In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss the people shortage. It isn't real.

Complaining about a lack of people is what is known as a "half argument." You say what you want, but not what you are willing to give up. That's like a politician promising to build a new public hospital but won't say where the money will come from.

The full argument for missing people is "we cannot get the people we want at the conditions we are willing to offer."  If you had a crucial project that will make the business millions of dollars, you would be able to find the resources you need. You could simply offer three times the market rate, full benefits, and a 40-hour workweek with no overtime.

Allocating resources is a basic leadership task. You rank your tasks and projects in order of descending business value and allocate available resources to the most valuable. It doesn't make sense for a CIO to say that the organization is "missing" a hundred programmers. A full argument would be that if we had a hundred extra programmers, we could build a specific IT system that is less valuable than all the current projects.

There might be a real shortage of money or copper or clean water. But there is no shortage of people.

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Beneficial Intelligence is a bi-weekly podcast with stories and pragmatic advice for CIOs, CTOs, and other IT leaders. To get in touch, please contact me at sten@vesterli.com