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Mark Twain missed the big one.

As he pointed out, lies, damned lies and statistics can certainly give people the wrong impression. But if you really want to convince someone that up is down, they’re flimsy tools compared to the really big deceiver: Surveys.

I’m not talking about the well-understood practice of asking biased questions, like Burger King’s famous, “Would you prefer to eat a delicious hamburger, cooked from a quarter pound of fresh ground beef on an open flame, or a disgusting, greasy, fried, hockey-puck-like mess?” (I might have the exact phrasing wrong — I’m working from memory) that led to its not-very-effective “The Whopper beat the Big Mac” ad campaign some years back.

Sure, it’s a useful technique. It’s simply second-rate compared to one exemplified by a recent Gartner survey, reported in the January 14th issue of Processor magazine in an article titled, “The End of the IT Department as We Know It.”

The survey asked the popular question, “What’s your biggest frustration — something you’re supposed to accomplish but don’t, or something someone else is supposed to accomplish but doesn’t?”

The exact phrasing was a bit different. Gartner asked corporate executives to identify what gets in the way of strategic change in their companies, and IT failures beat out changing the culture. Since the culture changers are themselves and IT is someone else, the response is less than surprising.

Perception, of course, is reality, so you need to pay attention to this, especially since Gartner sells the perception to the executives with whom you work, also sells its solution, and, unlike you, has a paid sales force and PR machine. According to the article (and to be fair, it’s possible Gartner’s actual findings had fewer logical holes than the article that presented them) what’s going to happen is:

New technologies, that deliver pre-packaged workflows to businesses, and let businesspeople reconnect the process flows by manipulating visual tools and pushing a button (Ta-Da!!!) will fundamentally change the responsibilities of IT departments.

Since today most IT organizations spend the bulk of their budgets on operations and applications, something fundamental needs to change. Mix in outsourcing and the end of IT is at hand.

Oh, and the career solution for technical professionals? Get an MBA.

Let’s deconstruct this, shall we? First of all, suggesting that IT should spend most of its budget on something other than applications and operations is a bit like suggesting that Toyota should spend most of its budget on something other than designing and manufacturing cars. Applications are what people use to do their work. What, other than running the applications you have while enhancing them and delivering new ones, are you supposed to be doing? Raising chickens?

Second, workflow tools (just another class of application, by the way) don’t automate work. They automate the process of assigning work. Once the work arrives at employees’ desks, they still need business applications to help them do it.

Maybe the point is that businesses will start to view internal processes as commodities. Instead of figuring out how you want to run your business, you’ll just buy best-practice processes off-the-shelf, pre-automated and pre-integrated, with no work required from IT other than to install them and no work required from anyone else other than training the end-users.

Yeah, that’ll work. Your COO will buy Wal-Mart’s supply chain processes, Nordstrom’s customer relationship management, Amazon.com’s e-commerce, and Dell’s build-to-order. Voila! Like magic, out will come a lean, mean, fighting medical-devices, cosmetics, or maybe janitorial services machine.

There’s an old saying in the consulting business: It looks great on the PowerPoint.

So here’s some advice you might find a bit more practical regarding how to keep the joint running, from your old keep the joint runner:

Keep on spending most of your budget on operations and applications. Shift as much out of operations as you can every year — but only what you can shift through improved efficiency and not a penny more.

Spend as much as you can on applications — not just coding, of course, but all the associated disciplines that spell the difference between code that runs and successful business change.

And most important of all, pay attention to the “biggest frustration” that started this chunk of rant ‘n roll. Many IT organizations still haven’t mastered the fundamental discipline of managing projects to successful conclusion.

If you haven’t, perception really is reality, and while your IT department might not go away, you probably will. Soon.

And not under your own steam.

ManagementSpeak: We’re going to reimagine IT.

Translation: We’re going to blow up IT and everyone in it.

What can I say? We need more ManagementSpeaks. It’s up to you to keep your ears and mind open to the absurdities.

Human beings are nature’s superior communicators.

That’s the theory, at least. Watching how often and how persistently we misunderstand each other, we can only be jealous of honeybees. They admittedly have less to say to each other (mostly, the subject is where to find food), but they’re able to ask and understand the answer with perfect precision.

Our hidden assumptions just might be the biggest barriers to understanding each other. When they differ, what you say and what someone else hears can be radically different.

And when the “someone else” is the CEO, it really doesn’t matter that the root cause was different hidden assumptions. The problem is yours.

Last week we explored four types of CEO — competitors, mechanics, referees, and economists — each of which makes very different assumptions about what “business benefit” means. It matters to you because if you work for, say, an economist … a CEO who thinks of the enterprise as an asset whose value must be maximized  … then you aren’t going to get very far proposing investments intended to (for example) reduce time to market for new products.

The issue isn’t whether you disagree. If you both understand that you disagree you can have a productive discussion about it. It’s when your hidden assumptions disagree that you get into trouble.

To improve your odds of spotting these crossed assumptions, this week we look at three more types of CEO: explorers, servants, and players.

Explorers are red-ocean/blue-ocean sorts of people, and probably embrace my friend Adam Hartung’s Phoenix Principle as well. For explorers, competition is for other, less imaginative people who aren’t able to find brand new, unexplored territories to colonize. Or, even better, territories others who aren’t very good at colonization have discovered– an approach at which the late Steve Jobs was superb; likewise Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and, prior to his retirement, Bill Gates.

Servant leaders … a concept first codified by Robert Greenleaf … think of themselves as “humble stewards of their organization’s resources,” to quote the Wikipedia entry on the subject. Businesses run by servant leaders are wonderful environments. It isn’t at all clear how they fare when faced with a competitor, though. Being the steward of a resource isn’t necessarily correlated with obtaining maximum competitive leverage from that resource. Servant leaders will have a lot in common with mechanics — in the end, their view is internal. Where they differ is that where mechanics focus more on processes, servant leaders focus on the people.

No CEO taxonomy would be complete without the player. Players see business as a game. Not as a game among businesses, as competitors do. As a game among individuals, which they intend to personally win. For players, the business is the playing field, not the point, and so long as they win, they’re happy.

Players are the CEOs most likely to encourage conflict among the executives who report to them. They do so for two reasons. One is that this is how they see the world. They’re competing against everyone else, and look how well that thought process has worked for them. So of course everyone else should be doing the same thing.

That’s the first, more benign reason. The second is more manipulative, but just as clear: By pitting the executives in the next level against each other, each is kept politically weak enough that none pose a threat.

Players are, after all, very good at playing the game to win.

Every one of the seven CEO perspectives presented here and last week are just as valid as the others. While each is incomplete, they all accurately reflects a very real aspect of organizational dynamics: Companies do compete in the marketplace; they are collections of processes organized to get the work done; they do consist of individuals whose self-interests aren’t in perfect alignment; and they really are assets, too.

Many do have untapped markets they could exploit given the right collections of insights, creativity, and attention to detail; and they all certainly are collections of people who need management support to do the best work they can.

And, like it or not, not only are we each responsible for our own careers, but executive-level career management really is a game. Those who refuse to play generally lose.

But just because these seven perspectives are equally valid, that doesn’t make the CEOs who prefer each of them equally enjoyable to work for. Given a choice, most of us would, I suspect, prefer to work for competitors, mechanics, explorers or servants.

I wonder what the odds are.