The vision thing: Are you Steve Jobs or Steve Ballmer?

What’s wrong with Steve Ballmer? Is it the same as what was wrong with Research in Motion’s semi-departed co-CEOs, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie? Does RIM’s new CEO, Thorsten Heins, share the problem? How about Steve Jobs’s successor, Tim Cook?

Most important of all, as an IT professional, do you care?

The answers, in order:

1: Lack of vision.

2: Yes.

3: Probably.

4: It will be very hard to tell.

5. You bet. Steve Ballmer: A lesson in lack of vision

Start with Ballmer. Give the man his due. Under his leadership, Microsoft’s software has made enormous strides in quality and security. Nor are the dings about Microsoft’s inability to innovate entirely fair — SharePoint and Lync (and to a lesser extent, Microsoft Live Meeting) are seriously innovative products. From what I’m able to tell, a lot of innovation is still going into Visual Studio, as well as Azure and Kinect.

The innovation is there. The product quality is there. What’s missing? In a word, storytelling.

Vision is poorly understood. It isn’t about eating a peyote button so that you can wander around admiring the bright colors while saying, “Oh, wow!” under your breath every so often.

It’s about storytelling — creating clear, compelling, easy-to-grasp narratives that answer the most important question anyone has about the products your company has to sell: What’s the point?

Take the SharePoint/Lync/Live Meeting combo. It’s marvelous technology for 21st-century companies with 21st-century workforces and 21st-century management styles — companies that need to support informal collaboration among employees who might be anywhere in the world.

Not that you’d know this from anything Microsoft has said about these products. There’s lots of information about what they do. What’s missing is what they can do for you. That requires the vision to see it and the storytelling skills to explain it.

Microsoft’s missing plot point: Methodology

What also requires vision: When IBM introduced the relational database management system, it introduced a design methodology to go with it — Codd and Date’s famous “12” rules of normalization. (There are actually 13 rules, but they were numbered 0 through 12. This is what passed for humor in IT circles back then.)

Whoever in IBM was responsible for DB2 understood the need for a design methodology, to help customers avoid the pitfall of re-creating the current mess — the then-common ad hoc approach to designing file stores — within the DB2 technology. But it didn’t end with the methodology; they needed the story behind the methodology.

IBM provided two compelling narratives. One was about what the technology could do for a company. The other was about the difference organized data design could make in achieving it.

When Microsoft introduced SharePoint, there was none of that. Roll out SharePoint and you’re rolling out a technology. What you’ll get is the same ad hoc folder tree you started with, an ad hoc list of keywords to go with it, and little else.

SharePoint (and, for that matter, the whole content management industry) needs the equivalent of Codd and Date’s rules, but for unstructured data — an organized way to design taxonomies. Microsoft certainly has the talent to provide one. What’s lacking? The vision to recognize that this should be part of the package.

When a company sells products, its product managers have to be able to envision them thriving in their native habitats, put to relevant use. If the managers can envision that scenario, they can create compelling narratives to make sure everyone understands what the products will help them do that they couldn’t do before and how it will be achieved.

Research in Motion: Execution masquerading as vision

Speaking of visionless leadership, Research in Motion is a case study. Sadly, its new CEO continues the tradition.

Way back when, the earth was young, BlackBerrys were cool, and some of us still used Palm products. BlackBerrys were then a raging success, but with two enormous and very visible weaknesses. The first: Very few BlackBerry users were willing to operate their BlackBerrys as cellphones, due to the form factor, sound quality, and so on. And as those of us who preferred our Palm PDAs knew, you could buy apps for the Palm platform, but very few for the BlackBerry.

Even without the Jobsian level of vision they’d have needed to design an iPhone-like device, it would have taken relatively little effort back then for RIM to make its gadgets more engaging as cellphones and to build an apps market for them. What was lacking?

Lazaridis and Balsillie were Henry Ford’s intellectual heirs. Ford had the vision to create the Model T, but lacked the vision to understand that it was the first step in the evolution of the automobile, not the last. Having had his one idea, he kept on repeating it, over and over again. Lazardis and Balsillie did the same.

As for their successor Thorsten Heins, I sure hope he was just being coy when he said what RIM has to do is execute better. If he’s serious, I know who RIM needs to execute.

So far as I can tell, RIM has one shot left. It must leverage the only product it has that’s still competitive: BlackBerry Enterprise Server. If it figured out a way to add integration plug-ins for “foreign” smartphones and tablets — that’s iOS, Android, and Windows 8-driven mobile devices — it could survive as an infrastructure company. Its phones and tablets? It might as well stop manufacturing them. It won’t sell any either way.

Apple: Succession or failure

Which brings us to Tim Cook. I don’t know the guy. We don’t hang out in the same circles. His background is ops, which isn’t promising, but doesn’t have to be crippling. His bigger challenge is that Apple’s business model was built around Steve Jobs. Cook won’t be able to fill every role Jobs played at Apple, which means he’ll have to find an organizational solution that transfers responsibility for a lot of Jobs’s duties to other sources.

Dividing roles previously held by a single individual adds overhead and generally delays decision making; things that used to happen inside someone’s head now have to be realized through consensus. Steve Denning perceptively points out that one of Jobs’s most important roles was Apple’s Scrum-like product owner. More than any of his other roles, that one required his vision.

Maybe Cook has it; maybe he’ll be able to delegate it. Luckily for Cook, even if he doesn’t make it work he’ll be able to coast for a long time on existing momentum. Especially with Apple’s secretive culture, we’ll have a very hard time knowing.

The bottom line: IT leadership requires good stories What does all of this have to do with you? One way or another, you’re an IT leader. You might be by title. You might not. But if you read this blog on a regular basis, you have an interest in the subject and probably not just to help you survive the managers you report to.

How can you tell if you’re a leader? It’s simple — others follow your lead. That’s what the word means. And if you want others to follow your lead, you have to be able to explain where you think they should be going. That’s true whether you’re responsible for your company’s SharePoint rollout, for an ERP module upgrade, for building out a private cloud, or for taking your company into the public cloud.

Whatever it is you’re responsible for, you must have the vision to see it in action before it’s built, then to share the motion picture in your head so that everyone else can see it too.

It isn’t the sum and substance of leadership. It isn’t even where leaders should spend most of their time and effort. It is, however, the indispensable beginning for everything else that follows.

This story, “The vision thing: Are you Steve Jobs or Steve Ballmer?,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bob Lewis’s Advice Line blog on InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.