Global Leadership

Global leadership in today's economy isn't just a nice to have, it is an imperative! My purpose as a leader is to influence my constituency by providing vision, purpose, direction and motivation, while accomplishing organizational goals, improving the bottom line and supporting people as they endeavor to reach their full potential.

Leadership Vision

My vision is to have satisfied customers and happy, engaged colleagues. Customers are satisfied when they get good services that meet or exceed their expectations. Colleagues are happy when they are empowered and have some control over their work and their careers, when they are engaged in meaningful work, are passionate about their work and are treated with respect. I am devoted to people and results.

Think Globally, Act Locally

Every action an Information Technology leader takes can impact the entire organization. On an enterprise scale, this means we have to pioneer new models to solve business problems, perfect them by partnering with local leadership and spread them to other parts of our organization. Accomplishing this goal requires a strong blend of technical, cultural, political and people skills. As a resource that fits this profile, I can help you in the following ways:

Cultural Fit & Awareness

Technology leaders must be adept in cultural fit and awareness to drive organizational change and global relations and reduce or eliminate outsourcing failures.

Organizational Change

Organizational change is about people’s behavior. Organizations are comprised of people and their behaviors formulate the accomplishments of the organization. Organizational change management explores behaviors to achieve greater results in performance which in turn drive bottom line value. Cultural fit is as individual as companies themselves. Every organization has its own variety of cultures and sub-cultures. Most businesses establish a target company-wide culture through their mission statement, vision, values and leader behaviors. Why then is understanding cultural fit so important to organizational change management? Because without understanding cultural fit, change adaptation will be ineffective.

The Balanced Scorecard Collaborative¹ published the following statistics:

• 90% of all companies fail to execute strategy successfully
• Only 5% of the workforce understands their company strategy

According to the Gartner Group, “$75 billion is spent annually on failed IT projects and poor management is the culprit.”

An 11 year study by Kotter and Heskett² demonstrates the correlation between change adaptive companies to their revenues and stock value. The results of the study revealed:

What this tells us is that the shareholder value of companies practicing sound organizational change management principles outpaced the S&P Index over the 11 year period by 340%. Think of the possibilities when a sound change management strategy is used to implement sound IT practices. Do you want to achieve results like this? Let me help you with your IT change management strategies.

Global Relations and Outsourcing Failures

In a study entitled Leading Causes of Outsourcing Failures, the Outsourcing Center³ surveyed 305 buyers and providers in North America, Europe, Asia and India to assess their experiences and opinions about outsourcing failures. One-third of respondents were buyers, two-thirds were providers. They concluded that 25% of the reasons for outsourced project failures are due to poor communication (16%) and cultural fit (9%).

One of the foremost causes of cross-cultural communication failures is the difference between high context and low context communication. This is very likely the primary cause of the communication difficulties that resulted in the 16% of outsourced project failures in the referenced survey. The residents of large Power Distance Index⁴ (PDI) countries use high context communication as opposed to small PDI countries where the residents use low context communication. Do you know the difference?

If you are having difficulty with outsourced vendors or internal change management, I can help manage those relationships for you.

Matrix Management

Matrix management is the practice of managing individuals with more than one reporting line, but it is also commonly used to describe managing cross functional, cross business group and other forms of working that cross the traditional vertical business units—often silos—of function and geography. I am highly adept at managing matrix teams, especially in situations where I don't own or control any of the levers.