The quote attributed to Thomas Edison of “Vision without execution being hallucination” is one side of the coin. As Roger Martin wrote in a recent HBR article, execution without vision is mindless.
A good analogy I’ve used to express how tightly integrated the two need to be comes from organized sports. Continue reading
Leadership with vision is great. It’s absolutely necessary. But it won’t get you where you 
intend to go if you have no strategy to fulfill it. Like anything else, it takes planning and action. Oh, and it takes strategy. Far too many corporate executives equate vision with strategy and use the terms interchangeably. That’s a big mistake. You might even equate it with having “Corporate Cataracts”. Continue reading
For most of us in the IT world, two major events over the last twenty years rank as “life changing”. One is predominantly US-based and the other one caused the entire world to watch with anticipation. I’m talking about the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) rules for US organizations and the turn of the calendar from 1999 to 2000. Continue reading
Many enterprises have groups responsible for governance functions, such as Project Management (the PMO,) Enterprise Architecture (the EA team) or Technical Architecture (the ARB.) Unless these groups reflect a mature, enterprise-wide approach to management, however, they are unlikely to produce the benefits for which they are chartered. This results in the Illusion of Control. Continue reading
Oh, you’ve been there … that much I know. You are the Project Manager on something with high visibility and you are also stuck with a project sponsor who acts more like an absentee landlord than a collaborative partner. Despite all your efforts to engage her/him, the sound you hear most is the quiet chirping of the crickets of non-participation. Yes, I’m thinking you’ve been there and so have I. And for those to whom this sounds foreign, you just haven’t managed enough projects yet – your time will come. Continue reading