The habits that set future-ready IT leaders apart

There’s an old tape we listen to that says, ‘Sometimes the best thing that can be said about IT is nothing.’ We have to abandon that old tape and tell our story, because in a world where ‘software eats everything,’ as Mark Andreessen famously said, IT executives have to be really great at storytelling and not be silent. We have to pivot to being upfront and blunt and bold, to tell our story, use our power of the pen, be our own advocates, and create our own digital twins of what we’re doing so people know the contributions we bring.

After all, we are now the cool kids. IT is making hardware cool again. We’ve made an intelligent thermostat and smartphones and self-driving cars. Back in the day, we were the geeks with our pocket protectors. Now we are the big kids on campus, so let’s leverage our storytelling and talk about our cool-kid-ness.

It needs to be both a verbal and a written exercise, because while putting it down on paper is important for crystallizing the thinking, telling it crystallizes it even more. The exercise of repeating it helps you synthesize it and make it even more palatable on the page. That cyclicality of the verbal and written exercise helps you fine-tune and hone your message over time. The more you tell your story, the better you’ll get at doing it.