The Bizdev Rule that Every CIO Must Know

Seth Godin made an interesting point today in his blog about the Verizon COO who turned down the iPhone.

The words that jumped off the (web)page at me were: "The iPhone/AT&T deal is almost certainly the exception that proves Godin's law of bizdev: No is the default answer. The spreadsheets and the marketing team and the CFO and the lawyers have no trouble at all defending the status quo, because, it's their status quo. They created it and they like it that way."

No truer words have ever been spoken.

And Godin's law of bizdev is the same reason that CIOs face such an uphill battle when it comes to making step-level changes within I.T.

To affect change, you have to convince business leaders that their status quo, is wrong or defective or deficient. You have to convince them, they're wrong.

If you can get by that hurdle, you next have to convince all their people of the same.

And finally, you need to overcome people's natural resistance to ANY change.

I'm willing to bet that an inverse correlation exists between the amount of I.T. change at an organization and the lifespan of a typical CIO.