By Alan Radding

What makes CIOs happy? IT organizations precisely aligned with the business? Systems that achieve 99.999 percent uptime? Projects that come in on time and at budget? While these are good goals to strive for, they alone can't make a CIO happy in his or her post, says Tal Ben-Shahar, author, Harvard University lecturer and a proponent of "positive psychology," a study of the strengths and virtues that help people thrive.

For Ben-Shahar, the author of The Pursuit of Perfect: How to Stop Chasing Perfection and Start Living a Richer, Happier Life (McGraw- Hill, 2009), the search for happiness starts with identifying your position on a continuum. Are you more of a perfectionist? Or are you more of what he calls an optimalist, someone who accepts failure and embraces it as a method of change?

"Perfectionists reject failure, and optimalists accept it," he explains. "People who lean more toward optimalism are more likely to be happy, because they're not afraid of failure. They can learn from mistakes, think outside the box and ultimately succeed. The CIO should think about failure as part of a process that leads to success."

Overcoming perfectionism may be difficult, due to years of learning and experience. But making mistakes — and owning up to them — is what sets great managers apart from the merely good, Ben-Shahar says. "Being too focused on perfection can hurt an organization's performance," he explains. "If you're too focused on avoiding failure, you avoid taking the risks needed to score big wins."

Of course, that doesn't mean that the pursuit of perfection is a bad thing. In fact, there are situations where perfectionist tendencies can help a CIO, says Bernard "Bud" Mathaisel, former CIO at Disney and a contributor to The Situational CIO, a paper published by PricewaterhouseCoopers. "At Disney, we were expected to be militarily precise when it came to ride safety systems," says Mathaisel, by way of offering an example. "That's where you want perfectionists."