oct07b1.indd


the way I see it 
S. David Mash 

Reflections of a former CIO 
Leadership
lessons
learned



This year I returned to academic librari­anship after five years as the chief in­
formation officer (CIO) for a small private 
college. For some, CIO is an acronym for 
“career is over.” For me, it is an opportunity 
for a homecoming with more to offer the 
profession I love. I believe I am a better 
librarian because of my half­decade stint in 
the bowels of the machine. My increased 
technical knowledge and the new insights 
I have about the inner workings of an IT 
department will serve me well. But these 
are the lesser part of the fruit of my time 
away from the library. The high­speed, 
high­stakes, sometimes high­profile life as 
a CIO forced me to grapple with important 
matters of leadership with an intensity I 
often would rather have avoided. Yet now 
I would not trade those years for a differ­
ent path. I come away from the experience 
with renewed convictions. 

Leadership defined 
First, leadership is not about power. A 
friend once asked me how it felt, as CIO, 
to be the most powerful person on cam­
pus. I was startled by the question. How 
would I wear this mantle? Over the years 
I remained conscious of the perception of 
power associated with my position. But 
an inner dissonance forced me to face 
the greater question of how power relates 
to leadership and how leadership may 
best be defined. It is my conviction that a 
leader is anyone—regardless of position or 
power—whose moral bearings, relational 
skills, breadth of awareness, and decision­
making practices are admired and emulated 
by others. Someone who occupies a “posi­

tion” of leadership or power, but who lacks 
these qualities, may have subordinates who 
comply and peers who cower, but they will 
not be able to cultivate a sustained com­
mitment to the course they set. 

Second, stakeholder involvement is not 
an optional part of planning or project 
execution. Leaders continually make deci­
sions that affect the daily life and welfare 
of others. This can become so routine that 
a leader might lose an appreciation for 
how his or her decisions weigh on oth­
ers. The demands of planning and project 
completion can make it very diffi cult for 
even the most collegially minded leader 
to contemplate, let alone fully process, 
stakeholder dynamics. But pure motives 
and busy schedules are no excuse for 
unilateralism. 

Leaders who are serious about achiev­
ing sustainable positive change cannot 
dispose of the buy­in and good will that 
only stakeholder involvement can achieve. 
It is my conviction that those who must 
live with the consequences of a decision 
(aka stakeholders) really should have a 
significant and meaningful opportunity to 
influence the decision. Leaders expect this 
for themselves, and the seasoned leader 
will provide it for others. 

Third, strategic planning articulated in 
terms of means instead of ends is a dead 
end process. Ever­present institutional 
stresses make it easy for tactical thinking to 

S. David Mash is director of the L. Mendel Rivers 
Library at Charleston Southern University, e-mail: 
dmash@csuniv.edu 
© 2007 S. David Mash 

C&RL News October 2007  592 

mailto:dmash@csuniv.edu


masquerade as strategic thinking, resulting 
in the accumulation of mere project check­
lists. But IT “strategy” driven by bandwidth, 
wireless coverage, and replacement cycles 
is a dead end. Library “strategy” driven 
by holdings counts, building expansion, 
and digital format migration is a dead 
end. Important means become implacable 
masters when we fail to keep them un­
mercifully subordinated to nobler ideas of 
why, ideas which transcend lemming logic: 
“everybody’s doing it.” 

Of course, inattention to trends may 
be professional malpractice, but follow­
ing trends because they are trends is not 
leadership. In place of counting the num­
ber of chill bumps generated by an idea, 
it is my conviction that planning must be 
disciplined by a compelling “purpose for 
which.” Good ideas that have no explicit 
connection to that purpose are not, in the 
end, good ideas. This purpose will vary 
from context to context but the need for 
such a compass point does not. 

Stephen Bertman has observed that “sup­
ported by an electronic network of instanta­
neous communications, our culture has been 
transformed into a ‘synchronous society,’ a 
nationally and globally integrated culture in 
which the prime and unchallenged directive 
is to keep up with change.”1 I am a daily 
beneficiary of the synchronous society. But 
my life as a CIO was often frenetic and the 
speed of change left little time for refl ection 
despite my conviction that prolonged refl ec­
tion is the soul of leadership. As I return 
to the library, I take to heart the maxim of 
Will Durant, that no man in a hurry is quite 
civilized. I am therefore resolved to spend 
less time fretting over how to catch up with 
the direction the culture is going and more 
time reflecting on where this direction is 
taking us. As a leader, I need to know the 
difference. 

Note 
1. Stephen Bertman, Hyperculture: The 

Human Cost of Speed (Praeger, 1998): 1. 

October 2007  593 C&RL News