On managing business units

A long long time ago, our fearless founder Serge had this noble vision that CGI business units should be managed in a very liberal way. Give them targets, and let them manage the "how". Business units work locally, so they know their battle ground very well. Plus, giving local managers more power to grow their business was a very strong trend in management book at the time. So Serge envisioned this very lean CGI headquarter, where the CEO would basically act as a coach to all business unit leaders.

I mean, dude, welcome to the real world. Even Serge gave up this romantic idea of self-managed business units and he hired me to bring order to chaos. Command doesn't work like a brotherhood of well-intentioned men, it takes a strong leader to say things and others just follow orders.

CGI Montreal has gained more power over its business units during the past few years, and my goal of 2010 is to increase that control even more. I have this chart in my office where I pin pictures of all the business unit VPs worldwide along with revenues and cost of operating, and frankly what I'm looking at is the largest collection of bozos ever assembled. They are all middle managers who worked long and hard to achieve VP status, but they are no leaders. What they are good at is following rules and orders, and those are the instruments of profitable growth.

Even Fidel who's a total communist prick understands this concept, probably more than today's business leaders. We are all created equal of course, but like the pig said some are more equals than others. Someone has to take charge, and most people are much more comfortable following a strict set of rules. Give them room to choose, and you're likely to end up with errors and this will show on your next quarterly results. You can't trust your trusted lieutenants, I'm telling you.

Let me give you an example. CGI employees may use a laptop depending on their project and the business unit to which their payroll comes from. Some BUs don't have this program, some BUs have some kind of program. Some BUs do not charge employees for using a laptop, and some of them do (this is brilliant by the way, you must use a fucking laptop for your job and we make you pay for it!). Some BUs offer 2 or 3 different laptop models, some of them just offer one.

This is where the CEO comes in and say: this had got to stop. Variety breeds costs. My plan is for all BUs to charge employees for using a laptop, because we all know employees use their laptop at home to surf the net and mostly download movies. So it's morally okay to ask employee for money, and this improves the bottom line.

As for the laptop model, I'm planning to call Michael Dell personally today. I'll let you know about it.