Leadership Elephant

In order to be successful as an IT manager, you need to be able to show the company that under your leadership your team is able to deliver high quality products on time and under budget. If you want to have any chance of being able to pull this off, then you are going to have to discover ways to build a high performance IT team.

All negotiations have to come to a close. When your next negotiation reaches this stage, you want to make sure that you are going to be able to walk away with the best deal possible. In order to make this happen, it's going to be what you've done during the negotiations that will determine what your outcome is.

An IT manager is only as good as his or her team is. This means that one of the most critical skills that an IT manager has is the ability to build the perfect team. The better a team that you can build, the better your team is going to make you look!

There are a lot of bad guys out there. For some odd reason, a lot of them seem to want to break into your company's networks and applications. As the CIO, it's your job to make sure that this does not happen. As much as we like to spend our time looking outwards in order to detect the next threat that our company may be facing, perhaps we're looking in the wrong direction. Just as important may be the insider threat that lurks within the company. No matter where it comes from, cybercrime is your problem to deal with.

The key to being a successful CIO is making sure you have a good understanding of just exactly what a CIO does. This means you have to take a look at what CIOs do and then learn from them. In order to be a successful CIO, you may decide you need an MBA. There are a lot of different ways to go about getting this degree - which one is the right one for you?

Is it time for you to just give up? Because every time you aim low, you’ll feel like you’ve died and gone to Disneyland. You’ll be in a place where you’re never concerned about hard work, a place where you never feel guilty for goofing off all day, a place where nobody expects anything...

All too often CIOs can get caught up in all of the technical details of the job: boosting uptime, replacing servers, guarding against cyber criminals, etc. What we tend to forget is that IT exists to serve the rest of the business and they are there (in most cases) to make money. This means that there needs to be a business side to IT and that is one of a CIO's key responsibilities.

As an IT manager, one of your most valuable possessions is your career. At your firm, you are the only person who is going to be spending any time worrying about your career: how's it going, what is your next step, what could you be doing better? These are all vital questions for you to be able to answer if you want to advance in your career.

As an IT manager you understand the value of technology. It's what provides our teams with the tools that we can use to accomplish great things for our company. The challenge that we run into is that technology is always changing. This means that as an IT manager you have a responsibility to stay on top of all of the various technologies that your team will be called on to make use of.

What does it really mean to be a CIO? You sure won't be writing any software any more. You won't be stringing network cables or updating firewall parameters. What does a CIO really do? I've got some bad news for you: CIOs manage.

There are a number of different ways to make yourself more powerful in a negotiation. Bringing a team to the table is one way to go about doing this, but there are advantages and disadvantages to doing it. Not all negotiations are done by ourselves. If we choose to bring in a professional negotiator to do our dirty work for us, then we're going to need to know how to find out if they truly know their stuff.

All too often we find ourselves in the position of being an IT manager with little or no training on what it takes to correctly staff a team. This is a critical skill for us to have. Ultimately, the success of an IT manager rests on how his/her team preforms. You might think that staffing is all about hiring the right people to come and join your team. It turns out that there is a lot more to this. Staffing involves attracting and retaining the right people. However, it also deals with knowing when it is time to let the wrong members of your team go.

In today's fast-paced Information Technology (IT) field, Chief Information Officers (CIOs) are being asked to do more than ever. No longer is it enough to just make sure that the company's various servers and email systems are up and operating correctly, now CIOs have to play a role in setting the company's overall strategic direction.

Este audio es una guía práctica y práctica para crear cambios efectivos en cualquier organización. Explica cómo los gerentes exitosos deciden una nueva dirección, comunican su visión y mucho más.

Who was it that said "It takes a village…"? They may not have been talking about being a product manager, but they might as well have been. Life has become so complex that product managers can no longer make their product a success just by their own efforts. Today it takes the help of one or more partners to get your product to where it needs to be. Are you going to be ready to work with those partners?

When you became a product manager, did anyone take the time to mention to you that you were signing up to become a member of your company's sales department? You might have thought that you were joining the marketing department, but if your product doesn't sell, then you won't be holding on to your product management job for long!

As product managers, we all want to become better at what we do. However, sometimes we can find ourselves in a rut: we've solved the immediate problems, our product is doing well, and we've just lost that drive that we need in order to reach the next level. This is when the power of competition comes in. We all like a good challenge. When we are faced with a situation in which we might not be the best, or we might not know exactly what we should do, that's when we can become our best.

How do you measure the success of a product manager? Ultimately it comes down to how successful their product is. The more units that get sold to customers who have decided that your product is what they really need, the better job you have done in creating a solution to your customer's problems.

Product failures are never something that a product manager wants to talk about. We all live with the secret dread that someday the product that we are responsible for might turn out to be a failure. It turns out that we're all missing an important learning opportunity. Products do fail, and they end up failing for a wide range of reasons. Every product failure is loaded with fantastic learning opportunities for product managers. We just need to take the time and open our eyes to see what we can learn from each failure.

It turns out that most negotiations are over even before they begin. The legal team that has spent the most time planning for the negotiation, doing their homework, and collecting the data that they'll need is the one that's going to walk away from the table with the best deal. Wouldn't you want that legal team to be your team?