What lessons can the popular video game "Angry Birds" teach IT leaders? According to Daniel W. Rasmus--who has found enough time to become one of the top 300 players on a free iPad version of the game--Angry Birds offers great insight for dealing with angry IT employees. Here are five of 10 lessons Rasmus presents in a post at CIO.

The first lesson is that you have to play to understand the game. To figure out a technology's risks and opportunities, CIOs need to engage with it and let employees try it out in the workplace. As Rasmus can testify, the more one engages, the more adept one becomes at the game.

Like any given angry bird, any given IT staffer offers unique talents, and those talents have to be recognized to be exploited. A CIO should play the role of "Chief Talent Manager, by helping people find the right balance between passion and organizational need," Rasmus writes.

If things get off on the wrong foot in an Angry Birds game, it is better to restart than try to recover, and IT projects follow a similar pattern. "Experienced Angry Birds players can tell from the micro-second the first bird leaves the launcher if they are on the road to a higher score or a waste of time," Rasmus writes. "CIOs share this intuition about what is and isn't working, but they still let people fumble through projects that elicit no passion, try to deploy technology in the wrong place at the wrong time, still let technology try to overcome cultural momentum."

Making effective changes requires targeted strategy in both Angry Birds and in IT environments. "You can't just fiddle with a solution in the corner and hope that it will disburse throughout the organization," writes Rasmus. "It takes a clear understanding of organizational physics to make change stick."

Exponential improvements are rare, and Angry Birds teaches that you benefit from being patient and accepting incremental advances. IT teams are mostly likely to make incremental improvements in performance, and if they are already high performing, it is very difficult to improve on them.

For more:
- see Daniel W. Rasmus' post at CIO

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