Leadership is support....

Do you feel like calling your boss when you are in a problem hoping he is there for you?


In my opinion, leadership is about the support you can provide to the community that you touch upon - your team, your customer, your vendor, etc, when they need you.


I want to take an example of one of my colleagues, who is basically an account manager. His role doesn't demand him to fix a java or a shell script, but in case of one, I feel like reaching out to him. His role doesn't demand him to take care of low quality conference bridge issues. But in case of one, I reach out to him. And he does all this without a fuss. For me, he is a leader.


I know whom to reach out in case of an issue. Are you one of that kind? A supportive leader or a tyrant boss.

Working with your competitors...

The IT Services business is very very tricky. And to win business, you are supposed to do anything...


You need to stay competitive. And you need to stay with competition...


The latter part is a very unusual situation when you are supposed to work with competition to deliver value to the customer. Now, how do you do that? You would have won the deal against the same competition and post that you need to work along with them. 


To give an example, take a Manufacturing services company getting serviced by multiple IT service vendors. Nothing unusual about it. Now, typically in a datawarehousing project, the data is pulled from multiple sources and then integrated into a datawarehouse and then reported from this environment into a presentation layer. 


We have 3 distinct ecosystems- sources, data-warehouse & presentation. Now, if each ecosystem is driven by a separate IT services vendor, and all 3 of them compete against each other for every project, how can you expect harmony to exist between the 3, which will naturally flow into the application that is getting built. 


Lot of times, projects get delayed not by the team performance, but purely by such strange de-risking practices followed by organizations to make the competitors work together. They never can. There will always be the line where information sharing will be seen as an "evil act".