As technology advances and supplants the “old ways” of doing things, some people are threatened that they are being put “out to pasture” and others find opportunity in the emerging technology—they find in it something new to learn and grow with, perhaps an opportunity to shine and become the resident subject matter expert at work or at home.

As we get older, it’s natural that some people may not be as flexible in “starting over,” learning something new, or changing the way “we’ve always done things.” It’s reminiscent of the sort of unflattering old saying that “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks”—a saying by the way that I don’t really believe (you should see my Dad on email, Internet, and so on—he’s great!). But at the same time, people, as do all things, have a life cycle, and our strengths and weaknesses go through peaks and valleys at various points on the cycle. For example, “with age comes wisdom.” Years ago, getting the chairman or CEO to use email was a corporate challenge. Now, young people are migrating to Social Media for communications, and email is the technology dinosaur. It’s a constant technology transformation.

In November 2009, the Wall Street Journal reviewed a new book by Sci-Fi author Cory Doctorow, called “Makers”. “This novel is set in a not-too distant future when the creative destruction of technological change has created an economy so efficient, with profit margins so thin, that traditional companies can hardly stay in business.” In this book, the inventor “uses three-dimensional printers to produce copies of machines and most anything else at close to no cost.” Now “good ideas are copied so quickly that they become commodities. Every industry that required a factory yesterday only needs a garage today.” Where this leaves us is in a time with “competition and invention getting easier and easier—it’s producing a kind of superabundance.” And the result is widespread unemployment and stress.

As we are presumably heading out of a major recession now with unemployment topping 10% (and some would say the real figures, including the underemployed and those that have stopped looking for work, at closer to 20%), we must but wonder whether the recession/unemployment is due to the financial crisis alone or is there some element that is due to our new high-tech economy, where everything in the manufacturing sector has either been tech-enabled or outsourced to Asia. And where we are left in a primary “services economy—pushing papers and flipping burgers? Is there a time coming when we become so technologically advanced, like in the Makers, that there is a very real threat of leaving hundreds of millions of people behind, while the few technology mavens “have it all”?

Interestingly enough, with the advancement of technology, the income disparity between rich and poor has grown where the top 1% of Americans own more than a third of the wealth, compared with a fifth of the wealth in the 1970s (according to Robert Reich).

I think it is critical that smarts and performance be rewarded (i.e. performance-based), but that we cannot let things get out of control and unjust. Billions cannot starve while the ultra-rich hop from rural mansion to Park Avenue condo and from private plane to recreational yacht. Technology must be used to level the playing field and not abuse it. Some like Bernie Madoff used systems developers and technology to create and issue phony financial statements to Ponzi-scheme clients showing trades that never occurred. Instead, we need to use technology to educate, communicate, share, and advance the opportunities for all and overcome the technology divide through amazing advancements here and yet to come. To do this, we must focus on continuous innovation and application of technology to the challenges we face—whether alternative energy, health care, world-hunger, global warming, and so much more. There is no shortage of issues for us to apply our minds and technology to—there is plenty for everyone to contribute to.

Which does your leadership do? Do they play it safe--staying the same familiar course, avoiding potential change and upset or do they provoke to action, encourage continuous improvement, are they genuinely open to new ideas, and do they embrace the possibilities (along with the risks) of doing things better, faster, and cheaper?

Surely, some leaders are masters of envisioning a brighter future and provoking the change to make it happen. Leaders from Apple, Google, Amazon, and other special leaders come to mind. But many others remain complacent to deliver short-term results, not "rock the boat," and keep on fighting the day-to-day fires rather than curing the firefighting illness and moving the organization to innovation, ideation, and transformation through strategic formulation and execution.

Provoking to action is risky for leaders as the old saying goes, "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down," and often leaders that make even the best-intentioned mistakes in trying to do the "right thing" get sorely punished. Only enlightened organizations encourage innovation and experimentation and recognize that failure is part of the process to get to success.

While responsible leaders, almost by definition, provide a stable, reliable, secure, and robust operating environment, we must balance this with the need to grow and change productively over time. We need more organizations and leaders to stand up and provoke action--to drive new ways of thinking and doing things--to break the complacency mindset and remove the training wheels to allow a freer, faster, and more agile movement of organizational progress. To provoke action, we need to make our people feel safe to look out for long-term organizational success strategies rather than just short-term bottom line numbers.

Harvard Business Review (December 2009) provides some useful tips for provoking action called "Five Discovery Skills Separate True Innovators from the Rest of Us."

• Associating--Develop a broad knowledgebase and regularly give yourself the time and space to freely associate--allow your brain to connect the dots in new ways and see past old stovepipes. “Fresh inputs trigger new associations; for some these lead to new ideas.”
• Questioning--”Innovators constantly ask questions that challenge common wisdom.” We need to “question the unquestionable” as Ratan Tata put it. We must challenge long-held assumptions and “Ask why? Why not? And What if?” Don’t be afraid to play devil’s advocate. Let your imagination flow and “imagine a completely different alternative.” Remove barriers to creative thinking and banish fear of people laughing at you, talking behind your back, dismissing you, or even conducting acts of reprisal.
• Observing--Careful observation of people and how they behave provides critical insights into what is working and what isn’t. There is a cool field of study in the social sciences called ethnomethodology that studies just such everyday human behavior and provides a looking glass through which we can become aware of and understand the ways things are and open us up to the way things could be better.
• Experimenting—We’ve got to try new things and approaches to learn from them and see if they work and how to refine them. Productive changes don’t just happen all of a sudden like magic; they are cultivated, tested, refined, and over time evolve into new best practices for us and our organizations. Experimentation involves “intellectual exploration, physical tinkering[and] engaging in new surroundings.”
• Networking—It’s all about people: they inspire us, provoke us, complement us, and are a sounding board for us. We get the best advances and decisions when we vet ideas with a diverse group of people. Having a diverse group of people provides different perspectives and insights that cannot be gleaned any other way. There is “power in numbers”--and I am not referring to the power to defeat our enemies, but the power to think critically and synergistically. The group can build something greater than any individual alone ever could.

Of course, we cannot drive change like a speeding, runaway train until it crashes and burns. Rather, change and innovation must be nurtured. We must provoke to action our organizations and our people to modernize and transform through critical thinking, questioning the status quo, regular observation and insight, the freedom to experiment and constructively fail, and by building a diverse and synergistic network of people that can be greater than the sum of their parts.

When we are confronted with difficult situations, people tend to two different responses: fight or flight.

Generally, people will stand and fight when they are either cornered and have no other option, when they will suffer undue harm if they just try and “let it go”, or when the issue is something that they really believe strongly in (like a principle or value such as equity, justice, righteousness, etc. that they feel is being violated).

In contrast, people typically will flee when they feel that they can get out of a bad situation mostly unscathed and their principles will not be violated (such that they can live with their personal and professional dignity intact). Often, people consider fleeing or a change of venue preferable to “getting into it” when it’s possible to avoid the problems that more direct confrontation can bring.

There is also a third option not typically addressed and that is just “taking it,” and letting it pass. In the martial arts, this is akin to taking someone’s best shot and just absorbing it—and you’re still standing. You go with the flow and let it go. This is sometimes feasible as a less dramatic response and one that produces perhaps less severe consequences (i.e. you avoid a fight and you still yield no ground).

Harvard Business Review (December 2009) in an article called “How to Pick a Good Fight” provides some guidelines on when as a professional you should consider standing up and fighting, as follows:

1. “Make it Material”—Fight for something you really believe in, something that can create real value, noticeable and sustainable improvement.
2. “Focus on the Future”—Don’t dwell on the past or on things that cannot be changed. Spend most of your time “looking at the road ahead, not in the rearview mirror.”[This is actually the opposite of what 85% of leaders do, which is trying to figure out what went wrong and who to blame.”
3. “Pursue a Noble Purpose”—Make the fight about improving people’s lives or changing the world for the better.” I’d put it this way: stay away from selfish or egotistical fights, turf battles, empire building, and general mud slinging.

“The biggest predictor of poor company performance is complacency.” So leaders need to focus “the good fight” on what’s possible, what’s compelling, and what’s high impact. Great leaders shake things up when the fight is right and create an environment of continuous improvement. Leaders create the vision, inspire the troops, and together move the organization forward to greater and greater heights.

As for fleeing or “turning the other cheek” those venues are best left for issues of lesser consequence, for keeping the peace, or for times when you are simply better off taking up the good fight another day.

The pendulum has definitely swung—our personal and home technology is now often better than what we are using in the office.

It wasn’t always that way. Early on, technology was mysterious to those not professionally engaged as system engineers or IT professionals. Technology was expensive and made sense for business purposes, but not for home use. IT was a professional enabler to get the job done, but consumer applications were scarce and not intuitive for anything but the office.

The world has turned upside down. Now as consumers, we are using the latest and greatest computers, smart phones, gaming devices, and software applications, including everything social media and e-Commerce, while in the office, we are running old operating systems, have nerdy phones, locked down computers, applications that aren’t web-enabled, and social media that is often blocked.

The Wall Street Journal (16 November 2009) summed up the situation this way:

“At the office, you’ve got a sluggish computer running aging software, and the email system routinely badgers you to delete message after you blow through the storage limits set by your IT department. Searching your company’s internal website feels like being transported back to the pre-Google era of irrelevant results…This is the double life many people lead: yesterday’s technology for work, today’s technology for everything else…The past decade has brought awesome innovations to the marketplace--Internet search, the iPhone, Twitter, and so on, but consumers, not companies, embrace them first and with the most gusto.”

What gives and why are we somehow loosing our technical edge in the workplace?

Rapid Pace of Change—We have been on technological tear for the last 20 years now; virtually nothing is the same—from the Internet to cloud computing, from cell phones and pagers to smart phones and iPhones, from email to social media, and so much more. From a consumer perspective, we are enamored with the latest gadgets and capabilities to make our life easier and more enjoyable though technology. But at work, executives are tiring from the pace of technological change and the large IT budgets that are needed to keep up with the Jones. This is especially the case, as financial markets have seized in the last few years, credit has tightened, revenue and profitability has been under extreme pressure, and many companies have laid off employees and others have even gone kaput.

Magnificent Technology Failures—Along with the rapid pace of change, has come huge IT project failure rates. The Standish group reported this year that 82% of IT projects are failing or seriously challenged. Why in the world would corporate executives want to invest more money, when their past and present IT investments have been flushed down the toilet? Executives have lost faith in IT’s ability to upgrade their legacy systems and fulfill the promises behind the slew of IT investments already made. Related to this is the question of true cost-benefit and total cost of ownership of all the new technologies and their associated investments—if we haven’t been able to achieve or show the return on investment on all the prior investments, why should we continue investing and investing? Is the payoff really there? Perhaps, we are better off putting the dollars into meeting core mission requirements and not overhead, like IT?

Security Risks Abound—With all the technology has come a whole new organizational risk set in terms of IT security. Organizations are hostage to cyber criminals, terrorists, and hostile nation states who can with a few keyboard strokes or mouse clicks disable the company transaction capability, wipe out its memory, steal its information, or otherwise neutralize it from functioning. And the more technology we add, the more the risk level seems to increase. For example, the thinking goes that we were safer when we ran everything in a locked down, tightly controlled, mainframe environment. The more we push the envelope on this and have moved to client server, the web, and now to even more transparency, information sharing, and collaboration—through social media, cloud computing, and World 2.0—the thinking is that we are potentially more open to local and global threats than ever before. Further, with the nation under virtually constant cyberattack and our capabilities to slow or stop these attacks seemingly not existent at this time, executives are reluctant to open up the technology vulnerability spigot any further.

While there are many other reasons slowing or impeding our technology adoption at work, we cannot stop our march of IT advancement and progress.

We are in a global competitive marketplace and the world waits for no one. The problems resulting from the speed and cost of change, the high IT project failure-rate, and the cybersecurity danger/challenges cannot be allowed to inhibit us from progress. We must address these issues head on: We have got to achieve efficiencies from technological advancement and plow the cost-savings into next generation technologies. We have got to drastically improve our IT project success rate though mature implementations of enterprise architecture, IT governance, project management, customer relationship management, and performance measurement (Reference: The CIO Support Services Framework). And we must invest heavily in IT security—with money, people, policy, training, new technology safeguards, and more.

Innovation, technological prowess, and information superiority is what gives us our edge—it is tip of our spear. So yes, we must carefully plan/architect, wisely invest, execute well, and secure our IT. But no, we cannot dismiss the evolving technologies outright nor jump in without proper controls. We must move rationally, but determined into the future.

Fortune Magazine (23 November 2009) named Steve Jobs of Apple, the CEO of the decade.

Steve Jobs’ unveiled his “digital lifestyle” strategy in 2000 when Apple was worth about $5 billion. Now almost a decade later, Apple is worth about $170 billion—slightly more than Google. Apple has revolutionized the markets for music, movies, mobile telephones, as well as computing.

Steve Jobs embodies User-centric leadership in every way:

Customer is #1—Apple’s products satisfy customers. “He may not pay attention to customer research, but he works slavishly to make products customers will buy.” There is intuitiveness to Steve Jobs’ understanding of people and technology. He knows what customers want even if they don’t or can’t articulate it and he designs the technology around the customer. Think iPhone, iPod, and Mac—they are some of the easiest and most customer friendly technologies out there; hence 100,000 applications for the iPhone, 73% of the MP3 player market, and some of the best PCs on the market today.

Innovation is key—Apple is consistently ahead of the curve. Their products are leaders, not follower-copycats. Despite losing the PC wars to Microsoft Windows, the Mac operating system, functionality, and design has been the one setting the standard for ease of use, speed, and security. The iTunes/iPod completely upended the music and movie industry, and the iPhone is the envy of just about every professional and consumer out there who doesn’t yet own one.

Holistic Solutions Delivery—Steve Jobs delivers a comprehensive solution’s architecture for the customer, and it shows with his merging of hardware, software, and service solutions. For example, “over the course of 2001…Apple launched iTunes music software (in January), the Mac OS X operating system (March), the first Apple retail stores (May), and the first iPod (November).” In 2002, Jobs told Time, “We’re the only company that owns the whole widget—the hardware, the software, and the operating system. We take full responsibility for the customer experience.”

Design Genius—The design of Apple’s products are sheer genius. They are sleek, elegant, compact, mobile, yet user-friendly—they are timeless, and pieces such as the G4 Cube have actually been showcased in The Museum of Modern Art and The Digital Design Museum. Even the Apple store in Manhattan with its winding glass staircases and cube entrance is a tourist destination in NYC.

Big Picture, Little Picture—Jobs is a master of balancing the strategic and tactical aspects of product execution. Jobs set the vision, but is also involved in the execution. “He’s involved in details you wouldn’t think a CEO would be involved in.” Apple is his passion and his desire for virtual perfection comes across the spectrum of both product and service from the company.

“Mastery of the Message—he rehearses over and over every line he and others utter in public about Apple.” And it’s not only the contents of the message, but also the timing. Jobs knows how to keep a product launch secret until just the right moment. MacWorld, for example, has been used to strategically communicate the launch of new products, and this has kept both Apple fans and competitors closely tuned to these events.

Steve Jobs is a true model of leadership excellence due in no small measure to his relentless pursuit comprehensive product solutions based on innovation, design excellence, and customer service excellence.

Great Jobs!

NextGov reported on 9 Nov 2009, that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report that “forecasts $3 billion in cost overruns on 16 major projects.”

What’s so of baffling is that these overruns occurred despite the agency’s use of earned value management.

According to Dave Powner, director of IT management issues at GAO, “Every one of the agencies had major problems in determining earned value management…as a result the agencies were unable to accurately identify the progress contractors had made on IT projects.”

These finding are expected to drive the 2009 Information Technology Oversight and Waste Prevention Act to increase oversight of IT investments.

This bill calls for “a Web site to publish information on the status of federal IT investments, similar to the Federal IT Dashboard,” but with more accurate data and with explanations on why projects are over budget.

Certainly, the use of measurements and dashboards to display and track these are helpful in understanding how we are doing in managing our IT investments—so they are on schedule, within budget, and to customer specification.

Clearly, we can only begin to better manage that which we measure and track. Our IT investments and their execution are no longer a black box or so it’s supposed to work.

However, to make these metrics and dashboard effective to improve IT execution, there are a number of critical success factors:

1. Transparency—This is a concept that is in common use these days, and we need to continue to put it in action. All IT investments need to be measured, not just the “major” ones, and their success and failures need to be visible. The purpose must not to scrutinize or shame project managers, but to be able to genuinely guide projects to successful conclusions. This is what the control phase of capital planning and investment control is all about. We need to course correct projects early and often, if necessary, before they are billions of dollars out of control.
2. Honesty in Reporting—Projects need to be reported accurately—no gaming the system. If the facts are sugarcoated or whitewashed, then no dashboard in the world is going to catch the problems that are misreported to begin with. Unfortunately with project management, the elements of scope, schedule, and cost can be manipulated to make it seem as if a project is okay, when it isn’t. One example is de-scoping the project to enable a delivery on schedule and on cost, even though what’s being delivered is not what was asked for or agreed upon.
3. Skills Enhancement—With better measurement of IT investments, we need to provide more training to our project managers. We can’t just expect perfection day 1. We need to work with people and grow them to be better project managers. We can do this with training, mentoring, coaching, and so on. Remember, it’s generally the people that make the IT project a success or failure, not the technology—so let’s invest in our people to make them better project managers.
4. Accountability—We shouldn’t be looking to exact a pound of flesh for genuine human foibles—mistakes do happen. But at the same time, people must be held accountable for fraud, waste, and abuse. Sometimes, people get complacent and they need a reminder that there are real implications to an IT project’s success or failure—mission and people are depending on you to do your job, so you had better do it responsibly and to the best of your ability.
5. Continuous Improvement—Ever since business school, I’ve always loved the Japanese management practice of Kaizen—continuous improvement. This concept is right on the mark with our IT investment and project execution. We are not going to magically put up a dashboard and whoola—better IT projects. It’s going to be a process, a transformation over time. We need to incrementally improve our IT project success rate through learning measurement, and best practices implementation. Of course, time is money, and we need to move quickly, but we do not want to artificially create the appearance of short-term performance improvement at the expense of genuine long-term success.

All the power to IT performance measurement and dashboarding, but with the absolute commitment to not only track and measure, but also grow and improve our customer results. It’s not a gotcha that we need, but a how can we help you succeed.

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AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN FIVE SHORT CHAPTERS

By Portia Nelson

I

I walk down the street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk I fall in. I am lost ... I am helpless. It isn't my fault. It takes me forever to find a way out.

II

I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I pretend I don't see it. I fall in again. I can't believe I am in the same place but, it isn't my fault. It still takes a long time to get out.

III

I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I see it is there. I still fall in ... it's a habit. my eyes are open I know where I am. It is my fault. I get out immediately.

IV

I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I walk around it.

V

I walk down another street.

At work, there is almost no greater feeling than being part of a high-performing team, and no worse than being part of a dysfunctional one.

Teams are not, by definition, destined to succeed. In fact more often then not, they will fail unless they have the right mix of people, purpose, process, commitment, training, and of course, leadership—along with the time for it all to jell.

I remember being on a team in one special law enforcement agency that had the “right mix.” The project was both very successful and was written up as a case study, and everything in the project was really fulfilling personally and professionally: from gathering around the whiteboard for creative strategy sessions to the execution of each phase of the project. Now, that is not to say that there were not challenges on the project and on the team—there always are—or you are probably just dreaming rather than really in the office working. But the overall, in the experience, the health of the team was conducive to doing some really cool stuff. When the team is healthy and the project successful, you feel good about getting up in the morning and going to work—an almost priceless experience.

Unfortunately, this team experience was probably more the exception than the rule—as many teams are dysfunctional for one or more reasons. In fact, at the positive team experience that I was described above, my boss used to say, “the stars are all aligned for us.”

The challenge of putting together high-performance teams is described in Harvard Business Review, May 2009, in an article, “Why Teams Don’t Work,” by Diane Coutu.

She states: “Research consistently shows that teams underperform their potential.”

But Coutu explains that this phenomenon of underperformance by teams can be overcome, by following “five basic conditions” as described in “Leading Teams” by J. Richard Hackman (the descriptions of these are my thoughts):

“Teams must be real”—you need the right mix of people: who’s in and who’s out.

“Compelling direction”—teams need a clear purpose: “what they’re supposed to be doing” and is it meaningful.

“Enabling structures”—teams need process: how are things going to get done and by whom.

“Supportive organization”—teams need the commitment of the organization and its leadership: who is championing and sponsoring the team.

“Expert coaching”—you need training: how teams are supposed to behave and produce.

While leadership is not called out specifically, to me it is the “secret sauce” or the glue that holds all the other team enablers together. The skilled leader knows who to put on the team, how to motivate its members to want to succeed, how to structure the group to be productive and effective, how to build and maintain commitment, and how to coach, counsel, mentor, and ensure adequate training and tools for the team members.

One other critical element that Coutu spells out is courage. Team leaders and members need to have the courage to innovate, “ask difficult questions,” to counter various forms of active or passive resistance, and to experiment.

In short, harnessing the strength of a team means bringing out the best in everyone, making sure that the strengths and weaknesses of the individuals offset each other—there is true synergy in working together. In failing teams, everyone might as well stay home. In high-performance teams, the whole team is greater than the sum of its individual members.

There is the old saying that rings true to basic leadership: “Keep it Simple Stupid,” (or KISS) yet for various reasons people and organizations opt or are compelled toward complexity.

And when things are complex, the organization is more prone to mistakes, people to misunderstandings, and leadership to mismanagement--all are points of failure in the dynamics of running an organization.

Mistakes can be costly from both a strategic and operational standpoint; misunderstandings between people are a cause of doubts, confusion, and hostility; and mismanagement leads to the breakdown of solid business process and eventually everything goes to pot.

An interesting article in the Wall Street Journal, 26 October 2009, defines four types of complexity:

Dysfunctional—This is the de facto complexity. It “makes work harder and doesn’t create value…research suggests that functional complexity creeps into a company over years through the perpetuation of practices that are no longer relevant, the duplication of activities due to mergers or reorganizations, and ambiguous or conflicting roles.”

Designed—This is an odd one…why would you design in complexity? “Executives may deliberately increase the complexity of certain activities or they may broaden the scope of their product offering, because they expect the benefits of those changes to outweigh the costs.” Example cited: “Dell believes that configuring each product to individual specs, rather than creating them all the same, makes customers more likely to buy from the company.”

Inherent—I guess this is the nothing I can do about it category, it just is hard! “The difficulty of getting the work done.” Plain and simple, some jobs are highly complex Mr. Rocket Scientist.

Imposed—This is the why are they doing this to us category—external factors. This “is largely out of the control of the company. It is shaped by such entities as industry regulators, non-governmental organizations and trade unions.” I would assume competitors’ misdeeds would fall into this one as well.

Whatever the reason for the complexity, we know implicitly that simplification, within the realm of what’s possible, is the desired state. Even when the complexity is so to say “designed in” because of certain benefits like with the Dell example, we still desire to minimize that complexity, to the extent that we can still achieve the organization’s goals.

I remember years ago reading about the complexity of some companies’ financial reports (income statements, balance sheets, statements of cash flows…) and news commentators questioning the authenticity of their reporting. In other words, if you can’t understand it—how do we know if it is really truthful, accurate, or the full story? Well-publicized accounting scandals like Enron, HealthSouth, and many others since around the mid-1990’s come to mind.

Generally, we know that when something is veiled in a shroud of complexity, there is often mismanagement or misconduct at play.

That is not to say that everything in life is simple—it isn’t. Certainly advances in the sciences, technology, and so on are not simple. Knowledge is incremental and there is certainly lot’s of it out there to keep us all occupied in the pursuit of life-long learning. But regardless of how complex things get out there—whether dysfunctional, designed, inherent, or imposed—we should strive to make things easier, more straightforward, and as effortless and trouble-free, as possible.

Will simplification get more difficult as a goal as our society continues to advance beyond the common man’s ability to understand it?

Yes, this is going to be a challenge. It used to be that graduating from high school was the farthest most people went with their education. Then college became the goal and norm for many. And now graduate and post-graduate studies are highly desirable and expected for many professional careers. It is getting difficult for people to keep us with the pace of change, breadth and depth of knowledge, and the advancement in technical fields.

One of the antidotes to the inherent complexity seems to be greater specialization such as in medicine, technology, engineering and so forth. As knowledge advances, we need to break it up into smaller chunks that people can actually digest and handle. The risk is that the pieces become so small eventually that we can lose sight of the bigger picture.

Complexity is here to stay in various forms, but we can and must tackle at the very least the dysfunctional complexity in our organizations. Some ways we can do this include breaking down the silos that impede our collaboration and information sharing; architecting in simplification into our strategic, operational, and tactical plans; building once and reusing multiple times (i.e. through enterprise and common solutions); filling gaps, reducing redundancies, and eliminating inefficiencies; reengineering our business processes as a regular part of “what we do”, constantly innovating better, faster, and cheaper ways of doing things; thinking and acting user-centric, improving the way we treat our people; and of course, being honest, transparent, and upright in our dealings and communications.