Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1561

Avoiding the Schizophrenic IT Organization

A pharmaceuticals company we've been studying decided to deploy more than 20,000 iPads and other mobile devices to the global sales force to improve its engagement with doctors in emerging and developed markets. Over the next two years, this change in how sales people interact with customers will redefine what the product content will be, how the sales staff will use a new CRM platform to record visits online, and how new insights will be derived from these interactions across sales, marketing, and brand management — ultimately driving decisions.

The impact on the company's IT organization has been significant. It has never before rolled out something at this speed. Welcome to the new world of IT.

Increasingly, business leaders are driving transformation projects in areas like digital marketing, multi-channel sales, and product-content and customer-information management, pushing the CIO and IT organization to respond in new, faster, and different ways. The timetable for implementing these projects is often months, not years.

For CIOs, the good news is that they're now finding themselves at the center of business change with the opportunity to directly impact front-line business results. The bad news (if it is bad) is business managers' expectations of the CIO and the IT organization are soaring; they have a "no excuses" view of IT responsiveness.

This is giving rise to a schizophrenic IT organization. One side is focused on running global-infrastructure and implementing big-system-application programs over three to five years, where the emphasis is on compliance, security, reliability, and effective 24/7 operations. The other side is focused on "making IT happen" rapidly without the complex plans and multi-year rollouts that have been institutionalized in large IT organizations.

The challenge for C-suite executives, including CIOs, is to avoid an either/or view of IT-enabled business change and to have the maturity to embrace both sides of the challenge at the same time. The logical response might seem to be to restructure and reskill the IT organization (again!) to accommodate the new demands — in particular, to acquire the skills to deploy emerging technologies like mobile, social media, analytics, and big data. This, we contend, is unlikely to achieve much. What is required is a fresh perspective and novel thinking.

The perspective we are advocating is shaped by shifting focus away from portraying the challenge as nailing the design, competencies and skills of a separate organizational unit. The fact is, IT use is pervasive right across the organization; so any response should reflect this. Executives must consider IT less from the standpoint of a factory (the current mind-set) and more from the perspective of how people are managed.

Just think about it: As a manager, you are intimately involved in hiring and managing your staff and appraising their performance; it is not something that you would ever consider delegating to the HR department. Your HR colleagues do have a role to play, but it's an advisory, coordination, and compliance role. They may, for example, liaise with recruiters in identifying potential candidates, help in positioning any advertisements, and work with you to develop talent. Given that you are likely to be critically dependent on information and IT in the performance of your job, why is information and IT treated so differently?

Based on our research, we think organizations should embrace three interdependent roles for managing information and IT: orchestrator, broker, and value realizer.

The orchestrator role involves coordinating how information will be used across the organization, determining where enabling investments will be made, defining the architectural standards needed for integration and process standardization, balancing agility and stability, and determining policies regarding the protection of information. The role also incorporates oversight function.

The broker role revolves around the supply of IT, applications, and services. These may be brokered from in-house resources, although it is increasingly likely that they will be provisioned from external sources. Even if all applications and services are come from the cloud, this must be done within a framework that takes into account both risk and architectural integrity. The role also entails continually assessing the economics and performance of supply to ensure that the organization continues to get the most bang for its buck.

The value realizer role is to ensure that the full value from IT investments is achieved. For new investments this is about managing organizational change and driving use of information. This change enabled by technology must then be sustained over the lifecycle of the investment for all the expected value to be delivered.

While the details of these roles may not be new, how each role will manifest itself in an organization most definitely will be. We don't see these roles necessarily aligning to a particular individual (e.g., the CIO); rather you should treat them as a set of connected behaviors, obligations, beliefs and norms that will affect a broad range of managers and staff in an organization. (For example, this thinking will accommodate Gartner's suggestion that the chief marketing officer will spend more on IT than the CIO by 2017.)

Nor are these roles likely to reside in a single organizational unit (i.e., the IT function). The challenge is to reconfigure resources and accountabilities across the organization to meet the remit of these roles. This is where the shift in mind-set provides the foundation. This will not be easy, but it's the challenge business leaders face if they are to avoid the schizophrenic IT organization.

Reinventing Corporate IT
An HBR Insight Center





Platforms Are the New Foundation of Corporate IT
The Future of Corporate IT Looks a Lot Like Google
Today's CIO Needs to Be the Chief Innovation Officer
The Real Power of Enterprise Social Media Platforms

Univision's Ratings Win Underlines the Power of Hispanic Marketing

It's been a good summer so far for Univision. The Spanish-language network hit the number-one spot in the sought-after demographic of television viewers aged 18 to 49 in July. It beat out channels like Fox, NBC, and CBS. It's the third summer in a row the network has bested its English-language counterparts.

Univision's success comes as little surprise. The Hispanic market continues to grow in importance to the future of American businesses — especially in the domains of advertising and marketing. A compilation of the latest findings we prepared at Smartling shows that the Hispanic population currently accounts for 16.7% of the U.S. population, or 52 million people, and will have $1.5 trillion in purchasing power by 2015.

Plus, the Hispanic market is young. The "youth demographic" is desirable across platforms and brands and generally represents the next generation of customers. By 2050, Hispanics will account for at least 30 percent of the total U.S. population — even if there are sharp declines in immigration.

Advertisers continue to take note. Many companies are changing their strategies to remain competitive and better reflect the ethnic and linguistic realities of this evolving consumer base. Target recently launched a popular bilingual television ad, featuring a version of the song, "If You're Happy and You Know It" in both English and Spanish. Kraft Foods now has an entire Spanish-language site designed specifically for the tastes of Latinos, featuring a noted Latino chef, a range of recipes with familiar ingredients from home, and party planning tips for quinceañeras (birthday celebrations for 15-year-old girls).

Marketers don't necessarily need Spanish to reach all Hispanics — many, especially children of immigrants in the U.S. — are English-dominant. However, most brands prefer to build brand loyalty with Hispanics early — in their home countries and among first-generation immigrants. With that in mind, providing content in Spanish has become a best practice.

The Hispanic advertising industry is now worth more than $5 billion, and is outpacing all other sectors of advertising, with four times the amount of growth. As of June 2012, ad spend growth rates had increased by 20.7% for the Hispanic market compared to just 1.7% in the non-Hispanic market. Companies like Procter & Gamble, McDonald's, AT&T, Verizon, Toyota, General Mills, and General Motors spend tens to hundreds of millions of dollars each year in Hispanic advertising. Savvy advertisers are able to build two-for-one brand loyalty, reaching both customers living in Latin America and Latinos who reside in the United States.

The landscape is changing fast on this issue and there are a few new trends worth watching:

The upscale Hispanic market is booming. Makers of luxury products are beginning to turn their attention to the Hispanic market. Nearly one quarter of all U.S. Hispanic consumers are now defined as "upscale consumers," with an annual income of $75,000 or more. By 2015, their buying power is estimated to be worth $680 billion.

The Hispanic market also matters for marketing to business buyers. B2B advertisers are beginning to turn their attention to the rising number of businesses owned by Hispanics in the U.S. In 2007, Hispanic-owned businesses generated $350.7 billion in sales, a trend that stands to grow with time.

Hispanics are more mobile-savvy than other segments of U.S. consumers. Hispanics are 28% more likely to own a smartphone than non-Hispanic whites. One study showed that 47% of Hispanics used a handheld device to go online, compared to just 28% of non-Hispanic whites.

Every business needs to understand its customers well. As these trends show, it may no longer be a viable option to put off a strategy for marketing to Hispanics until mañana.

Women Overestimate Their Willingness to Confront Harassment

In experiment, 83% of women said they would confront a job interviewer who asked such sexually harassing questions as "Do you have a boyfriend?" And the more confrontation they predicted for themselves, the greater their contempt for women who didn't protest. Yet past research shows that most candidates who face such harassment do nothing to protest, says a team led by Kristina A. Diekmann of the University of Utah. People underestimate the costs of confrontation, such as impaired reputation and social status, if they don't experience the harassment themselves.

Build a Career Worth Having

We live in a time of chronic dissatisfaction in the workplace. Gallup's 2013 State of the American Workplace study found that as many as 70% of working Americans were unfulfilled with their jobs, 18% to such an extent that they are actively undermining their co-workers. This is a marked increase in workplace dissatisfaction from 2010, when Conference Board found that 55% of Americans were dissatisfied with their jobs.

How can we explain this? Certainly factors like the sluggish economic recovery and stuck wages play a role, but I think the real answer is even more straightforward: It's not clear how one designs a satisfying career in today's professional culture, especially if lasting fulfillment (as opposed to salary maximization) is the goal.

At my company, ReWork, we connect talented professionals to meaningful work opportunities at companies that are making substantive social, environmental, and cultural progress. Based on our conversations with over 12,000 professionals and hundreds of hiring managers, we've gained insights into what's lacking in the traditional approach to career planning, and how professionals can create careers with an ongoing sense of purpose. Here's my advice:

1. See your career as a series of stepping stones, not a linear trajectory.

There's an implicit view that careers are still linear. Sure, many people accept that the career ladder is broken, but most still attempt to somehow increase the "slope" of their career trajectory.

They wait until they are unhappy, look around for opportunities that seem better than their current job, apply for a few, cross their fingers, and take the best option that they can get. Then, they toil away until they are unhappy again, and the cycle repeats. Though this approach can increase your salary over time, studies show that, once you make more than $75,000, more money doesn't correlate to happiness or emotional wellbeing.

Most people end up with a career path of somewhat arbitrary events that, at best, is a gradually improving wandering path, and, at worst, is just a series of unfulfilling jobs

The solution to this dismal cycle? Let go of the idea that careers are linear. These days, they are much more like a field of stepping stones that extends in all directions. Each stone is a job or project that is available to you, and you can move in any direction that you like. The trick is simply to move to stones that take you closer and closer to what is meaningful to you. There is no single path — but rather, an infinite number of options that will lead to the sweet spot of fulfillment.

2. Seek legacy, mastery, and freedom — in that order.

Research from authors such as Daniel Pink (Drive), Cal Newport (So Good They Can't Ignore You), Ben Casnocha and Reid Hoffman (Startup of You), and Tony Hsieh (Delivering Happiness) shows that there are three primary attributes of fulfilling work:



Legacy. A higher purpose, a mission, a cause. This means knowing that in some way — large or small — the world will be a better place after you've done your work.

Mastery. This refers to the art of getting better and better at skills and talents that you enjoy using, to the extent that they become intertwined with your identity. Picture a Jedi, or a Samurai, or a master blacksmith.

Freedom. The ability to choose who you work with, what projects you work on, where and when you work each day, and getting paid enough to responsibly support the lifestyle that you want.

The order is important. People are fulfilled most quickly when they first prioritize the impact that they want to have (legacy), then understand which skills and talents they need to have that impact (mastery), and finally "exchange" those skills for higher pay and flexibility (freedom) as they develop and advance.

People don't typically have just one purpose. The things you're passionate about — women's health, early childhood education, organic food, or renewable energy — are likely to evolve over time. And it's important to develop a high degree of freedom so that you're able to hunt down your purpose again when it floats onto the next thing. This means being able to do things like volunteer on the side, go months at a time without getting a paycheck, or invest in unusual professional development opportunities.

3. Treat your career like a grand experiment.

In my experience, people who are successful in finding — and maintaining — meaningful work approach their careers like a grand experiment.

All of the things you think you know about what you want to be doing, what you're good at, what people want to hire you to do (and at what salary), how different organizations operate, etc. are hypotheses that can be validated or invalidated with evidence — either from the first-hand experience of trying something (including bite-sized projects), or second-hand from asking the right questions of the right people.

The faster and cheaper that you're able to validate your career hypotheses, the sooner you'll find fulfillment. You don't have to take a job in a new industry to realize it's not for you. You can learn a ton about potential lines of work from reading online, having conversations, taking on side projects, and volunteering.

And a bonus — by doing your homework on what's actually a good fit for you, you won't waste your time applying to jobs that you aren't competitive for. And like any good scientist, you'll achieve a healthy detachment from your incorrect hypotheses — they are just par for the course, after all.

I use the word "grand" to describe this experiment because the reality is that your career is not just a way to earn a living. It's your chance to discover what you're here for and what you love. It's your best shot at improving the world in a way that is important to you. It's a sizeable component of your human experience, in a very real way. As such, it should be an adventure, with a healthy bit of magic and mystery along the way.

So if you're one of the many who find themselves on the path to meaningful work — remember to enjoy the journey, don't give up, and don't settle.

How to Schedule Time for Meaningful Work

An interview with Julian Birkinshaw and Jordan Cohen, coauthors of the forthcoming article "Make Time for the Work that Matters."

Download this podcast

A written transcript will be available by August 9.

Being the World's Largest Ad Agency Might Not Be Something to Brag About

Google's All "Who Cares?"


This week's merger announcement between Omnicom and Publicis, two ad and marketing agencies with a combined 2012 revenue of $23 billion, involved glasses of champagne. But perhaps a jug of water would have been the more appropriate thirst-quencher for these industry giants' long road ahead, even as the biggest agency in the world. This commentary from The Economist is both a primer for those who haven't been keeping up with the news and a witty analysis for those paying attention to only a particular segment of the story. The bottom line, of course, is that the companies merged in an attempt to solve a couple of major problems: the growth of digital advertising that bypasses agencies’ traditional role in placing content and, secondarily, an ongoing succession conundrum at Publicis (Maurice Lévy, who heads the company, is 71). The new agency also promises to cut $500 million in costs, and because it will represent 20% of ad spending and 40% of some publishers' ad slots, it could be in a great position to help clients get better rates. But there may be more bad news than good. Aside from the whole "We have to get this approved by antitrust authorities in more than 40 countries" issue, the stumbling blocks could include client dissatisfaction (several competing brands are now being represented under the same mammoth umbrella); cross-cultural differences; and the challenge of catching up to the nimble Google, which controls a third of all online ad spending. Perhaps, the article argues, the change is akin to what happened on the Wall Street trading floor when everything became automated: "The move toward buying ads on exchanges will mean that their margins are squeezed and life gets a lot tougher." Cheers?

The Limits to Self-Interest

A Manager's Moral Obligation to Preserve Capitalism Working Knowledge

Most people think of capitalism as morality-neutral, at best. Others think of it as downright immoral. Karthik Ramanna of Harvard Business School differs with both views. True, capitalism unleashes people's self-interest. But in order to let them pursue their goals, it has to enable individual freedom and fairness of opportunity, which are among society's important moral "goods." This delicate balance shouldn't be taken for granted, however. In a new working paper, Ramanna and Rebecca M. Henderson, the John and Natty McArthur University Professor at Harvard, say executives in the financial industry have the capacity to do a lot of harm to capitalism's moral framework if they give in to the temptation to structure the rules of the game around maximizing their own profits — something that's fairly easy to do when practically no one understands the esoteric markets and instruments that big banks have been brandishing lately. Pressure from industry groups can help these executives recognize that they have a responsibility to set aside their self-interest "in order to preserve the interests of the system as a whole." Ramanna believes the executives will eventually get the message and do the right thing. "CEOs are usually not immoral people," he says. —Andy O'Connell

Strip-Mining People’s Lives

The Trouble with Zuckism PandoDaily

Facebook (finally) traded for over $38 a share this week, the magic number it initially went public for back in 2012. To some extent this shows that fears about the social network's ability to make money may have been overstated. But it's the way they make money — mining user data to generate ad revenue — that's the focus of Kevin Kelleher's piece. Most users, he says, don't love the social network, but the cost-benefit proposition of connecting with people easily across the globe is too good to pass up. It's under this condition that Zuckism flourishes: "Zuckism says that if you can tap a deep enough need at a big enough scale you can strip-mine a billion intimate lives for profit." The question going forward, Kelleher says, is what will happen when Facebook's two constituent bases — its users and its investors — grow further and further apart as user enthusiasm wanes and investors make more money.

You Can't Eat a Check

In Lieu of Money, Toyota Donates Efficiency to New York Charity New York Times

Kaizen, Japanese for "continuous improvement," is Toyota's self-described business model. Sure, it can help Toyota make great cars and trucks, but can it also help feed hungry New Yorkers? In a rebuke to the traditional practice of cutting a check to support a charity, Toyota offered the Food Bank for New York City some strategy consulting instead. And despite some initial apprehension, it worked: Toyota engineers were able to cut down the dinner wait time from 90 minutes to 18 minutes. And after Hurricane Sandy, a Food Bank warehouse lowered the time it took to pack boxes of supplies for victims from 3 minutes to 11 seconds. This efficiency gets food to more people, sure. But it also saves the Food Bank time and money. So next time your business is thinking of donating money to a cause, you might want to consider just how far your expertise can go instead.

Live and Let Die

How Link "Suicide" Could Save the Web Wired

A link is a link, right? Nope. There are web links that are relevant, useful, and significant. And then there are all the rest. The relevant-slash-useful-slash-significant ones are great and deserve to live on in perpetuity, but the rest should die, writes Jeff Stibel. In fact, the web should be structured so as to let pointless links disappear automatically after a while. Same with unused sites, for that matter. Summary executions of useless links and sites would prevent the web from becoming ever more cluttered with things no one needs. A cleaned-up web would be more meaningful and, ultimately, more useful. But how to distinguish the good from the bad? A start might be for users to agree that one-way, and thus weaker and less significant, links (I link to you but you don't link to me) should appear in a different color or font size from two-way, and thus stronger and more significant, links (we both link to each other). "There’s no reason we can’t eventually build this facet into the web’s very fabric," he writes, making it sound oh so easy to unleash a web-crawling killing machine. —Andy O'Connell

BONUS BITS:

Oh No They Didn't

A New App Will Let You Share Your Leftovers With Strangers (NPR)
CEO Mocks Steve Cohen in Bizarre Full-Page Wall Street Journal Ad (Quartz)
House Party: Working and Living at the Office (Wall Street Journal)

How Your Brand Can Flirt on Vine

The look is always the same: A seasoned marketer is cajoled into watching their first Vine video. Six seconds pass and it's over. The marketer gazes quizzically at the smiling young person that brought the video to his attention.

"That's it?"

Like any emerging platform, Vine (the short-form video app owned by Twitter) requires a recalibration for users to understand a new context within a new format. And for marketers who are used to their 15 second online pre-rolls, it's especially important for them to recognize that this burgeoning technology could one day deliver more value for them than YouTube. If a 60-second video is a dinner date, then Vine is the opening flirt across a crowded bar.

First, let's dissect the anatomy of the flirt: The wink, the blown kiss from a loved one. These familiar tactics are short-form moments that over-index with joy. At Virgin Mobile, we call these surprise and delight moments the "Virgin Touch." Our goal is to shower the customer with tons of little, metaphorical kisses, hoping that a few stick. Virgin flirts constantly with hopes that some of these moments are shared, which in turn adds to the mythology of our brand.

Now look at Vine. It's a platform invented to maximize joy in six seconds. People who post on Vine — or "Viners" — tend to be 15- to 30-year-olds who have perfected the art of telling a good story in the shortest amount of time possible. Viners may use a series of techniques to make you smile. Some, like Nicholas Megalis (the top Viner at 1.9M followers at the time I write this) use catchy jingles or songs. Others, like Meagan Cignoli, use stop-motion animation. Rudy Mancuso is the king of "looping" — the ability to manipulate your six seconds to create an endless loop (Vine videos auto-repeat after they end). Then there's Brandon Calvillo, an emerging Viner (and one of my personal favorites) currently hijacking our Virgin Mobile Vine account, who has invented a new technique inserting pop song lyrics as punchlines to mundane everyday situations. He's been especially clever with this technique when it came to commenting on our recently announced Virgin Mobile FreeFest.

Vine was brought to my attention by Gary Vaynerchuk, the internet maven who himself started his career as a YouTube wine celebrity. He had the bold idea, along with his co-founder Jerome Jarre (also a celebrity Viner) to start a new company called Grape Story that would solely represent Vine stars (similar to how CAA represents actors) and connect them with brands. At the time, he was putting the final touches on his new book, Jab Jab Jab Right Hook, which focuses on the multiple touches a brand needs to do to break through and win a prospect.

What we at Virgin saw as kisses, Gary saw as punches. Both hope for the same result: a constant barrage of conversation with an engaged prospect about their values, culture, and sensibilities. Gary walked me through the explosive growth of Vine, which was approaching a tipping point after surging to 13 million users in the first four months after launch. Having seen a similar trajectory at Buzzfeed 18 months earlier, we decided to help him launch his new business. Virgin Mobile was the first brand that would partner with Grape Story on Vine and would attract top-tier talent to help bring awareness to our brand.

At its core, Vine is about "rubbernecking" — distracting your attention for a mere instant with hopes for a payoff. For some it's an attractive passing stranger. For others it's a car accident at the end of a long traffic jam. Either way, for a brand to break through on the platform, you need to reduce your message or brand essence to a simple beat, and then set up for the payoff of that beat. All in six seconds. Though this may sound daunting, there are considerable benefits. Vine videos automatically repeat after they play, so your moment's frequency will deliver roughly three times for a given user (if they enjoy the video, that is).

Within three weeks of launching our Vine relationship with Grape Story, we gained over 30,000 followers (and trending to hit 100,000 followers in a month or so). The lion's share of these followers were from a contest we called #happyaccidents, where Viners were encouraged to post videos of their phones distracting them from everyday life. Subsequent to this contest, we created "Resident Viners" — similar to resident DJs at hot clubs — where an emerging Viner would guest-Vine from our account for a few weeks, help build our base, then leave.

Currently, we're still testing the mechanics of the platform to understand what are the most reliable breakthrough methods. Based on our findings experimenting with the platform thus far, Vine feels ideal for what I call "Product Placement 2.0" — that is, a place where the brand or product can act as a character in the piece rather than just set dressing. Rudy Mancuso was successful at integrating Ritz crackers in this fashion.

At times, Viners have experimented to be more subtle with our branding. And at other times, less so. As the most influential Viners engage with our page, we start to see other junior Viners creatively interpret our brand in the form of contest entries. These moments are the "kisses" we most enjoy. "Brand Flirting" at its finest.

So how does Vine fit into your existing marketing ecosystem?

To make sense of it all, it's best to first temper expectations. Vine, at this moment, is not a brand that will increase sales. But its role in the ecosystem is no different than the traditional out-of-home assets you may have used in traditional campaigns. Think of a good, branded Vine video as the passing bus that carries a clever summer blockbuster film ad on it. And the true value of the medium is in its low cost. A typical sponsorship of a Vine video can run a mere few thousand dollars, yet it can gain tens of thousands of "likes" or "re-Vines". Marketers with lower marketing budgets can capitalize on this as one of many tactics to break through in a cluttered space with fickle Millennials.

Vine, of course, isn't the only platform out there for short-form video. Instagram recently announced their entry into the market. Though the jury is still out on which platform will win over brands, it's clear that both platforms will address different objectives for advertisers. Instagram videos will most likely feel more like pre-roll ads and look to formally begin a customer relationship with the prospect. Vine will focus more on brand voice and whimsy.

Viners have the unique ability to tell a breakthrough story in six seconds and can build an organic following because of this skill. According to our friends at Grape Story, there is no famous Viner that gained fame in another platform prior to joining Vine. Engaging fans in such short time is a talent. Brands can learn plenty from those who've mastered the art of digital flirting.

Should Your CIO Be Chief Digital Officer?

We've all seen it. CIOs who do great things in leading IT soon gain extra responsibilities. By helping business leaders to improve their businesses, the CIO becomes an obvious candidate to fill any open role that involves technology, process, or strong governance. Some CIOs become CIO-Plus-COO or CIO-Plus-Head of Shared Services. Others gain new responsibilities in strategy, M&A integration, or innovation. Still others move on to business roles including CEO. In the book, The Real Business of IT: How CIOs Create and Communicate Value, Richard Hunter and I coined the phrase CIO-Plus. In the four years since our book was published, the CIO-Plus idea has gained real traction, and there are numerous stories and cases studies on the phenomenon.

But there is another leadership role that has arisen in many organizations in recent years: the Chief Digital Officer (CDO). In many companies, "digital" is a cacophony of disconnected, inconsistent, and sometimes incompatible activities. One company had three simultaneous mobile marketing initiatives, conducted by different groups, using different tools and vendors. Other companies have multiple employee collaboration platforms with different rules and technologies. The problem is exacerbated as business units do their own things digitally, or as companies hire vendors who can only do things their own way. If your company has wildly different digital marketing activities for each brand or region, you know what I mean.

The CDO's job is to turn the digital cacophony into a symphony. It's OK to experiment with new businesses and tools, but experimentation must be coupled with building scalable, efficient capabilities. The CDO creates a unifying digital vision, energizes the company around digital possibilities, coordinates digital activities, helps to rethink products and processes for the digital age, and sometimes provides critical tools or resources. That's why Starbucks — an early leader in all things digital — hired a CDO last year. And it's why many other companies are naming CDOs before they get too far along the digital road.

The title CDO may or may not become permanent in your company. But the responsibilities of the CDO will be required. You may appoint a temporary CDO to get your house in order, or you may develop other ways to get the job done. Whatever approach you choose, you need to create appropriate levels of digital technology synergy, brand integration, investment coordination, skill development, vendor management, and innovation over the long term.

Is CDO the next step for the aspiring CIO-Plus? The answer is not obvious, but it's well worth considering. Many of the CDO's roles are challenges that great CIOs have already mastered in their own domains. But some, such as brand synergy, are new to the CIO. Diverse companies are responding to the digital leadership challenge in different and dynamic ways.

Although relatively few CIOs have an official CDO title, roughly 20% of CIOs in Gartner's latest survey said they played the role. At Codelco, the world's largest copper mining company, CIO Marco Orellana is helping to fundamentally transform the process of mining and selling through digital technologies such as real-time coordination, analytics, and autonomous vehicles. At Asian Paints, Manish Choksi managed the difficult step of centralizing and standardizing processes across a loosely-coupled set of regional units. Now, as CIO and Chief of Corporate Strategy, he leads the digital transformation of manufacturing, selling, and customer service.

In some companies, the CIO and CDO are deliberately separate roles. The CIO of an apparel company participates in digital decisions and supports digital initiatives while keeping the company's traditional IT unit running smoothly. He is not seen as a potential CDO, but the company values his skills in a strong supporting role. Meanwhile, Starbucks' CDO Adam Brotman and CIO Curt Garner work very closely as a team to drive digital strategy and execution.

Then again, executives in some companies feel their CIO does not have what it takes to be part of the digital conversation. The CIO of a business-services provider had little role in digital at all; the CEO asked him to focus only on legacy IT systems while a newly-hired CDO managed digital activities. Two years later, the company moved all IT functions under the CDO, and the CIO moved to a new firm.

So, should your CIO take on digital responsibilities? Here are some questions you can ask yourself:

Is your CIO great at the CIO role? Is IT clearly running well? Are IT costs and agility what you want them to be? If your answer to these questions is "no," then you probably want your CIO to focus on fixing IT, not expanding beyond IT.

Is your CIO ready for a CIO-Plus role? Do you see your CIO as a senior executive colleague or just a leader of the technology function? Has he successfully managed non-technical roles such as merger integration, process management, or shared services? Is your senior team smarter when your CIO is in the room?

Does your CIO have digital expertise? Can she talk the language of social media or mobile or analytics, and can she help you understand? Does she understand the digital threats and opportunities your company faces — from inside and outside its industry? Can she create a compelling digital vision for the firm?

Will your CIO command respect across the enterprise? The CDO role can require even more political savvy and communication skills than the CIO role does. Is your CIO up to the task of driving change across a strong-willed senior executive team? Can she engage a busy workforce to turn digital vision into reality?

In an increasingly digitizing business world, most companies need better digital leadership and coordination. You need to create a compelling digital vision, coordinate digital investments, drive appropriate synergies, build a clean technology platform, and foster innovation. You need to energize a busy workforce and generate shared understanding in your senior executive team.



If your CIO is good, look to him for help. Strong CIOs have already tackled some of the tough challenges of digital leadership. They understand the importance of governance and policy. They know the intricacies of managing across organizational units. They tend to be highly connected with senior executives, having helped them achieve their objectives over the years. They know the current business and the future opportunities technology can create. Plus, in any big company, it's difficult — if not impossible — to build great digital capabilities without linking to your existing IT capabilities and people.

So, should your CIO be CDO? You need to get the digital leadership job done, whether through a new C-level title or other methods. If you have a great CIO, give her some digital responsibility. You may not choose to make her your digital leader. But the skills and relationships of a great CIO will be an asset to any digital leadership team.

Reinventing Corporate IT
An HBR Insight Center





Platforms Are the New Foundation of Corporate IT
The Future of Corporate IT Looks a Lot Like Google
Today's CIO Needs to Be the Chief Innovation Officer
The Real Power of Enterprise Social Media Platforms

What Does Post-Bureaucratic Leadership Look Like?

Remember that classic New Yorker cartoon with Rover sitting in front of a computer? The caption read, "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog." Well, on the web, no one knows you're a senior vice president either. That's why every leader is going to have to learn how to get things done in a world where authority is the reciprocal of followership.

As traditional hierarchies get supplanted by networked, or "social" organizations, leadership will become less a function of "where you sit," than of "what you can do." Any company that strives to build a leadership advantage will need more than a celebrity CEO and a corporate university that serves up tasty educational morsels to the "high potentials." It will need an organizational model that gives everyone the chance to lead if they're capable; and a talent development model that helps everyone to become capable.

What does it take to dramatically enlarge the leadership capacity of an organization — and equip all of its people to lead without formal authority?

Those are the questions behind the Leaders Everywhere Challenge, the second leg of the Harvard Business Review/McKinsey M-Prize for Management Innovation. And today we're proud to announce the eighteen finalists. This is a robust collection of real-world case studies and courageous experiments in rethinking the work of leadership, redistributing power, and unleashing 21st century leadership skills. Here they are in alphabetical order:

Biggest-Ever Day of Collective Action to Improve Healthcare That Started With a Tweet

Story by Helen Bevan, Damian Roland, Jackie Lynton, Pollyanna Jones

Using Micro-Learning to Boost Influence Skills in Emergent Leaders

Story by Mark Clare

Reweaving Corporate DNA: Building a Culture of Design Thinking at Citrix

Story by Catherine Courage

Teaming at GE Aviation

Story by Rasheedah Jones

The System of Leadership

Hack by Monique Jordan

Total Volunteer Force for the U.S. Military

Hack by Timothy Kane

A Tale of Two Captains: Making the Case for the Universal Applicability of Leaders Everywhere

Story by Charlie Kim and David Marquet

Don't Remove Their Igloos!

Story by Peter King

Co-Presidents: Distributed Leadership at The Nerdery

Story by Mark Malmberg

The Power of Employees to Overcome the Bank Crisis

Story by Valerie Martens

The 4-Hat Hack: How a Micro Change in Your Employee Portal Can Yield Mega Results in Leadership

Hack by Joel Modestus

Rap a Tap, Tap Tap, Join TITAN and You Are the Leader

Story by Lalgudi Ramanathan Natarajan and Sumant Sood

What Goes Into Building a CEO Factory?

Story by Stephen Remedios

Empowering Intrapreneurs within the Federal Government at NASA

Story by Kevin Rosenquist

Integrity, Rationality and Collegiality: Ingredients for Greatness

Story by Marcus Ryu

Who Do People Report to Here?

Story by Richard Sheridan

Project 10X: Growing the DNA for 21st Century Leadership in Organizations

Hack by Max Shkud and Bill Veltrop

Quit Email and Start Leading

Hack by Kim Spinder

Please explore the finalist stories and hacks and add your comments and ratings — they'll make a difference as finalists update and build on their entries for final judging. We'll announce the winners of the Leaders Everywhere Challenge the week of August 19th.

Three Differences Between Managers and Leaders

A young manager accosted me the other day. "I've been reading all about leadership, have implemented several ideas, and think I'm doing a good job at leading my team. How will I know when I've crossed over from being a manager to a leader?" he wanted to know.

I didn't have a ready answer and it's a complicated issue, so we decided to talk the next day. I thought long and hard, and came up with three tests that will help you decide if you've made the shift from managing people to leading them.

Counting value vs Creating value. You're probably counting value, not adding it, if you're managing people. Only managers count value; some even reduce value by disabling those who add value. If a diamond cutter is asked to report every 15 minutes how many stones he has cut, by distracting him, his boss is subtracting value.

By contrast, leaders focuses on creating value, saying: "I'd like you to handle A while I deal with B." He or she generates value over and above that which the team creates, and is as much a value-creator as his or her followers are. Leading by example and leading by enabling people are the hallmarks of action-based leadership.

Circles of influence vs Circles of power. Just as managers have subordinates and leaders have followers, managers create circles of power while leaders create circles of influence.

The quickest way to figure out which of the two you're doing is to count the number of people outside your reporting hierarchy who come to you for advice. The more that do, the more likely it is that you are perceived to be a leader.

Leading people vs Managing work. Management consists of controlling a group or a set of entities to accomplish a goal. Leadership refers to an individual's ability to influence, motivate, and enable others to contribute toward organizational success. Influence and inspiration separate leaders from managers, not power and control.

In India, M.K. Gandhi inspired millions of people to fight for their rights, and he walked shoulder to shoulder with them so India could achieve independence in 1947. His vision became everyone's dream and ensured that the country's push for independence was unstoppable. The world needs leaders like him who can think beyond problems, have a vision, and inspire people to convert challenges into opportunities, a step at a time.

I encouraged my colleague to put this theory to the test by inviting his team-mates for chats. When they stop discussing the tasks at hand — and talk about vision, purpose, and aspirations instead, that's when you will know you have become a leader.

Agree?