At that first race in Richmond, Va., Dallas listened to radio communications between the drivers and their pit crews as they plotted race strategies. What he found, Dallas said in an opening keynote speech at Computerworld's Premier 100 IT Leaders Conference Monday, is that NASCAR teams "are constantly striving to be innovative. They're always looking for an edge."

Corporate IT departments need to adopt the same kind of mentality, said Dallas, who now is CIO at Medtronic Inc., a maker of medical devices in Minneapolis.

And it has to start from the top: "CIOs have to get back to leading," he said, noting that top IT executives need to be able to find creative, intelligent and passionate people within their organizations "and give them air cover so they can go out and be innovative."

Neither part of that equation is easy, according to Dallas. Workers who come up with the best ideas "are usually a pain in the ass," he said. And just having ideas isn't good enough -- employees need to be highly committed to them to make projects work. IT managers have to "learn how to judge the person as well as an idea," Dallas said.

He learned that lesson from Medtronic's CEO, who left Dallas sitting in a waiting room for not one, not two, not three, but four scheduled meetings. When Dallas persisted and requested a fifth meeting, the CEO accepted the request within two minutes.