Hubris
A large Midwestern company was having trouble with an ERP implementation and brought in Eileen Strider, a former CIO who is now president of consulting firm Strider & Cline Inc. in Kansas City, Mo., to assess the situation. It didn't take her long to realize that the CIO overseeing the project was a big part of the problem.
"I kept hearing about the CIO -- that he does whatever he wants," she says.
But initially, this CIO had put up a good front. He had assembled a steering committee to gather input from others throughout the organization, Strider says. Those peers were eager to be heard, and at first they thought that was the plan. However, as the project moved forward, they realized that the CIO was disregarding all ideas except his own.
"He was just very confident in his own decision-making, and it was too much trouble to work through it with people who had opinions that were different than his," Strider says. "He was sure he was right."
His actions had contributed to the problems surrounding the implementation, Strider says, and they resulted in a breakdown of trust between him and his peers.
When Strider presented her findings to the CIO and other executives, he was surprised. But apparently he was too proud to change. He announced his retirement the next day.
Inertia
Sometimes making the wrong decision doesn't get you fired; it's the inability to make any decision at all. So says John Stevenson, a former CIO who is now president of JG Stevenson Associates LLC in Plano, Texas.
He tells the story of two IT executives at different consumer products companies. One company had a shoestring IT budget; the other had plenty of cash. As a result, one exec didn't have to make any big decisions because his was a keep-the-lights-on assignment. The other didn't have many big decisions because his budget could support lots of different directions and projects.
But then the two companies merged and the IT leaders were both frozen in their past perspectives; neither could make decisions about what the merged IT operations should look like. "They couldn't come to grips with the decisions that had to be made," Stevenson says.
Frustration mounted among their colleagues, who were forced to make their own decisions about the company's future without the support of a coherent IT infrastructure.
Leaders at the merged company initially intended to retain the pair as executives in the new company, but ultimately, they dismissed both because of their indecisiveness and hired Stevenson as CIO of the merged organization.