Maybe it's just that I haven't been fortunate enough to encounter leadership that's not like that, but this story sounds right to me.
Try to think of it from leadership's perspective. For the sake of simplicity, let's say there are 100 similar initiatives proposed each year, each costing $1 million. That's $100 million per year in pure costs to the business (ignoring amortization, tax shenanigans, etc). Even for a bank, that's real money, to be strategically spent and not wasted.
With that setup, making leadership feel the pain and understand at a visceral level why this particular million dollars is well spent, is all at once a good strategy, rational for leadership, rational for IT, and a healthy-ish dynamic for the business.
Aside/tangent: In a very real sense, executives are managers of the finite time, employees, expenses, etc. of the business. Now, you could, and I would, argue that they're nearly always not especially good managers, and that the purely rational choice from "the company's" perspective is to pay them more like regular employees and not so lavishly. However, "the company" doesn't make decisions, people do, with all their political games, incentives and self-interests. Since executives control the flow of information/decisions/resources/money in the company, they siphon off an out-sized share for themselves, acting as a (perhaps inevitable?) parasite on the host company. Fixing this problem is left as an exercise to the reader.
Or to the writer. Bjarte Bogsnes has written a couple of books on this; Implementing Beyond Budgeting is worth reading.
The core of the idea is that the decisions that the overall body makes are so much worse if you try to combine managerial control with budgetary control that you want to separate them as much as possible. Set goals; provide budgets; don't link the two. Yes, as an executive you have responsibility for the overall spend. So employ people you can trust to do that well, and don't sweat the details.
> Since executives control the flow of information/decisions/resources/money in the company, they siphon off an out-sized share for themselves, acting as a (perhaps inevitable?) parasite on the host company.
Reminds me of the sociopaths in The Gervais Principle. Highly recommended.
face it - no matter where you leave from, or why you leave, your successors will almost certainly blame you for anything goes wrong in the first few months after you leave - you can't worry about it, because there is nothing you can do about it.
Kinda, but it could harm your future prospects though if you’re unaware you’re getting badmouthed in your absence and word gets round. One degree of separation is all it would take before people who’ve never met or worked with you have been persuaded you’re a problem.
... still my advice is that life is too short to care about such things. In my experience people (guys too) that indulge a bit too much in rumors are massively insecure folks with various other issues, and it shows.
Have confidence in your skills and the rest are details, especially if we talk about IT where job mobility is generally way above average, you really don't have to kiss assess or be worried what others think/say about you to be successful.
I don’t know. It depends on how it was explained to them. If they just heard that by date X the link is predicted to be 50% saturated then IT did a really poor job. We know that 50% saturated mean with this technology that customers are going to experience delays, or connection errors. So why don’t say that? We expect that by date X the customers will experience connection problems.
Or to put it other way you know that the 100% limit is a theoretical limit only achivable in ideal situations, so talk about the utilisable limit. People need to be fed the right information to be able to make informed decisions. And since it is IT who is paid to understand the tech things it is their job to communicate the peculiarities in a way the suits can understand.
Now maybe they have done their best job at this, but the article makes it sounds like they just sent a memo without this info.
If you are a marginally competent leader you’ll ask the obvious question “why is it a problem if our link is only 50% saturated”. If you are slightly more competent you’ll have read some literature about business processes and intuit that the same queing theory might apply.
Try to think of it from leadership's perspective. For the sake of simplicity, let's say there are 100 similar initiatives proposed each year, each costing $1 million. That's $100 million per year in pure costs to the business (ignoring amortization, tax shenanigans, etc). Even for a bank, that's real money, to be strategically spent and not wasted.
With that setup, making leadership feel the pain and understand at a visceral level why this particular million dollars is well spent, is all at once a good strategy, rational for leadership, rational for IT, and a healthy-ish dynamic for the business.
Aside/tangent: In a very real sense, executives are managers of the finite time, employees, expenses, etc. of the business. Now, you could, and I would, argue that they're nearly always not especially good managers, and that the purely rational choice from "the company's" perspective is to pay them more like regular employees and not so lavishly. However, "the company" doesn't make decisions, people do, with all their political games, incentives and self-interests. Since executives control the flow of information/decisions/resources/money in the company, they siphon off an out-sized share for themselves, acting as a (perhaps inevitable?) parasite on the host company. Fixing this problem is left as an exercise to the reader.