Leadership1 publisher2 min readPublished
An incoming tech chief opened with a 12-month list of what he would not change
Eight technology executives writing for a Forbes council put a new CIO's first weeks into inventory and listening, and one of them wrote his boundary down: the things he promised not to change for a year.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
What happened
- Forbes Technology Council published advice from eight named technology executives on what incoming CIOs and CTOs should do before launching a major initiative or overhauling existing systems.
- Jeetendra Gangele of BluePill said his first move in the job was to write a list of what he would not change for 12 months.
- Marcin Nowak of Decerto said he has worked with insurance carriers where one small change took six to nine months to reach production and nobody on the leadership team knew that number.
- Anna Drobakha of Groupe SEB said a new leader should audit their own use of AI in decisions, briefings and preparation before studying the organization.
- Adarsh Naidu of Amazon Web Services said the strongest opening move is one-on-ones with engineering leads, business unit heads and frontline teams, doing far more listening than talking.
Compiled by The Board RoomSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- decision The first artefact a new technology chief shows upward is a choice between a transformation thesis and an inventory of what is already running, and the contributors would show the inventory.
- constraint Until somebody measures how long one small change takes to ship, every date in the new executive's roadmap is untested, and it is the executive's own credibility riding on those dates.
- exposure Retiring a system that looks obsolete can break a workaround nobody documented, and the leader who ordered the change owns the failure in their first months.
- contradiction The contributors do not agree on where the opening weeks go: Drobakha would spend them on the leader's own AI practice, while Jain would give the whole quarter to the inherited estate.
A list of what will not change is cheap to write and expensive to break. Jeetendra Gangele, at BluePill, said the resistance a new leader meets is not about the idea itself: "People are not resisting your idea. They are protecting their peace. Trust is cheaper to buy before the change than after." [3] A roadmap can be rewritten in a Monday review without anyone outside the room noticing. A dated commitment to leave named systems alone sits on the record, and breaking it is visible to everyone who read it.
Marcin Nowak's figure is the one number in the roundup with a scale attached, and it caps the first promise. He said measuring how long one small change takes to reach production (a rate table, a business rule, a new field on a form) tells a new leader more about what can realistically be promised than any architecture review or vendor assessment. That measurement should come before the roadmap commitment [4][6]. Set that against how Nidhi Jain of CloudEagle.ai described the standard arrival: "Most new CIOs come in with a transformation thesis and a 90-day plan." [7] Six months is twice ninety days; nine months is three times it [17]. On those numbers, the first change a new executive commits to in week one reaches production somewhere in the second or third quarter of the tenure.
The credibility risk is specific. Osborn Gomes said, "New leaders can lose credibility by fixing the visible technology before understanding the invisible dependencies around it." [9] His method was to trace a few critical systems, processes and workarounds back to the business decisions that created them. Something that looks outdated may be solving a problem nobody wrote down [10].
The freeze list commits a new executive to leaving named systems alone. It does not commit them to leaving those systems unexamined. Gangele described a list of what he would not change [2], and that leaves room for the work Jain recommended: "The best first move is quiet: Spend the first quarter finding out what is really there." [8]
This is advice from an invitation-only council [14], and Nowak's carriers are the only measurement in it. Dzmitry Lubneuski of a1qa framed the same choice as cost, preparation now against money and nerves spent on corrections later [16]. None of the eight puts a number on the damage done by moving early. The case for the quiet quarter rests on one delivery-time figure and on eight executives' accounts of what they wish they had done first [15].
What to watch
- Whether any contributor publishes their own organisation's time-to-production figure, which would turn Nowak's carrier anecdote into a comparable number.
- Whether boards begin asking an incoming CIO for the inherited-systems inventory at the first quarterly review instead of a 90-day plan.
- Whether the freeze-list practice appears anywhere with dates and named systems attached, so it can be checked against what actually stayed.