Career / Interviews

How does the recruiting industry work?

Harvard professor Howard Gardner says it is possible to get others to see things differently; but it takes perseverance and finesse.

It's commonly believed that the more time we devote to a project, the better the results. Not so. Wharton professor Maurice Schweitzer tells Stephanie Overby how CIOs can correct "input bias" and stop confusing quantity with quality

Author Nicholas Carr and CIO (US) editor in chief Abbie Lundberg go toe-to-toe on the strategic value of IT

Three questions for Larry Bossidy, co-author of Execution: the Discipline of Getting Things Done.

Hosting the Australian Open might sound glamorous, but for Tennis Australia it also means coping with the mother of all seasonal spikes.

And there he was there in force, kicking off the first-day keynote, meeting with a covey of clients and going "one-on-one" in the advisory sessions, all of which left him a bit hoarse, but no less vocal, during an interview with CIO - one of a handful he gave during his visit.

Corporate executives have a hard time executing their business strategies because they just aren't tough enough, says strategic planning expert C Davis Fogg. A US-based consultant to blue-chip companies and the author of <i>Implementing Your Strategic Plan</i> (Amacom, 1999), Fogg says strategic plans flop because executives don't follow through. They fail to lead. They fail to hold their employees - or themselves - accountable for results.

Wal-Mart is big. To understand just how big, consider that on November 23, 2001, the 40-year-old retailer sold more than $US1.25 billion worth of goods in a single day. The company has 4457 stores, 30,000 suppliers, annual sales of more than $US217 billion - and one information system. According to CIO Kevin Turner, running centralised IS with home-grown, common-source code gives Wal-Mart a competitive advantage and helps the company maintain one of the lowest expense structures in retail.

Now that every company on the planet is trying to automate the relationship between suppliers and customers, it's worth remembering who invented this stuff more than 20 years ago: Procter & Gamble. Specifically, teams of business and IT people led in 1980 by P&G brand manager Duane Weeks (who now runs his own software company, Exemplary) and in 1987 by Ralph Drayer, P&G's vice president of customer services (who now runs his own consulting company, Supply Chain Insights).

Keith Power talks to the former CIOs of US retail giants Wal-Mart and Lowe's about the benefits their IT strategies delivered.