What the CIO Wants You to Know (Part I)
I'm reminded of the old commercial from American television where an actor gazes sincerely into a camera and says, "I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV." Well, I'm not a CIO, but I report to one and therefore make it my business to listen carefully to what he says. Before I became a direct report I used to vaguely wonder what the CIO really thought...whether he cared about the particular project I was working on or even consciously realized that I, as a developer among many, existed. Now that I have a front-row seat I welcome you to listen in. In 2001 Ram Charan wrote What the CEO Wants You to Know—a book described as "taking the mystery out of business, [showing] the secrets of success used by business legends." In this mini-series of articles, I hope to vicariously offer some similar secrets relevant to technology workers. What you read here might surprise you...and how well you apply what you read could make the difference in your career...
First let me add a quick disclaimer: I realize there are those among us who aren’t the least bit interested in what the CIO wants them to know. They regard the CIO alternately as hatchet-man, village idiot, sell-out and corporate puppet. In my career I have known or have worked for just about all of these...CIOs who were hired from the outside expressly to make impassionate decisions concerning mergers, relocations, and layoffs without regard to the families it would devastate. Then there were CIOs who seemed more interested in social climbing than software. While I'm not saying my current CIO never exasperates me, I can say that he holds the enviable reputation for being thought capable enough to fill the shoes of any of those reporting up to him, from the network administrator to the programmer. While our IT organization may or may not be globally representative, I will make an effort to select excerpts most widely applicable. Still, readers should consider the culture of their own organizations when judging the relevance of this commentary.
"Face facts with dignity."
If memory serves correctly, this blurb was on a slip of paper in a fortune cookie, but our CIO read it and practically cackled with delight at the chord it struck with him. He mentioned it even recently when his direct reports were discussing a book that we're reading as a group: Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan.
"It frustrates me," he said (and I paraphrase), "when individuals fail to take responsibility for their projects and fail to live up to their potential, and yet seem bewildered when they are passed up for a promotion." [Disclaimer: This is not meant to imply that all failed projects are the fault of the employee assigned to them.]
"Perhaps," I said, "we as employees are like anorexic girls looking in mirrors and seeing distorted reflections. Maybe we are incapable or unwilling to confront the reality of our own incompetencies. If all you know how to do is program, maybe it's just too painful to recognize that you might not be a very good programmer."
The group acknowledged this may be so as we fell momentarily into a brown study of human psychology.
"That's why it's so important to be 'ethically honest' with staff in performance reviews," the CIO reminded us (as managers), "so that they're aware of where they stand and they don't go ten years thinking they're doing just fine."
We talked more about the difficulty of communicating relatively poor performance with staff because of individuality...one employee may read between the lines of everything you say, interpreting the slightest voice inflection as significant, while another may remain oblivious.
But facing facts with dignity is not just about recognizing poor performance or weaknesses.
The CIO reminded us that it's also about making a mistake and learning so significantly from it that you not only don't repeat it, you are better because of it.
It's about not making excuses or blaming others or circumstances.
It's about not throwing up your hands in frustration when given too many simultaneous assignments...and then missing the deadlines on all of them...it's about having the courage to say to your manager, "I can't do them all in this timeframe...which one is my priority?"
It's about making conscious choices and managing expectations with clients, coworkers, and management proactively.
Sometimes, as Mr. Nilges has reminded developer dot stars, "facing facts with dignity" may dictate finding another place of employment more suited to your style, ethics, or constitution, or as Mr. Read has suggested, recognizing that a certain programming language is not for you.
"Facing facts with dignity" may mean confronting your demons, but it also involves recognizing your strengths and leveraging them to your advantage. There's hope in those words. While you may not be a hot-shot coder, you may be a great communicator, and there's room for both in IT.
Art Defined by the Artist
I won't pretend that we can settle the art/craft debate here, but I would like to add something that I find useful in my own thinking about it. To me, a "work" is "pure art" if the creator declares it so, especially if the process by which the creator made the work was engaged in without a utility or consumer in mind. The creator is in control of the context. Others are free to judge whether it's good art or not, but I don't believe that someone else has the power to say "That is not art."
I think this idea fits nicely, Edward, into your socio-economic analysis of art vs. craft, because it takes a certain level of socio-economic priviledge (call it luxury) in order to have a state of mind from which to proclaim, "I am making art for art's sake. It is not craft. I am an artist, not a craftsman." Only a person with a certain amount of freedom from concerns like where his or her next meal (or paycheck) is going to come from has the luxury of these kinds of thoughts--which is I think why we're still wrestling with this debate: because it's only recently that as a society we find ourselves in a situation in which large numbers of people have this kind of luxury. (There are historical exceptions, of course, and I'm not arguing that art and "pure artists" did not exist 200 yaers ago. I am speaking primarily in generalities.)
I am heavily influenced by the conception of art that arose from the modern art period of the 20th century. Whether or not one agrees with the recent survey of "art experts" who declared Marcel Duchamp's Fountain as the most influential modern art work, which owes largely to the story behind it, Duchamp's famous 1917 stunt of submitting to an art contest, under a pseudonym, a common everyday toilet. The point of Fountain, and I think the reason so many view it as the most influential work, is it says that the *creator* is in control of declaring what is art. To quote from the Wikipedia article I linked to, "Duchamp described his purpose with the piece as shifting the focus of art from the physical craft to the intellectual interpretation."
When museums with antiquarian collections of pots and fabric display these as "art" it is a recontextualization, inevitable due to the passage of decades and centuries, because in my view the people who made those beautiful pots and woven rugs were artisans, working for hire, or working to make a living. "Why are you making this rug?" Because my master told me to. Because people need rugs, and I need to eat, and I can sell this rug for money. The fact that rugs and pots are now mass produced and that the days of the master pot makers and rug weavers are over is less relevant to me.
Metaphorically I identify with the rug weaver of a thousand years ago, or the cabinet maker (like my grandfather, Bernard Johnson, who was a master cabinet maker in Fort Lauderdale, FL). The days of cabinet makers may be largely over (though I confess to being one of Edward's priviledged few who paid a craftsman to make his custom kitchen cabinets, even if the saw that cut all the wood was driven by a computer program working from a 3-D computer-based design), but here I am, here we are, a craftspeople in ether, making virtual cabinets for hire. Someday they may find a way to replace me with an automaton (and more power to them if they can--that's progress), and in a perfect world I wish I could be free of the need to work for other people, free to persue "pure art." In the meantime, I choose to approach my "materials" and my process as an artisan, not an artist.
This is where I was coming from in my original comment to Donna's post; I think the more you view your work as art as opposed to craft, the harder it becomes to reconcile with the compromises required to perform your "art" in that commercial context. My effort to view what I do as craft instead of art is way for me to make peace with the compromises I am forced to make on a daily basis, because I can view them as compromises my employer or client is taking on, not me. I don't choose to carry the burden. Perhaps this is an illusion on my part, and perhaps it is not sustainable. I suppose it puts me in the same bed as the 1950's "silent generation," who as Edward puts it "traded their ideals for safe corporate jobs." Guilty as charged.
Edward, I very much like this quote from your comment:
And I agree with you totally, Edward, in your description of the real struggle of the artisan who want to make something both functional and beautiful. For myself, I choose not to work for employers who forbid attention to the aesthetic parts of the job, nor for employers who forbid putting energy into the unseen parts of the job, like error handling. Some people may not be so lucky to be able to make this choice and may find themselves stuck in a job that does not match with their own proclivities as a craftsperson. The artisan who yearns to make his or her products beautiful may indeed be much like the conflicted Gershwin described in Donna's post.
But I figure there's spectrum in any field, and always has been, between on one end a demand for unadorned, purely functional, and perhaps not even durable, artifacts and on the other end highly refined, artfully designed artifacts in which as much, or more, attention is paid to form as to function. Some craftspeople may find themselves unable to stomach producing work for the low end of that demand spectrum, but the demand for the low end is there, and someone will always be there to fulfill it.
Best,
Dan