About the Authors

Before becoming a recognized industry pundit (RIP), Bob Lewis amassed five years of experience researching the behavior of electric fish and, more broadly, sociobiology, followed by ten years of experience applying the knowledge he’d gained by working in what’s often called the “real world.” This took the form of a variety of staff, management, and leadership roles, including stints in information technology, product development, manufacturing analysis, and modeling.

Twenty-two years of writing and consulting followed, resulting in quite a lot of direct and indirect knowledge and experience about what makes some organizations more effective than others, and how to get from here to there without pretending people will behave how we’d like them to behave, just because we’d like them to.

When InfoWorld was a print publication, Bob was one of its most popular columnists; his “IS Survival Guide” reached an estimated 250,000 readers per week and received a silver medal from the ASBPE, West Coast chapter. Counting this, his InfoWorld blog Advice Line (which received a bronze medal from the same organization), various feature stories published in InfoWorld and CIO, and his own Keep the Joint Running column/blog, he’s published a dozen books (including this one) and more than 1,600 columns on business strategy, leadership, organizational effectiveness, and how to integrate information technology into all of the above and more.

Dave Kaiser started his IT career at the ripe age of nineteen at industry-leading Control Data, which ceased to exist just a few years later. He has twenty-three years of experience in IT leadership and is currently the CIO of a Midwest-based insurance company.

His focus has been leading people, establishing a healthy corporate culture, process engineering, software development, and providing superior customer experiences through information technology. He is a strong believer in using smaller teams to deliver faster results that also happen to be on-budget, something that somehow seems unusual in today’s corporate world.

Dave has presented at numerous industry conferences in a wide range of subjects, from software development trends to predictive analytics. He is also the cofounder and past CEO of the charitable SFM Foundation, which is in its eleventh year of granting scholarships to the children of workers severely injured in the workplace.