This past week I had the pleasure of watching a truly compelling presentation by Keith Ferrazzi. His consulting company, Ferrazzi Greenlight, helps organizations build high performance teams. His latest book is "Who's Got Your Back."
Occupying the unenviable spot of the last presentation of the day at a conference in Las Vegas, Keith's passion held the audience spellbound for one hour. His content moved some to tears as he described his own childhood and the adversities he faced.
But that was not the point of his presentation. His point was illustrating how to go about creating more productive partnerships with your peers and colleagues to accomplish more than average enterprise project teams. Of his many insightful points he asked how much time we spend doing our jobs vs. the amount of time we spend trying to neutralize or get around that one individual in our organizations that seems to obstruct progress at every turn. If you could simply create a relationship with that one person to remove that inhibitor, how much more productive could you be?
Does business view IT that way? Does IT view business that way? Numerous studies have found that the majority of IT staff thinks business can't make up its mind. In the very same studies, business feels that IT can't keep pace with the changing requirements of the business. Who's right?
The very next morning, Tom Austin gave a presentation where he said that IT had set a dangerous precedent early in the millennium. Because IT felt that it could not provide the creative, graphic skills for advanced Web site development, IT abdicated responsibility of Web sites to marketing. He warned it's happening again with social media. His belief is if this happens, it will be disastrous. IT will become marginalized as SaaS alternatives, accessible by credit card, will penetrate organizations at alarming rates.
Tom's view of the organization is certainly not the high performance team that Keith described. IT is going to view business as rogue. And business is going to view IT as unresponsive.
Businesses are doing what they have to do to survive in this economy and thrive in the recovery. IT must be a partner and offer weapons to the business for them to fight the battle. Get ahead of the curve. Go talk to the CMO and ask her about her social media plans. She'll tell you. She wants your help. The CMO is not that obstructionist. Go build the high performance team.
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