 Hi, I'm George Claffey, Chief Information Officer for Charter Oaks State College in the Connecticut Distance Learning Consortium, and I'm going to provide you with my top ten things for new CIOs to do. And the first one I suggest is quite easy. Get a candy dish, put it in your office, and fill it up with candy. It's a great way to break ice with new coworkers and even people who don't like candy come in on a bad day. Number two, understand the importance of organizational culture. Every organization has a pulse that goes across the entire organization. Sometimes it's fast and sometimes it's slow. Different factors bring extra pressure or increase the tempo of that pulse. Number three, work in the help desk. One day, each year, every year. You'll be surprised what you find out. Number four, don't be the biggest geek in the room. Leave your laptop in your office, find a tablet or something subtle, but when you bring a laptop to a meeting and you put it in front of you, you create a barrier between you and the other people in that meeting. Number five, don't use your inbox to organize your life. Most of our inboxes have between 100 and 200 items and some have over 500. Find a methodology, find an organizational system. Number six, invest in relationships with your peers. Meet the CFO, meet the provost, understand their language. Learn about profit and loss statements. Learn about five-year graduation rates, retention, and enrollment. Talk to them in their language, not in your language. Number seven, the process of planning is more important than the plan itself. By example, look at your disaster recovery plan. You can have a plan that plans for a hurricane or a flood or a fire, but nine times out of ten, the actual incident that happens will not be what you've planned for. The reality is the process of planning, the tabletop exercises in planning, talking to your other executives about the prioritization of services. Those activities, those relationships, those working groups, that's what you need in a disaster. Number eight, be a student and a teacher. Many colleges and universities allow an individual with a master's degree to be an adjunct faculty, and if your institution does or a nearby institution does, I would encourage you to do that. Be in front of the students that you are providing services for. Number nine, don't build committees, councils, or groups. Look to build teams. Teams are a group of people and they work off each other's strengths. It's not about one superstar in a room and everyone being subservient to them. It's not about some title. It's about five people or 12 people working together. Number 10, spread out the IT responsibility. Part of being the CIO or being a great leader is spreading out some of that responsibility to the people that work for you. Leadership doesn't happen in a vacuum. Become a mentor. Take on a bunch of mentees. Spread out decision-making. Spread out budget allocation. Allow the people that work for you to make decisions. Don't make them in a vacuum.