIOs say e-business has made security a bigger problem, increased overall IT complexity, and forced companies to collaborate among departments and business units far more frequently than before. Still, CIOs generally report higher sales and reduced costs thanks to their e-business initiatives.

Strategic Technology: IT Optimization


By Gary A. Bolles

Caught between competing pressures to reduce costs and improve service delivery, IT departments are trying to transform themselves into leaner, more business-focused operations. At the same time, vendors are pushing a variety of technologies with fancy names such as “business technology management” designed to help optimize the IT department. It’s a noble goal, says Contributing Editor Gary A. Bolles, but these technologies won’t cure all your ills. Optimizing IT has to be approached as a strategy that goes from wringing extra packets out of existing WAN connections all the way up to tweaking the organization’s business goals.

CIO Insight Staff
CIO Insight Staff
CIO Insight offers thought leadership and best practices in the IT security and management industry while providing expert recommendations on software solutions for IT leaders. It is the trusted resource for security professionals who need network monitoring technology and solutions to maintain regulatory compliance for their teams and organizations.

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