New York News
The new year brings with it enthusiasm for new priorities and accomplishments to come, resolutions to seize opportunities and overcome challenges, and the opportunity to assess takeaways from the previous year and turn the page on projects and missteps past.
In the ideal beginning of the year scenario, organizations would have completed celebrating and cerebrating on accomplishments of the previous year and performing forensic root cause analyses of the smattering of initiatives that failed to meet expectations. Now, rolling into Q1 with heads held high and bursting with confidence, the enterprise should be enthusiastically embarking on programs designed to realize the full promise of explicitly articulated goals and objectives.
This, however, is not the situation in many — probably most — IT and digital organizations today.
Having just completed my walkabout of the C-suite in 12 vertical markets, I have found that the three words most frequently used to describe the general attitude toward 2023 were “uncertainty,” “headwinds,” and “conservative.” This has led me to conclude that the No. 1 job of IT and digital leaders in 2023 is to “un-cancel” the future. They have to get their organizations to believe and behave as if 2023 is going to be better than 2022.
Navigating a tsunami of macro-pessimisms
The general message from a multiplicity of disciplines is lack of hope and optimism. “Doom Porn” — for example, books resembling Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb and Nouriel Roubini’s MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, And How to Survive Them — continues to top non-fiction best seller lists.
Forecasters at my former hangout, The World Bank, tell us that growth will be a less than breathtaking 1.7%. My classmate at Carnegie Mellon, hedge-fund manager-extraordinaire David Tepper, told CNBC viewers that t