Turning great ideas into great results... and finding the CIO’s “soft” center: two of the latest must-reads for IT leaders.

The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the execution challenge

Vijay Govindarajan & Chris Trimble

The easiest aspect of innovation, believe the authors, is finding the ideas; the really tough part lies in the execution of the ideas that get the go-ahead. Yet, they argue, far too many organizations place far too much emphasis on the former and not nearly enough on the latter. And when they do move into execution mode, they fail to understand the most effective means of managing the innovation process.

This book aims to redress the balance. Written by two innovation heavyweights (Govindarajan is a professor of international business at the Tuck School of Business as well as GE’s first ever “professor-in-residence” and chief innovation consultant; Trimble is an adjunct professor at Tuck), it focuses entirely on the execution challenge. And the basic premise is simple: Successful organizations are designed for efficiency and not innovation.

To avoid destructive conflict with the main business functions, most innovation initiatives therefore have to be treated very differently. In particular, they should be run as a “disciplined experiment.” That means, most importantly, not measuring a project’s success in regular P&L terms, but rather as a continuous learning process. The more rigorous this process, and the faster the learning, the more successful the innovation is likely to be.

Govindarajan and Trimble distill vast amounts of complex information on the subject — they claim to have “the most extensive library of innovation case studies in the world” — into some beautifully simple theories. The challenge comes, as they say, in executing them.

The CIO Edge: 7 leadership skills you need to drive results

Graham Waller, George Hallenbeck & Karen Rubenstrunk

What makes a superior CIO? And why are so few CIOs held in high regard by their fellow-CXOs?

Those are the questions that have obsessed the authors of The CIO Edge for years. As senior figures in executive recruitment firm Korn/Ferry and at analyst group Gartner, they certainly have enough collective experience — not to mention CIO performance histories — to guide them towards some answers. And to confirm their hypotheses they also interviewed a wide range of high achievers, including CIOs at Ford, Fedex, Axa, P&G and more.

What they found was that in order to deliver great results, CIOs need to be expert managers of IT processes, but they also have to be consummate diplomats. In most instances that means developing the kind of “soft skills” that allow them to lead, communicate and collaborate effectively and so build working relationship with everyone involved in projects, programs and business initiatives, from sponsors and vendors to colleagues organization-wide.

In each case that the authors track, the CIOs who had a refined set of soft skills were the real stars: “Focusing on leadership and people skills — things many CIOs minimize in their quest to keep up with [the] day-to -day of managing IT — is the biggest determinate of success or failure.”

That won’t be news to most CIOs. What will be, though, is a clear outline of those winning soft skills and guidance on how to cultivate them. As P&G’s CIO, Filippo Passerini, says: “If your mission is to make a real difference as CIO… IT becomes more of a people business than a technology one.”