April 2005 Cutter Benchmark Review: Cultivating Effective Leadership in the IT World

by David R. Caruso and Kerry F. Gentry

Leadership is critical to the success of all enterprises. Nowhere is that need more apparent than in the IT world. IT professionals have a tendency to view their industry -- and themselves -- as somehow different from the rest of the world of human endeavor, and there is a certain misleading truth in this perception. Each industry, each project, and each individual is indeed unique, but unique in its characteristics and context, not in the principles that underlie its descriptive models and paradigms. Especially in the case of leadership, it is important to understand that the capabilities and behavior that separate effective from ineffective or good from bad are universal, becoming IT-centric only at the rather superficial level of situational knowledge. IT, in other words, is a singular but not unique case in the study of leadership.