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Leadership
and Information Technology
Public Comments
In my capacity as president of WBSI and
Executive Director of the Institute's International Leadership
Forum, let me welcome you to the Public forum organized to discuss
"The Disconnect Between Top Leadership and the
Growth of Information Technology"
We hope you will find the ILF Fellows' dialogue interesting and
informative, as well as the comments made by other members of the
public, and that you will be stimulated to enter your own views.
To our knowledge, the ILF represents the first
time that a think tank composed entirely of highly influential
leaders has been mobilized, the first time that such a
deliberative body on policy formation has been created as a
virtual organization, the first time its ongoing verbatim dialogue
has been made available to the public, and the first time that the
public has been able to contribute to a concurrent discussion
designed to further inform the ILF recommendations. So we hope you
will bear with us as we attempt the journey through this new
territory, and please give us your suggestions for improvement.
Comments
LIT
01:
Kip Winsett
Date: 7/25/2001
Time: 11:04:47 PM
Comments:
Hi,
I have enjoyed following this forum, and have found many
interesting ideas and lots of information. However, it doesn't
seem that there is anything concrete in terms of resolving the
disconnect. Clearly, there is consensus that IT currently offers
very little to leaders, and that what is available is not of much
use to them. Having spent many years in IT, I know that is a
significant problem.
John Craven in his comment 1:103) 05-JUL-2001 - "Leadership
in the military, leadership in government, leadership in human
communication, leadership in coping with complexity" has, I
think, touched on one of the most basic areas of complexity in
this issue. There are different areas of leadership, different
levels of leadership and different styles of leadership.
Possibly IT is not currently of much use to leaders because it is
not truly providing what THEY want. Who is deciding what leaders
want from IT? Would it perhaps be useful to identify in as much
detail as possible all of these "leadership niches" and
poll leaders in those categories to find out what they want? If
the response from leaders is insufficient perhaps it would be
possible to identify what unique types of benefits IT could
provide that would be common to most of the leadership niches. For
example, learning how to ask the kinds of questions that elicit
richness of response might be of use to all leaders. From a
technical point of view that is not a particularly difficult task.
I know that IT, from a purely technical point of view, can offer a
lot - but it seems such a waste of time to simply throw stuff at
people in the hopes that they might find it useful (which is what
is currently happening). Developing software is a time and money
intensive task which forces developers to focus on what they think
will bring enough profit to justify the expense. Pure guesswork.
Worse yet, software developers and marketers are the worst people
to deal with the "What is needed" question because they
don't have any idea of what leaders do or how they do it.
LIT
02:
Kip Winsett
Date: 8/24/2001
Time: 11:04:31 PM
Comments:
In re: comments 1:131 – 133
Robert Wright (author of Three Scientists and Their Gods and The
Moral Animal) has written an excellent book titled “Non-Zero:
The Logic of Human Destiny.” It examines the natural evolution
of humankind via the language of game theory.
One point which he makes with resounding impact is that
“business” is the result of a successful genetic strategy
which is centered in a non-zero sum (win-win or lose-lose)
context. A good review of the book is available on-line at http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Econ_Articles/Reviews/nonzero.html.
The author also maintains a site at http://www.nonzero.org/
He also offers some genetic explanation for the necessity of the
kinds of behaviors/situations which are antithetical to the
non-zero sum strategy. If his premise is correct, one is left to
reconsider in a different light just how we should control
or remodel the democratic/marketplace.
LIT
03:
Kip Winsett
Date: 9/02/2001
Time: 9:15:24 PM
Comments:
I see a couple of areas which seem to have been minimized in this
forum
1. People vote when they think the subject of the election
"matters". I suspect that to vast numbers of the
electorate the issues presented in the campaigns are irrelevant.
The political parties control the subject matter and unless they
are willing to compete via issues that are fundamentally important
to most people we aren't likely to see much change here. I have
observed over the years in discussing various campaign issues with
people that people almost exclusively based on their own
self-interest. I once noted that to a friend and his response
essentially was "well, of course". There doesn't
seem to be any desire to actually make decisions based on what
will be good for the country as a whole. Perhaps that is
reasonable given the size of the country and the complexity of
governing so many diverse regions. If you travel through any city
and try to discover the lives of the people, you will find that
most of them are very busy with the details of day to day
existence. Jobs, household chores, kids, etc.
2. people vote when
they think their vote "matters". We have all seen any
number of perversions of the system by politicians. We are all
dealing with the results of political decisions that have resulted
in gridlock, pollution, increases taxes, reduced services and
more. We all know the candidates lie. (Bush senior "Read my
lips. No new taxes"). Does it matter if I vote if the
candidate for whom I vote breaks his promise about the very issue
which gained him my vote?
Dick notes in his comment of 1:157 (Ray, you and I are healthy,
white males, over six feet tall, with nice three digit IQ's. We
are not marginal, but at the center. Things come our way quite
apart from any efforts we have made.) There is some fairly typical
profile of those who vote - not so constrained as this perhaps,
but nevertheless quite limited. These people are deciding
the future of our country and by and large they are doing it based
upon their own self interest - whether that be financial or
cultural. The politicians and the media cater to this group. Dick
has identified any number of groups who do not participate, and
their are countless other groups who participate very marginally
or from a very uninformed position (college students?).
Is it possible for IT to solve any of these basic problems?
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