I was sad to say goodbye recently to UC CIO Greg Jackson, who’s moved on to a wonderful position at Educause. Greg was the whole package as an IT leader: deeply experienced, a superb communicator, analytical yet empathetic, funny as all get out, and knew how to walk the talk. He also answered emails really quickly, and was the best writer I have seen anywhere in educational administration. His message of apology and explanation following an extended University email outage several years ago is the Gettysburg Address of owning IT problems; I refer to it often when I need reminders about using moments of accountability as teaching opportunities.
He also had a wonderfully rich web page of his own, which included lists of restaurants he’d tried, his extensive coffee mug collection, and best of all, a set of hard-won leadership principles he had learned.
The great thing about Greg’s principles was that pretty much everyone who worked for him, and there were hundreds, knew lots of these principles. This only became clear to me at his good bye party, when employees successfully answered trivia questions about the principles, which included items like “Never surprise up,” “Red wine goes with everything,” and “If you can’t explain it to Josh [his young son when the priniciple was written], you don’t understand it.”
As Yogi Berra once said, “You can observe a lot just by watching.” I observed a lot just by watching Greg do his work with style, skill, and class. Thanks, Greg, for all I learned from you. Best wishes at Educause, and all you do thereafter.
Maybe it’s a fitting tribute, and maybe it isn’t, but I’ve compiled a beginning list of my own equally hard-won principles in Greg’s honor. I’ll be sure to add to them as time goes on, as he did. Perhaps other IT leaders reading them would like to share some of their own.
–It’s not about what technology does. It’s about what it means.
–Educate out and up, always.
–Context is king, not content. Content without context means little.
–Silos are for corn and missiles, not educators. Grownups’ turf wars *always* hurt students.
–Learn to lean into discomfort. It’s the only way to see the opportunities buried inside problems.
–There is a fine line between being spontaneous and being disorganized. I can tell which is which.
–Avoid techspeak and decode acronyms or people will hate you. And never, ever turns nouns into verbs; no one can “obsolete” or “nutshell” anything.
–When smart people who care about what they do keeping running into the same problems over and over again, it’s not the people. It’s the structure.
–Changing structures is much easier than changing people.
–If you build it, they will *not* come.
–Autonomy does not mean doing whatever you please. Pilots have lots of autonomy, but they still have to file a flight plan because sharing airspace affects a lot of other pilots.
–Sharing a decent pizza can solve many workplace problems.
–Networked technology compels interdependence, whether or not you like it or know it.
–The best lesson from years of sandlot baseball: “Play your position.”
–Never miss a good chance to shut up.
–Input does not equal authority.
–Most important technology problems don’t have anything to do with technology.
Posted on September 25th, 2009 by Curt Lieneck
Filed under: General Interest, Managing IT, Quotable Quotes | No Comments »