As enterprises and IT organizations cope with the impact of social, economic, and technological trends, they reassess their strategic priorities. On the surface, IT leaders will face familiar hurdles: finding and retaining top talent, protecting sensitive data, and creating friendly, robust remote work environments. However, the ongoing pandemic has accentuated these problems. So, following the status quo could be a high-risk strategy. This CIO article shares valuable lessons by André Mendes for leaders to formulate their strategy and go beyond it.
Status Quo Can Be a High-Risk Strategy
According to André Mendes the recipient of the MIT Award for IT Innovation, “Maintaining the status quo ensures constant decay in your ability to respond to your environment.”
Nurturing a Collaborative Environment
A recent episode of CIO Leadership Live featured Maryfran Johnson chatting with Mendes. Below are some excerpts of that discussion. It is challenging to assume a centralized role in a large and diverse organization and expect to be agile in making daily decisions. Therefore, you must develop goals that share a similar agenda. Achieve common goals by leveraging each department’s expertise and capabilities.
Go Beyond Maintaining the Status Quo
Technological evolution can be boiled down to analyzing the objective and establishing a catalyst that describes how the technology will facilitate meeting the goal. Therefore, it is valuable to recognize that agility and adaptability are the keys to thriving in a rapidly evolving world.
Hire People with Purpose
Before hiring people for senior positions, you need to understand their motivation, adaptability, flexibility, and intellectual curiosity.
They must lead by asking questions that prompt change within the organization and across the entire industry. Furthermore, if that change benefits the community in the long term, you are effectively serving the greater purpose of leadership. In contrast, blindly following the status quo can be a high-risk bet for any leader.
To read the original article, click on https://www.cio.com/article/306274/andre-mendes-status-quo-is-the-cios-riskiest-strategy.html
