Corporation on a Tightrope: Balancing Leadership, Governance, and Technology in an Age of Complexity

By John G. Sifonis and Beverly Goldberg

Book Overview

Business is no longer business as usual. The global market is in constant flux, as some nations come together, other fall apart, trading blocs emerge, and formerly closed doors reopen. At home, leadership roles and organizational structure have seen a sea change, with the vertically integrated, tightly knit organization seemingly headed for oblivion. And the changes keep happening faster and faster. For a firm to succeed in this highly complex environment, executives need a better understanding of the deep philosophic and extensive physical adaptations needed to reshape and prepare their company for an uncertain future. To provide this deeper understanding, John G. Sifonis, a business consultant, and Beverly Goldberg, a think tank executive, who together have decades of hands-on experience, visited dozens of companies, conducted numerous interviews, and then traveled to the Sante Fe Institute, to discuss their conclusions about practical applications of complexity theory to business. The result of their study is Corporation on a Tightrope, a brilliant blend of complexity theory and hard-earned business sense, that will help executives lead their organizations into the highly uncertain future.
Sifonis and Goldberg show that the flexible organization of the future will be a complex adaptive system that responds to the effects of market-driven changes on its three critical components--governance, technology, and leadership. It will be an organization capable of self-renewal, constantly reshaping itself to seize opportunities as they emerge and quickly shrink when the market changes yet again. To help executives create this flexible firm, the authors provide seven practical tools, principles that when carefully put in place create a solid foundation for the future--an organization must set unwavering ethical standards; establish a social contract; maintain a lean organization based on core competencies; develop leadership skills at every level; be open to learning, encourage experimentation, and be innovative; avoid restructuring when it should be regoverning; and ensure connectivity. The authors illustrate each of these principles with fascinating examples taken from actual corporations, such as the ethical dilemma faced by Levi's, whose move overseas brought up the problem of lost American jobs and foreign child labor; the innovative arrangement between insurance company Allmerica Financial and DST Systems, a developer of automated business solutions; and the leadership of executives such as Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines, who projects enthusiasm and friendliness to the media, and has his workforce reflect the same image. Readers will find other instructive anecdotes on companies such as Boeing, Texas Instruments, Shell, and Intel.
Spiced with pithy quotations from prominent executives and business experts such as Peter Drucker, Edward Filene, Charles Handy, and Sam Walton, plus top people at Johnson & Johnson, Unilever, and other major corporations, this is a sweeping, visionary book that will transform the way business leaders take their companies into the future.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195093259
• ISBN13: 9780195093254
• Release Date: May 1996
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.5" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

The Average tenture for a CIO is three to five years. Why?

1. The technology leader of tomorrow must be a businessperson first, with all the leadership and people skills of any other senior executive. 2. In 1991, a study by Deloitte & Touche reported the average tenure of a CIO was three years and that almost one-third of all corporate CIO unwilling depart from their posts. In 1995, Computer Science Corp reported tenure of five years. 3. A ComputerWorld survey of Fortune 1,000 CEO found that 64% doubted the value of their IT investment. Among the reasons for this negative perception was failure to understand governance, strategic misalignment, lack of proper communication, unrealistic expectations, the failure to bring new technologies into the organization in a timely fashion, lack of innovative uses of technology, and a misunderstanding of how costs and how value should be accessed. 4. Strategic Alignment Modeling starts from the premise that every change made in the business strategy affects the business structure, the IT strategy, and the IT infrastructure. 5. Many CIOs, fail to make clear the gains from using technology to automate a process. 6. CIOs face the difficulty of delivering applications on time and within budget. 7. Businesses look to technology leaders to be the prime movers in the use of technology, which is why technology leaders need to avoid personal attachment to a specific system. These leaders are determined to protect what they are familiar with and to maintain the control that a large, single system provides - that they ignore all recommendations for change. 8. Among the most frequently heard complaints about CIOs is that they promise improvements from new technologies that simply do not materialize. 9. Senior management approves cost of new technology based on gains in productivity over a five-year period and that business volume by providing customers with efficient, high quality service. 10. Divisional Information Officer establishes a structure where the CIO works closely with senior management. This is done so the units could each find the best business solution for their IT needs- developing their own systems, or contracting with either outsourcers or the corporate IS group producing coherency of vision, maximizing buying power, using best-practices, and not sacrificing long-term viability by adopting short term strategies. 11. InformationWeek suggest that IT personnel are too important to be bottled up in any single part of the company. It should be divided into four primary functions: data services, building applications, strategic planning, and enforcement of the rules through the executives of the organization. 12. The CIO may have the power to take away any business unit's IT franchise if they do not adhere to the principles established by the governing coordinating body. 13. CIO reveal in a 251 market survey that 96 percent can predict information expeditures, occupancy costs, head count capacity and price/performance for the next three years