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How To Throw Away Your Professional Life, And 7 Other Bits From The InformationWeek 500 Conference

Here are eight quotes that caught my ear during presentations and conversations at the InformationWeek 500 conference this week.

1. "People like binary missions."
HP CEO Mark Hurd, saying people would rather focus on cutting costs OR growing revenue. HP needs both, and that's what Hurd says he's demanding.

2. "If you're involved in reasonable projects, you're throwing your professional life away."
Tom Peters, noting that you're not in the laundromat business. Information technology provides the most exciting, most powerful tools in business, so do something that shakes up your business and makes competitors fear you.

3. "IT people often discount the innovation needed to cut cost."
Global Crossing CIO Dan Wagner, drawing on his experience cutting IT spending by 80% over four years when Global Crossing, the No. 4 company on the InformationWeek 500 list, cratered and went into bankruptcy. Too many IT people think the only glory is in new projects with new software and gear.

4. "Hang around with freaky people, and you get more freaky. Hang out with dull people, and you become more dull."
Tom Peters, urging people not to have lunch with the same colleagues every day. Collect odd companions far outside your company, who make sure you keep thinking wild thoughts and don't get stuck in the same thinking.

5. "We're changing our ERP platform to make a fundamental change in how we do business."
No one, actually. Instead, one exec observed to me that at this conference centered around innovation, there was zero talk about big platforms like ERP. Maybe that's because companies are in a waiting mode as all the ERP vendors do major rewrites of their systems, and everyone's in holding mode. Or maybe there's just not that much interest.

6. "Screw around vigorously."
Tom Peters, arguing that innovation isn't a precision science and is in fact pretty much totally random. So your only chance is to keep trying lots of wild ideas and go with the ones that work.

7. "With all the technology we have, we haven't automated very much of it."
HP CIO Randy Mott, noting that the world (including the U.S.) is employing more IT people than ever. His plan is to invest in new systems and software, with a goal of running them with fewer people. Mott intends to cut HP's IT employment to 8,000, down from about 19,000 in the beginning of 2005.

8. "If you're not changing the world, I got a problem with you."
You guessed it--pretty sure you get Tom Peters' point by now.

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