A third essential book: Building a Second Brain
For a long time, when I’ve had the chance to recommend books to people starting on their leadership journey, I’ve recommended one about how to manage ourselves and how to manage our work.
Category: Leadership
Business as Unusual: Governance and Leadership
As CIO’s, particularly in higher education, we are blessed to have a vibrant community with great interaction. We meet at conferences, we get to be familiar with a lot of wonderful colleagues, and we form long-term relationships across our universities. We have wonderful organizations such as Educause and Internet2 to be part of. And, I think, we live a little bit in our own echo chamber.
Clickbait Alarmism
I have seen a number of alarmist headlines about various security issues that mostly appear resolved. In one that I saw today, published last week, the article detailed a vulnerability and waited to the end to say that the problem had been fixed! That’s irresponsible in my view. By all means publish details and the […]
Deal with Ambiguity but listen for nuance
People love bright, clear lines. And who can blame them? But that is a tactical world view. Strategy is different and it means living in a less defined world. But twice recently, I’ve had to deal with a slightly different issue – the idea that we have to listen for nuance as an alarm. People rarely are direct and […]
World War Three
So, fully meaning to be alarmist, the one thing that has been truest for me in IT this year is that the third world war is already being fought on the Internet. The bad guys are multiplying, becoming more professional and more sophisticated and more dangerous every day. Some are state-sponsored. Some are terrorists or […]
Choosing kindness
One of my leadership maxims is “we’re dealing with human beings.” I repeat it regularly to my leadership team because I want us to think in terms of the people we work with and not just in terms of goals and strategies and what must be done today. It is important for all of us […]
Connecting to the campus
One of the really wonderful privileges I have in my current role is that I get to participate in many of the ceremonial duties of campus leadership. This includes things like graduations, and today’s event, convocation. It is kind of fun to put on regalia from time to time and it is particularly good to […]
BYON
(Originally posted June 24, 2012 on my defunct Tulane blog “Texan at Tulane”) So I have been talking with colleagues about BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) – the buzzword trend of customers who have their own mobile device or such coming to campus. Some of them want to control the customer through policy or dictate. […]