Leadership Essentials
for Getting to the Top
Ed Granger-Happ
CTO, Save the Children
The question of a dream
• A graveyard scene
• A tombstone that’s mine
• Engraved on it:
“He cut costs”
* to appropriate a story Tom Peters told
The question is…
What is your climb to the top
going to be about?
Key questions to think about
1. What is your story?
2. What are you doing to help create new value?
3. How are you serving your customer?
4. How are you creating meaning?
5. How are you orchestrating strengths?
6. How are you connecting people?
7. How are you simplifying?
8. How creative are you in creating balance?
9. What are you doing to create excitement?
Key questions to think about
1. What is your story?
2. What are you doing to help create new value?
3. How are you serving your customer?
4. How are you creating meaning?
5. How are you orchestrating strengths?
6. How are you connecting people?
7. How are you simplifying?
8. How creative are you in creating balance?
9. What are you doing to create excitement?
1. What’s your story?
•
•
•
•
This is not just a “once upon a time…”
What are you passionate about?
Boil it down
What my word?
connections
• My story:
– five careers
– success to significance
4. How are you creating
meaning?
• The work has meaning
“People want to work for companies their parents
would be proud of” – K. DeCamp, Cisco
• When we make a good IT decision, more kids
get fed
• My story
–Connect the work to mission
–Being the volunteer: TFR, teaching prospective
CIO’s
–Pepperidge Farm Story – Paul Amorello
5. How are you orchestrating
strengths?
• Find out what your people’s strengths
are and build your team on these
• Zander and Buckingham
– The conductor doesn’t play –Ben Zander
– Not everyone plays violin
– Marcus Buckingham’s “The One Thing”
• My story
– A perpetual student of people management
– Always trying new things—experiment with
people; find out what motivates them
6. How are you connecting
people?
• Everything from partnering, living
with your business VP’s, to
connecting people with common
interests and information
• My story:
– NetHope: collaboration and
connectivity
7. How are you simplifying?
•
•
•
•
Technology is complex, but
Talking about it isn’t
The consultant from Mars
The #1 skill?
Translating
• My story:
– Managing on the business side
– P&L
– Tom Murphy’s IT Strategy comment
Mapping to the CIO
Leadership Profile
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
What is your story?
Creating new value?
Serving your customer?
Creating meaning?
Orchestrating strengths?
Connecting people?
How are you simplifying?
Creating balance?
Creating excitement?
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
Core values
Innovator
Customer Focus
Visionary
Management
Partnering
Master of Complexity
Leadership
Technology
Champion
A closing story
• The parable of the 3 stonecutters
Sweating my butt off breaking rocks
Making a decent living for my family
Building a cathedral
• What cathedral are you building?
• Welch’s 4 E’s and a P
Energy, Energizing, Edge, Execution &
Passion
All that’s left of home
Questions?
Appendix
2. What are you doing to help
create new value?
• Creating value
– flip side of cost cutting
• Three levels of IT projects
– keeping the lights on
– improving work flow
– delivering the mission (strategic)
• My story:
– Product manager
– What’s my product at Save?
3. How are you serving your
customer?
• Who is your customer?
Children living on a dollar a day?
• How do you know if you’re serving them?
Ask
• My story:
– running the support dept
– consulting
8. How creative are you in
creating balance?
• The people coming up are asking
about balance, are you?
• Flexibility, creativity, championing
• My Story:
– Take on the vacated dept. or project
lead
– A recovering workaholic
9. What are you doing to
create excitement?
• Where are the rabid Steve Jobs
technology evangelists?
• This is cool stuff; get charged up about it!
• My Story
– Learn a new technology every 3-6 months
– Lots of pilots, experiments
– Did I mention being a perpetual student?
…the homework never ends!
– Make presentations like this (no acronyms,
no hardware, no software!)