[0:45] What made Mike realize he had to move companies to be successful?

• I was hired by my previous company to build them a house. Now that the house is built, they needed someone to shovel the sidewalks and that wasn’t me.
• I wasn’t a director because I was an executive, it was because I built everything.
• There was no annual review and no budget it was a case of begging for money or begging for forgiveness afterward.

[04:55] Did you measure results?

• I assumed the way to show value was to be the can-do, never say no guy.
• That’s good for the business but not for you or the work that you do. They get gourmet IT all the time.
• I listened to your episode with Greg Altman where he talked about the difference between pressure and stress and wrote to him about it.

[07:19] So we need to hold back the gourmet service for when they pay for it?

• I dropped out of college, started an ISP in the 90s, then went into consulting, then met my wife, got a help desk job, and worked my way up so I did things backward. That’s how I came to learn what I know now.

[09:00] You said the organization had you believing stuff about yourself that’s just not true, that is something important not just for people in IT but in life.

• The perception of value is skewed, people tend to think what’s easy is hard and vice versa.
• Setting up servers is easy but adding a field to a canned report isn’t.
• IT is never treated like a business partner but a vending machine. People come with solutions, not problems.

[15:00] Where’s the disconnect? Where are you at fault for not setting the right expectations?

• A lot of it has to do with personalities.
• After I had taken a 2-day strike to make them realize the value of IT I realized we never talked. The last time I had spoken to the boss was a month prior through a message in Teams.

[17:27] At least you were using Teams.

• That was one where I decided to push that out to everyone as a valuable tool and was told to stop immediately, then work from home hit.

[18:00] IT leaders need to take responsibility for their level of communication because no one else will.

• We do, there were weekly one on ones where I said I get the feeling I’m not meeting your expectations. I want to and I want to exceed them. It was acknowledged that they were never set but nothing happened beyond that.
• It was always short-lived and the engagement would stop.

[20:00] Why did it stop? Did you see the scope for further IT engagement there?

• I never got an answer.
• I saw so many opportunities for further IT implementation.
• Through my learning I realized the only thing I didn’t have to make it as a leader was engagement from my leaders.

[21:49] It sounds like an issue with a perception of value and communication issues.

• A lot of what we do is EDI between third party, vendor, and trading partner. I learned more about it to bring in-house and we went from 40% to 90% of all transactions through EDI.
• All it did was give them another stick to beat me with. I still had to do all my other things now as well.

[23:40] If you’d known me back then I would have done it for free.

• Part of my strike was trying to get them to outsource some of my work.
• When you have no communication with your leadership, you don’t know where you stand. There was always anxiety. The only time I felt job security was when I told my boss I wanted to leave.

[30:00] Have you seen the PNL for the company? What percentage of operating costs does IT take up? And, how much of the company lives and dies by IT?

• It’s less than 3% that’s for sure.
• Without IT everything crumbles.

[33:00] It’s always a numbers game, imagine how much more could be done with even 15 more.

• Measuring ROI, etc. should be easy.
• IT is always thought of last.