The Uncomfortable CEO: Making Information Technology Overcome Business Uncertainty

Information technology (IT) is often organized as a cost center and excluded from active decision making relative to achieving the company's strategic goals. Uncomfortable CEOs are dissatisfied with this status quo. They have the vision to understand that viewing IT as a mere commodity service provider falls far short of realizing its full potential. Importantly, they translate vision into action and prepare to respond to key challenges. These include:

• More than 50 percent of all capital expenses incurred by businesses worldwide go to IT. However, most business leaders remain skeptical as to whether their IT investments bring business relevance to their corporations.
• IT organizations need to demonstrate the core capabilities of deep business understanding and resilient leadership.
• Corporations must develop and select IT leaders who can deliver positive business results in a rapidly changing, highly volatile, and unpredictable business environment.

Therein lies an opportunity! Uncomfortable CEOs have the capacity to change before the case for the change becomes obvious. They have learned how to strategically leverage IT by linking it to planning, operations, finance, and innovation development. IT is an essential component to achieving an organization's vision. IT is capable of providing invaluable insights that can have the greatest impact on both productivity and profitability for the entire organization.

The Uncomfortable CEO™ is a handbook for CEOs and other senior executives that lays out the argument for leveraging IT's key role in the business world of the twenty-first century and provides guidance for doing so successfully. The author explores thought-provoking ideas and challenges your executive thinking to reveal the business relevance of IT. Thirty leadership actions provide a clear step-by-step guide for CEOs to lead their IT organizations toward the highest-leveraged function.