Hi I’m Seth Godin, I’m an author and a blogger and an entrepreneur.
Almost all the companies in the Fortune 1000 got there by being industrialists.
They figure out how to do something and then they do it more, they do it louder, they do it more often.
Profit turns to profit. You scale.
And industrialists got ever better over the last 80 years at becoming more productive. It's squeezing out efficiencies.
And if that's all your job is, it's likely that you're going to fail.
Because getting a little more efficient at yesterday's job
doesn't turn tomorrow into a better day for your company.
So the challenge is to develop a point of view,
and this is what's missing in many executive suites.
Somebody who stands up and says, I think this is the way to go. It is a mistake to go in to work and say, “What do you want from me today?”
What the CEO and, more important, what the shareholders want from the companies that are going to grow tomorrow
are people who can stand up and say, “I have a point of view.”
One thing that people get stuck on is they say, I can't possibly be a thought leader. I don't have an original idea in my head. How could I ever do something for the first time?
No-one's asking you to do that. At the scale that you are working, no-one needs originality from you. We need things that are important. We need things that matter,
but you don't have to be first.
You don't have to invent cloud computing.
You don't have to invent the idea of tracking what your customers are interested in. Those inventions are old, but you can figure out how to take those things that are in the world and weave them together into something that works for you, in your experience, in your organization,
and that weaving, that idea of raveling together the way things are and then putting them back together
is what we see from the best CIOs.
Part of having a point of view is being able to come to the boss and your coworkers and most important your employees
and paint a picture for them. It better be true. It better have data to support it, but data is insufficient. We need more than data from you.
It doesn't take years of training to have a point of view. It takes practice.
So the mistake we have is saying, oh, one day when I'm more senior, one day when my kids are older, one day when everything is safe then I'll have a point of view?
No. You can have a point of view right now. Two minutes from now.
You have to pick A or B. You're not allowed to say, what are you interested in? Once you gain that habit you will get better and better and better
at being able to not just have a point of view but telling a story that supports it.
So what we do for a living is we don't follow maps, we make maps.
And once you understand that, once you can see the difference between the companies that have succeeded and tripled their stock price and changed the world and
your company it's probably because they're in the map-making business and you're busy trying to find how to get from here to there, right?
The answer is not here's the map. The question is where's the compass?
Because a compass doesn't change when the map changes. If the world changes you still have your compass
and that true north, that place you were trying to go, the value you are working to create for your customers,
the idea that you can matter in a certain way
needs to be pure and true and honest and clear.
And, as the CIO, you, better than almost anyone in the organization, can stand up and have a point of view about what that compass looks like.