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Management and leadership are, as has been mentioned once or twice, different. Precisely how they differ is a matter of some controversy, and quite a lot of ink has been spilled arguing what exactly distinguishes the two.

There has been somewhat less discussion of which is the more important, possibly because the answer is so obvious.

It is obvious, isn’t it? Just listen to the two words. Leadership sounds downright inspirational, forward-looking, and important. Management, in contrast, conveys overtones of control, drudgery, and hard, tedious work.

Hmmm. Maybe it isn’t so obvious after all. If we use the Edison Ratio as our metric (1% inspiration : 99% perspiration), perhaps management is the more important of the two. After all, inspiring the troops to battle on for glory and mother country doesn’t do much good if you haven’t first taken the elementary precautions of arming, training, and briefing them.

From a personal perspective the distinction matters only in how you decide to allocate your time. To be effective, you have to be proficient at both — to inspire people to follow your lead, and to make sure they do the job well and deliver results. It’s a reality as true for a chief executive officer as for a first-time supervisor.

Organizationally, the sequence is more clear: Manage first, then lead.

Which is to say, before anyone will take IT seriously as an equal partner, fully engaged in the development of business strategies and tactics, it first has to deliver stable, high-performance systems and networks; it has to complete projects on-time, within the planned budget, and with the original list of deliverables intact; and those deliverables have to help the business change and improve as intended.

Oh, and the Help Desk has to be helpful. Don’t ever underestimate the importance of the Help Desk. It’s impact on IT’s image would be hard to overstate. The Help Desk is the WD-40 of IT, lubricating its relationship with the rest of the business. It’s where the battle for business users’ hearts and minds is won, one resolved problem at a time.

Those stable networks don’t win anyone’s hearts and minds. They do, however, lose them. They’re critical to IT’s success, but only in the way showing up for work is critical to an employee’s career. It isn’t something you get credit for. It’s expected.

Which leaves projects as the battleground for IT’s credibility in the enterprise. IT project completion rates were poor during our industry’s Jurassic period, when file-oriented batch mainframe dinosaurs roamed the enterprise; they continued to be poor after the introduction of database management systems and on-line programming techniques moved us into our Cretaceous period; and they still hadn’t improved as additional waves of technology propelled us through geologic time to the Pleistocene era of object-oriented programming.

IT organizations have finally started to figure it out: Better project completion rates come from better project managers, not better technology. Project completion rates are trending up at last, and that’s a good thing. The only problem is, they’re trending up just in time to be not enough.

Project completion rates are about delivering software to the business that adheres to specifications. Which was enough when IT figured its proper role was to be a supplier and the enterprise was its customer.

The world has changed again, though, and as an industry we’ve caught up just enough to be a step behind the times. Because while we’re finally completing IT projects, the business is figuring out that there is no such thing as an IT project.

We need to take the next step and take it quickly: We and our partners in the business need to stop completing projects and start excelling at change.

Because in the end, taking control of business change is the only goal that matters.

While most of the correspondence responding to last week’s column — about how to choose in the upcoming presidential election — was favorable, a couple of readers thought commenting on the election in this space was inappropriate. They also thought I revealed a clear bias (although toward which candidate they didn’t say).

I’m puzzled: If someone thinks it’s biased to suggest you base your vote on each candidate’s vision, programs, knowledge of the issues, ability to lead and manage, and how well each one presents himself, I’m left to wonder what would constitute an unbiased set of criteria. Perhaps Fox News could prescribe something more Fair and Balanced(TM). If not, I’m sure Al Franken would be willing to help.

The election tactics pursued this year … to some extent by every major candidate; this isn’t the proper venue for evaluating the candidates’ relative rank on the rankness scale, let alone the childish question of who started it … is simply a symptom of something relevant to you in your job every day you show up for work. It’s the philosophy that winning justifies any and all tactics. Call it the Vince Lombardi syndrome, from Lombardi’s famous statement that “Winning isn’t everything, it is the only thing.”

From all accounts, by the way, Lombardi would be horrified, having advocated sportsmanship above all else. As a country, though, our culture has mutated — from the “it isn’t whether you win or lose that matters, it’s how you play the game” values of my youth to the “do whatever it takes to win,” philosophy so many Americans now apparently admire.

Increasingly, the organizational cultures in which you’re likely to find yourself exhibit the Lombardi syndrome. Why is that?

It’s easy, and pointless, to try to determine whose fault it is that we find the Lombardi syndrome on the increase. As with so many other circumstances, the “blame” belongs to systemic traits, not to the individuals and corporations trying to succeed within the system.

My own opinion is that business leaders are trapped in a sort of “tragedy of the ethical commons.” It’s like a WWF cage match without the script: If your opponent is willing to hit you with a chair or a hidden baseball bat and you play by the rules, you’re going to lose. Every time. It’s why regulation, and the enforcement of regulations, is important. It lets business leaders who prefer to behave ethically do so without losing competitive ground to those who don’t. But regulation has fallen out of favor — deregulation is on the increase, regulations are increasingly written by the industries being regulated, and enforcement of the regulations that remain is declining.

So what do you do when you find yourself working for a Lombardi-syndrome company? How do you maintain your own equilibrium? How, that is, do you behave ethically when every choice in front of you is, to your moral palette, distasteful? (Harkening back to last week: If you dislike all the candidates, do you abstain or vote for one of them anyway?) The answer, I think, is that ethics is a filter, not a guide.

We live, after all, in a capitalist economic system, predicated on the idea that each of us is expected to act in our own self-interest. Acting in your own self-interest just doesn’t have much moral substance, but acting against it violates the core premise of a capitalist society.

Still, Americans generally figure they’re supposed to “do the right thing.” It’s much like Ginsberg’s restatement of the three laws of thermodynamics: You can’t win, you can’t break even, and you can’t quit the game. So unless you’re willing to eke out a living as a self-sufficient scratch farmer, or are confident you can find a job with a company that adheres to a set of ethical values close to your own, you have to figure out how to deal with this ethical paradox.

“Do the right thing,” is simply unhelpful. It assumes the conclusion. “Don’t do a wrong thing,” is more useful; “do the least wrong thing,” is often the best you can do.

When it is, hold your nose and do the least wrong thing. What other choice do you have?

In the Minneapolis winter, hot soup makes an appealing lunch. At a local eatery specializing in such fare I learned an important lesson for IT.

This restaurant serves soup in bowls and “bottomless” bowls. Bottomless gets you unlimited refills. Here’s your challenge: As an IT analyst, devise a system to keep track of who’s entitled to those free refills. How would you do it?

Would you print a card at the register with a bar code, to be scanned to verify which customers should get refills? Would you ask bottomless customers to show their receipts each time they return for another helping? Or …

Design your solution before you read how the restaurateur handled the problem.

Okay ready?

Bottomless customers get a differently shaped bowl.

Every time I eat there I wonder if I’d have found this simple solution. Ask yourself, and your analysts and designers too, because if they restrict their thinking to IT they can cost you a lot of money. Sometimes, a second type of bowl can replace a million lines of code.

Whether you’re selling soup or silverware, hardware or handbags, you’re in retail. And while IT has tremendous importance in the retail back office, in the store itself its importance is limited. Which is ironic, because CRM is one of the hot applications of IT these days, and most retailers live and die on good customer relations.

Take data warehousing, one of the most important tools in what we usually think of as a CRM implementation. You can use data warehousing to collect terabytes of customer information and slice it, dice it, cross-correlate it, and do multidimensional scaling if that will teach you anything.

When you’re done you’ll learn (among other things) which customer segments, and maybe even which customers do and don’t buy which products from you.

Pick up a copy of Paco Underhill’s excellent book on retail, Why We Buy, and you’ll see the importance of watching shoppers shop. If you watch shoppers in action you’ll learn something data mining can’t teach you: Why (for example) your older customers aren’t buying concealer from you. It isn’t their demographics or your branding. It’s a merchandising problem: You’ve placed the concealer on the bottom shelf. Shoppers have to bend down for it, and it’s in a high-traffic area besides, where other shoppers brush buy them on their way to pharmaceuticals. For older shoppers bending down is bad enough. Being “butt-brushed” (Underhill’s term) makes it intolerable, driving them to forgo the concealer despite their need for it.

If you’d relied on data warehousing and data mining alone, you’d have adjusted your inventory planning to stock less concealer. This would have reduced waste — a good thing to do. By going into the store and watching actual shoppers actually shopping you rely on observation — a more powerful tool than mere inference. You’d know to move the concealer to a higher shelf, increasing sales instead of fine-tuning inventory. That’s much better.

There’s a double-barreled lesson here for IT. The first is to recognize when an IT solution is incomplete. To take another retail example, I once discussed the possibility of setting up “register-pop” in a client’s stores. Similar to the familiar screen-pop used in CTI-enabled call centers, which helps telephone agents interact more effectively with callers, register-pop would identify shoppers at the register and provide information that could help store clerks up-sell.

Ultimately, we decided against this approach. While technically feasible, it would have provided just-too-late information. By the time customers reach the register they aren’t shoppers anymore. They’re buyers — they have what they want, have already waited in line, and don’t want to go back into the store for more stuff.

Some advanced retailers are looking into an alternative that identifies shoppers before they reach the register. It relies on an advanced face-recognition technology called the Sales Associate. By giving the sales associate a wireless PDA connected to a central customer database, they hope to make their sales force more effective in helping regular customers.

That’s the first lesson — that IT solutions are often incomplete. The second lesson is more universal: Infer when you must, but watch when you can. This is true whether the subject is merchandising, customer interface usability, or whether a process design will work in your warehouse. Given a choice, don’t guess, don’t assume, don’t even ask.

Position yourself unobtrusively and … observe.