Monthly Archives: March 2009

IT’s Toxic Assets and Self-Funded Stimulus Plan


ist2_3042772-toxic-wasteOK – so I’m climbing on the latest news headlines – forgive me, but I do see an analogy that is important for IT leaders to be aware of.  Current business conditions mean this is a great time for CIO’s to clean up their back yards, and aggressively “kick the IT legacy problem in the teeth” as one of my Scottish clients used to say.  Also, it’s Spring, and a great time to do some Spring Cleaning of the house of IT.

What Are IT Toxic Assets?

I’m using the term to cover any IT asset or capability that is a net drain on value – i.e., the net cost of keeping it is greater than the business value it delivers.  Toxic IT assets can include:

  1. Hardware (computers, servers, printers, storage, routers, power supply equipment, etc.)
  2. Software (applications, tools, system software, etc.)
  3. People (anyone on the IT budget)
  4. Policies

Toxic Hardware

Let’s take hardware first.  We tend to get lazy when it comes to replacing hardware that is no longer delivering enough value to cover its cost.  Old Fred in accounting likes using the ancient fax machine because he’s never bothered to learn how to use the neat new scanner that sits right next to the fax.  So, rather than fight with Fred, we leave the behemoth machine there, taking up space, consuming electricity and giving off heat the equivalent of a small town, and needing non-standard and expensive paper roll supplies.  Or the old PC’s that nobody is using, or is ever going to use, but that sit around gathering dust because… well because it’s easy to let them sit there.

Just like in our private lives, we accumulate “stuff” and don’t clear it out until we move (perhaps not even then!)  Or until some exceptional event is upon us that motivates the clear out.  And, boy does it feel good when we’ve finished!  And so does the Salvation Army or whatever needy cause you’ve donated the stuff to!

Toxic Software

Software is a similar problem.  First, there’s licences and maintenance fees we are paying for stuff that is not being used.  There’s excess fees we are paying for “premium services” or “extended editions” that aren’t needed.  We put the full MS Office Suite on every PC, whether it is needed or not.  Second, there’s the legacy stuff who’s functionality was replaced long ago by an ERP or whatever, but that still has one or two users of an old report.  Those users could get a virtually identical report using the ERP’s report writer or query tool, but they can’t be bothered to learn it.

Toxic People

Then there’s the people.  Dr. Judy Bardwick, occasional research associate of mine, and noted author, speaker, and management consultant specializing in the psychology of the corporate environment, has written and talked extensively about the “entitlement culture,” and IT is by no means immune to this.  IT professionals sometimes tend to attach themselves to specific systems, feeding and taking care of them.  There’s always tweaks to be made, and end users are always asking for enhancements.  Some of these tweaks and enhancements are essential, but from my experience, many are “nice to haves” rather than “must haves” and nobody is really figuring out the full life cycle costs and value to determine if they are really cost-justified.  I guess that may be OK when times are flush (though I don’t really believe it’s responsible use of resources) but under the current economic climate, it borders on criminal behavior!

Toxic Policies

A classic example of a toxic policy is the “unfunded mandate” from headquarters.

In an effort to streamline accounting, all divisions and functions must align to the new Corporate Chart of Accounts.  Please see the policy document CP10478xPP04921z dated February 1, 2009, and please bring your accounting codes into compliance by June 1, 2009.

To the person in accounting who came up with the policy, it makes all the sense in the world, and will save their department a quarter headcount.  To the IT organization, who is being hit with unfunded mandates such as this from different corporate folk every week of the year, they add significant headcount, and/or detract from higher value generating activities.

Other toxic policies include too liberal a provisioning of personal computing devices (people getting devices that don’t need them, or getting way more device than they need).

So, What’s a Poor CIO To Do?

Rule 1 – be ruthless!  Don’t be a victim!  Take control!  Use the economic climate as air cover to do some serious toxic asset remediation.  One strategy I’ve seen work well is to pick a target – say 15% of the total asset base, for example – to eliminate over a 6 month period.  Enlist your business partners in the effort – it can be a good way to create some goodwill in those key relationships.

Rule 2 – leverage business-IT governance to ensure you really do have the air cover you need to make the changes.

Rule 3 – create motivation among the IT organization to help find and eliminate the toxic assets.  Create a competition, with some kind of reward (need not be financial) and recognition for (a) finding target opportunities, and (b) eliminating these opportunities.

Rule 4 – this is a great opportunity to experiment with Social Networking – to make the targeting and elimination of toxic IT assets a collaborative exercise!

(Image courtesy of Investorshub)

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The Dangers of Cloudy Thinking!


clouds-getting-laseredI’m fascinated and bemused by this Cloud Computing phenomenon.  Never before have I had such a strong feeling that something really, really important is happening – a fundamental discontinuity, if you will, in the way we leverage IT – and yet most of my clients and those I am interacting with in a couple of multi-company research projects are essentially standing on the sidelines.

I’m reminded of the earliest days of the personal computer, when IT executives I was working with at the time scoffed at the notion of PC’s (or microcomputers as we called them back then) as anything more than home entertainment, while a little ways down the corridor from their office, business executives were “Visicalcing” away at their Apple II’s and TRS80′s!

I’m not claiming that Cloud Computing is fully ready for prime time, and that any CIO who is not leading a wholesale transformation of his computing approach is irresponsible.  But  I am seeing way more denial than is healthy or appropriate, and the level of understanding and pace of experimentation is, I fear, going to put many CIO’s further behind the 8-ball that they should be.

Why Cloud Computing Denial?

I think there’s a couple of things going on here.

  1. The vendor market, once again, by jumping on the marketing buzzword of the month, is causing confusion and leading to skepticism.  There was a great story this week about the highly respected Jim Goodnight, CEO of SAS, thinking he was having a joke at the expense of the world’s tech media when his company announced a $70 million cloud computing initiative.  It turns out SAS was really announcing a new server farm, but Goognight thought it would sound more appealing if the press release used the term “cloud computing”.
  2. People inevitably try to understand new technologies based on what they already know, so Cloud Computing is seen as “warmed over1960′s time sharing.”   Actually, what mystifies me here is, what was so wrong with or bad about 1960′s time sharing?  It opened the door to end user computing, fourth generation languages and report writers and business analytics.  It made computing accessible and affordable to many who could not otherwise have experienced and benefited from computing.
  3. There’s the control issue.  This gets disguised as the need to protect information and ensure availability, but I believe has more to do with an innate need to own and manage large, hairy data centers and server farms as a badge of courage.

So, What Really Is Cloud Computing?

One of the more helpful descriptions comes from CEO of OpSource, Treb Ryan’s presentation at this year’s SaaS Summit.  Treb argues that the three defining characteristics of Cloud Computing are:

  • Complete flexibility.  Not just pay-as-you-go but automated sign-up, rapid provisioning and no commitments – it’s as easy to turn off as it is to turn on.
  • Web programmability.  The ability to access and manage functionality through Web APIs are a crucial element of a true cloud platform.
  • Community resources.  Successful clouds encourage communities that share ideas, best practices and add-ons to enhance their use of the platform.

These characteristics may be a little self-serving for OpSource, but do get to the essence of Cloud Computing and help differentiate it from earlier, more limited ways of sharing compute capacity.

Time to Denigrate or Time to Experiment?

I do believe that there are untapped “edge” opportunities that yield significant business value, and can be deployed rapidly and easily, especially important under these uncertain economic conditions and constrained IT budgets.  These edge  opportunities typically lend themselves to Cloud Computing as a basis for computing and storage capacity, and to Software as a Service as a basis for solutions provisioning.

CIO’s that see these new computing approaches simply as warmed-over history, may be doomed to repeat it!  CIO’s that see through the marketing hype, and have the vision to appreciate the fundamental changes that are upon us, have a unique opportunity to steal an early march, and while their competitors are hunkering down, help their companies steal market share and innovate.

(Image courtesy of Dvice.)

Clouds, SaaS and the Wal-Martification of Health Care IT


philips_tabletOver the years, a lot of my consulting work has been in pharmaceutical and medical devices industries.  That experience has been augmented over the last few months through my work with a major integrated health care, biomedical research, and medical education institution.  Through these experiences I have become fascinated with the potential for IT to help revolutionize health care in the US.

As a result, I have been closely monitoring this space, and was intrigued by Wal-Mart’s announcement of its plans to market a digital health records system.  For  the uninitiated, companies such as Microsoft and Google, plus a host of other players have offerings (or intentions) in this space, and President Obama’s stimulus package offers $17 billion for incentive payments over five years for doctors and hospitals to adopt EHRs.

Medical Records in the Cloud

As my readers will already know, I’m a proponent of contemporary Web 2.0 means of delivering IT capability – at least for certain situations, and it’s interesting to note that Wal-Mart’s plans are based on both Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Cloud Computing underpinnings.

With my interest in IT enablement of health care, among the blogs I track is one penned by John D. Halamka, MD, MS.  John’s many roles include CIO of CareGroup Health System and Harvard Medical School, as well as being a practicing Emergency Physician.  He has just posted on the Wal-Mart entry into this market, with some interesting commentary on the cost structure and Wal-Mart’s qualifications for this business.  His net take is generally a “thumbs up.”

I’m not sufficiently expert to try to predict how all this will work out, and there’s been ongoing heated debate about the cost and value of Electronic Medical Records.  However, I’ve seen enough of the health care industry, both as a consultant, and as a consumer, to know without a shadow of doubt that it has hitherto been woefully under-served by IT.  I strongly believe that while there will be twists and turns and glitches along the way, IT has the potential to take out significant costs, and improve the quality and outcomes of healthcare.   With healthcare taking such a huge bite out of ever decreasing retirement savings, it’s hard to think of many things with higher priority.

(Image is a Phillips Wireless Medical Tablet PC)

Personal Knowledge Management – One Guru’s Framework


knowledge-managementI will break my own principle about not simply referencing another blog’s work, but I think in this case, it’s a worthwhile rule break.  I came across a great piece by Harold Jarche on his blog called Sense Making with PKM.

Harold nicely lays out a simple Personal Knowledge Management framework combining internal processes with external activities.  He then maps these processes and activities to web 2.0 tools (both generic types and specific open source examples.)

How Effectively Are You Managing Your Personal Knowledge?

Harold’s work resonated strongly with me, and I plan to work hard at personally applying his framework (I know, the best laid plans, and all that!)  Perhaps this hit me so forcefully because I have felt somewhat disappointed with my own ability to take real advantage of all these new technologies in a more disciplined and structured way.  I use a lot of discrete tools (several social networks and a collaboration hub, Google reader, Delicious, Mindmesiter, Yammer, etc.) but still don’t feel as though I’ve integrated them into a natural process that truly augments my ability to sort, categorize, make explicit, connect, exchange, leverage and contribute to the rapidly proliferating sea of information and knowledge relevant to my world, and to that of my consulting clients.

Please share your own thoughts about this crucial topic – what are you doing that’s helping you?  Why do you think its working for you?  What are the barriers to getting better at this and how can you mitigate them?

(Graphic image courtey of iKnowlej.com)

Portfolio Management: So Much More Than a Collection of Projects!


collectionI’ve posted recently about Program Management – mainly in response to a reader’s question about how to group projects into programs.  Her question, in turn, was in response to one of my most popular posts on the distinctions between Project, Program and Portfolio Management.

IT Portfolio Management Matters!

I’m delighted that my old post on this topic (about 16 months ago) keeps attracting readers – portfolio management is one of the most important keys to business value realization from IT.  It is also often poorly implemented.  In fact, quite often, the term “portfolio management” is used without any justification in reality.

Modern Portfolio Theory

IT portfolio management is rooted in Modern Portfolio Theory.  Defined by Wikipedia, Modern Portfolio Theory:

proposes how rational investors will use diversification to optimize their portfolios…

When applied to IT, Portfolio Management proposes how the organization (assuming it is acting in a rational way towards its investments) uses diversification to optimize its IT investments.  In this case, optimization may include balancing:

  • Short term and long term investments.
  • Low risk, low return against high risk, potentially higher return initiatives.
  • Common and shared (i.e., IT infrastructure) against business unit specific investments.
  • Investments by major business process.
  • Creating new capability versus maintaining existing capability.
  • Investing in IT process and capabilities (i.e., improving the “business of IT”) versus investing in IT capability for the business.

IT portfolio management is the primary means to elevate IT decision making and investment prioritization to a business issue.

In this context, IT portfolio management implies a top down decision making framework.  It implies that:

  • Senior executives have debated, considered and reached consensus about their IT investment portfolio strategy.
  • This, in turn, implies that senior executives have considered and agreed to a business-IT strategy.
  • They have wrestled with the thorny questions about “level of optimization” of IT investments – whether this should be a business unit or function (implying a conglomerate or holding company model) or the enterprise (implying a more integrated business model.
  • If they balance by business process, that the major business processes have been defined, and their importance to business strategy execution determined.
  • They are able to monitor the gaps between their actual IT investments by portfolio category, against their target, or “model” portfolio, and can make adjustments as necessary.

Not a Collection of Projects

From time to time, I see consulting clients attempting to implement portfolio management from a collection of projects.  Sometimes, this activity includes taking a huge list of several hundred (in one recent case, nearly a thousand!) to the business so they can “prioritize the portfolio.”  This bottom-up approach is always doomed to failure.  It is often the result of several years of “order taking” behavior by the IT organization, and is, in fact, the order taking equivalent,  elevated to a different level.  It effectively says:

We’ve taken orders from you for years, and now we have this huge list of projects.  So, please take a look at them, and help us prioritize them, because we can’t do them all!”

This cannot work, and ultimately, reinforces order taking behavior, and the sense that IT does know know what it’s doing, and does not deserve the trust of its business partners.

A Question of Business-IT Maturity

I’ve written extensively about Business-IT Maturity and its relationship to business value. (For a more comprehensive treatment, use this search.)  At very low maturity, by definition, the business executives will not have the wherewithal to engage in and answer the questions exemplified in the bullet points above, so implementing portfolio management is going to be virtually impossible.  But, to get to higher maturity, these questions have to be understood, discussed and decided upon, so the IT leadership is best served educating the business till it is ready to engage meaningfully in these questions.  At that point, they will be ready for IT portfolio management.  Until then, be careful not to call bottom up collections of projects, “portfolios.”  If you do, when you are finally ready to introduce portfolio management, the language, and the business discipline it connotes, will have been polluted.

An the Link Back To Programs?

Finally, linking back to the start of this post, and the readers question, “Programs” become the most meaningful intermediary between “projects” and the “enterprise IT portfolio” – a manageable and meaningful “unit of value-producing work” that business executives can get their heads around.

Photo courtesy of the Building and Fire Research Laboratory.

The Art and Science of Grouping Projects into Programs


groupingI just received a comment on an old post, Project vs. Program vs. Portfolio Management.  This has been a popular post since it was written back in October 2007.  The comment read:

I’m doing a research on how do organizations group their projects into programs, please tell me how do they go about doing that. e-mail me as soon as possible.

First off, this is an important question.  Second, my blogging philosophy is that if a question is worth answering by email, it’s worth offering on the blog, so others might get into the discussion and benefit from it.  Mostly, I reply to a comment with a comment, but when a question is as important as I believe this one is, then I think it deserves a post of its own.

What is Program Management?

Wikipedia covers Program Management well (as usual!) Their simple definition is:

Program management or programme management is the process of managing multiple interdependent projects that lead towards an improvement in an organization’s performance.

Wikipedia goes on to say:

Projects deliver outputs; programs create outcomes.  Program management is concerned with doing the right projects, whereas project management is about doing projects right.

These are key distinctions, and begin to get at the heart of the reader’s question above.

Another great reference is from IBM and their white paper entitled Program management: Different from project management.  In this, IBM says:

Many enterprise IT organizations are tackling large, complex efforts that combine the delivery of software elements, new and changed business models, and overall changes to organizational structure and capabilities. Typically these efforts involve several parallel projects, and managers are finding that “traditional” project management approaches fall short for such undertakings. Consequently, many IT professionals are turning to the substantial body of experience, and the smaller body of documentation, that supports the discipline of program management. This discipline describes principles, strategies, and desirable results for managing large-scale efforts comprising parallel projects.

This description, like the Wikipedia definition, provides clues to the question posted as a comment in my earlier blog entry.

Beware the Language Traps!

A caveat here – organizations tend not to be rigorous (and certainly not globally consistent) with their use of terminology here.  So just because you use the term “Program Management” does not necessarily mean you are doing it.  (Nor does the fact that you use the term Project Management mean you are doing that, or that you have Project Managers mean you are actually doing good project management practice!)  By the same logic, you may actually be doing great Program Management, even though you don’t use the term.  (I have to say, I have never seen this, but it’s possible).

Another language complication is that the term Program Management may have already been adopted by your organization – perhaps with accurate and appropriate usage, but perhaps not.  I’ve worked with aerospace and defense companies where the term “program” has a very specific meaning related to government procurement.  This is a tough issue, because they are not going to throw out that terminology, so you really need some other terminology to distinguish between those sub-units of work that focus on deliverables, timeframes and budgets (project management) and those collections of mutually dependent projects that collectively produce business outcomes.

So, How Do You Group Projects Into Programs?

This is part art, part science, and frequently involves both top-down and bottom-up planning approaches.  The key element is wrapped up in the notion of a business outcome.   A business outcome is a measurable result – both in terms of time and quantity – that is significant to business leaders.  “We will increase the results of cross-selling our services by 15% by the end of 2009″ is a business outcome example.  Note, it is specific as to degree and timing.  It is also of value to the business – sufficient to drive change, and relatively easily turned into one or more financial impacts.

So, how will be achieve this increase in cross selling?

  • We will implement a Customer Relationship Management solution
  • We will re-engineer our customer acquisition process
  • We will reorganize our sales force
  • We will change our sales compensation, reward and recognition model
  • We will retrain our sales executives
  • We will realign our service portfolio to make it easier and more logical for our customers to buy additional services that cross traditional boundaries.

These changes might involve technology, organizational change, change in HR practices and compensation, training and development, changes to the service portfolio, and changes to our marketing approach.  All in all a complex set of changes that are collectively necessary to achieve the outcome.  In this case, the program is likely to be  the “Cross Selling Enhancement Program” or something similar.

The underlying projects that will be grouped into that program are typically defined by organizational units and their primary responsibilities.  The technology changes will be owned by IT, and may include software, data base, and workflow projects (or analysis, design, implementation projects as a different way of breaking things down.)  The sales reorganization and process changes will be owned by Sales, the HR changes will be owned by the HR organization, and the service portfolio changes owned by product management.  The overall program might be owned by Sales and Marketing, or there might be an Enterprise PMO, that could be part of the IT organization, or a separate entity.

The process I’ve outlined about is essentially top-down – start with the outcome, and decompose into component parts by organizational impact or specialization, form into projects and connect together in an overall program plan.  This is ideal.  Often, however, things happen much more organically and chaotically.  A sales VP gets on a kick about cross selling, but after a few months talking about it and hoping it will happen, decides they don’t have the right tools.  She reaches out to Salesforce.com, but fairly quickly realizes she’s going to need help and support from the IT organization.  And, as the onion gets peeled back, new layers of complexity and new issues occur, and the number of projects spawned by the desire for more cross selling mushrooms.

Unfortunately, these individual projects have little or no sight into the original outcomes – increase the results of cross-selling our services by 15% by the end of 2009!  So, the projects loose sight of the goal (and therefore miss it).  They also attach their own “pork” or “earmarks” (to put this in the context of the latest US political debates).  “While we are creating our partnership with Salesforce.com, let’s experiment with their platform to bring some social networking capabilities to bear.”  “While we are training the salesforce in cross-selling, let’s also teach them solution selling.”  While we are cleaning up our customer relationship data base, let’s build a data warehouse to support our business analytics.”  And so it goes.  All potentially worthwhile ideas, but none of them may be essential to achieving the original business outcome, and may potentially derail or de-focus us from achieving that outcome.

Anyway, in the bottom-up case just discussed, the program may be created by recognizing a growing collection of projects that need to be better connected, coordinated and shaped to meet an outcome of importance.  That might mean killing some projects and re-chartering others.

A Question of Governance

So, how do you group projects into programs?  Above all, based on the business outcomes you are trying to achieve.  Ideally, this is a top-down planning exercise, then a bottom-up governance and control exercise to keep the projects collectively on track to achieve the outcomes.  In a less than ideal world, it is first and foremost a governance exercise – you need a mechanism that produces visibility into all the projects going on.  That mechanism also needs visibility into the enterprise and business units strategic intents and desired business outcomes, so that it can recognize opportunities to synchronize, coordinate, refocus, delay or even kills projects that are consuming time and resources, but may not be moving the enterprise or business unit towards its stated goals.   And, by the way, just as Projects group into Programs, so do Programs group into Portfolios.  But that’s a topic for another day!

New To This Blog? Some Pointers for Getting the Most out of IT Organization Circa 2017


Photo courtesy of IgoUgo.com

Photo courtesy of IgoUgo.com

If you’ve just (or have recently) stumbled upon this blog, welcome!  I’d like to give you a quick sense of why this blog exists, why you might want to subscribe to it, or to add it to your RSS reader, and how to get the most from it.

I’ve been thinking recently about this blog and it’s purpose.  Thanks to the excellent ProBlogger site, I’ve challenged myself with the question, “What do I want this blog to be known for?”  By focusing on this, I can hopefully work towards making those goals a self-fulling prophecy – but I’ll let you the reader be the judge of that – and please do let me know how I’m doing!

So, first, what this blog is not:

  • It’s not commentary or reviews of the “topic of the day.”  There are many great sites that provide that service well – no matter what your area of interest.  It’s not my thing.
  • It’s not a content aggregator.  Again, many such sites exist and can provide value with their “links for today”.  While I will occasionally point readers to a link I think is particularly interesting or helpful, it’s not my purpose.
  • It’s not a review or commentary of vendors or their products or services.  Many sites do a fine job, specializing in this – I don’t.

So, what do I want this site to be known for?

What do I want you the reader to feel, and to tell your colleagues?

  1. It’s a source of valuable ideas for IT leaders.
  2. It provides a forward-looking perspective on IT organizations and how they can increase the business value captured through IT investments, assets and capabilities.
  3. It’s a great repository of practical reference materials.  Most posts from 18 months ago are as relevant today as a post from last week.  So it’s a great resource to search for ideas on just about any aspect of IT management.

So, how can you get the most from this blog?

Fist, subscribe.   You will find RSS feeds, and a link to subscribe by email down the right hand column near the top.  You’ll find a quick link to add this to Technorati or to bookmark it on del.icio.us near the top of the left column.  Or, just make sure you are at the Home page, copy and paste the URL to your reader (I use Google Reader for my tracking of blogs and news I’m interested in, but there are many good alternatives).

Second, there’s a running list of “Top Posts” (i.e., by popularity) down the left column – scan that from time to time, and see why so many people visit these particular posts.  There’s also a list of recent posts, further down the left column, and finally links to archives at the bottom of the left column.

You can also look at the tag cloud down the right hand column for tags you are interested in searching on.

Last, but not least, (and one way I actually use my own blog as a reference source) use the search bar just below the header and use the site as you would Google to see what I’ve written about governance, or ITILv3, or social networking, or whatever.

And finally, please feel free to use the comment feature – ask questions, disagree, clarify, debate – engage in the global conversation about IT value realization.

Recession and the Crisis of IT Employee Engagement


prp_cartooncopyI’ve been recently working on a multi-company research project on Managing IT in Recessionary Times.  In support of that project, I have taken advantage of every CIO conversation I’ve had lately (probably at least one such conversation per day for the last month or so) to ask about how this recession is impacting their company and their IT organization in ways that are different from prior economic downturns.

The responses have surprised me – not so much for their content, but for the passion and emotion behind the issue, and the degree to which many of these CIO’s highlighted the same issue as the #1 challenge they were facing that felt quite different this time.  To be clear, there were some exceptions, but the majority have told me that their biggest challenge is engaging their IT talent.  It seems that people are so distracted by the economy, and by fear for their jobs and for their retirement savings, that they were having a hard time knuckling down and doing their jobs.

Is Lack of Employee Engagement Counter-intuitive in a Recession?

On the face of it, I think this is counter-intuitive – you might expect people to really work their hardest and ensure they are “invaluable” in their positions, and should be the last ones to be shown the exit door.  But this is not the case in most IT organizations I have probed on this issue.  The reality in most cases is the fear and concerns for their livelihood are so dominant in many people’s minds that they are having a hard time performing – even though they recognize that this might well be self-defeating.

I’ve used motorcycle analogies before (see Zen, Motorcycles and the Art of Organizational Change Management) and another analogy comes to mind here.  There’s a phenomenon well known to motorcyclists (or at least it should be if they want to live to be old motorcyclists!) called Target Fixation.  Simply stated, a motorcycle tends to go where its rider is looking.  If you are overly focused on an obstacle you want to avoid, there’s a very good chance that you will steer right into it!  (As an aside, my wife and I rented Segway’s a couple of years ago on vacation in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.  It was a great experience, and a wonderful way to cruise the marina – until my wife experienced Target Fixation first hand.  Once she had mastered the Segway (not difficult, but certainly different from just about any other form of transportation) and was feeling comfortable with it, she managed to steer it straight into a tree!  I was a few yards behind her filming our little marina excursion on a camcorder, and I could see exactly what happened – a pure case of Target Fixation, as she saw the tree, and literally steered into it – inexorably fixated on this hard object!)

So, the danger I believe for any of us, is that if you let the economy and the uncertainties dominate your thinking, you will increase your chances of becoming victim to it.  It is what it is – focus on those things you can do, and don’t allow water cooler gossip and the constant drum of recession woes get to you.

(Cartoon courtesy of Zealize Limited.)