Tag Archive for: Leadership

Why I Don’t Believe In Recruiters

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Recruiters are tools…on every level.

 

In case you haven’t noticed, I have a modest disdain for consultants and professionals who come from the “say anything” philosophy of life; I wrote on that here. Spin is a bad thing, confronting the elephants in the room is a good thing, and it’s really that simple.  In this case, I’m going to take it to a whole new level of hate, but that’s just in the spirit of keeping it real.

The title of this article is an homage of sorts to an aggressively atheist song by Art Alexakis of the band Everclear titled “Why I Don’t Believe in God.” In that lyric, Alexakis recounts scenes from a troubled childhood that sapped his ability to believe in anything related to God.  It’s one of those challenging thoughts that we all need at times:  Is our hatred of something related to bad people and experiences or related to a really bad game?

In this case, I’m going to hate on the game, and the players get their dose as well–all based on my subjective experience.

Sometime around 1995, I was deeply entrenched in an upper division football program at my university (yes, mine!). For anyone who doesn’t know, college football is all about the ability to recruit top talent.  “It ain’t the x’s and the o’s, it’s the Jimmys and the Joes” is how it’s been put in one form or another for a long time–meaning a great team comprises great players, no matter the scheme.

In that world, recruiting matters deeply.  Finding the right talent and convincing “it” to come to your football program are the two foundational moves of a healthy program.  It’s not the only thing, but it’s close.

So, one evening at dinner with the team, one of the assistant football coaches gets up from the table and says bluntly, “I need to go lie to some kids.”

He meant, of course, that he needed to go make the telephone calls to budding high school stars that assistant coaches were obliged to make. He needed to go “lie to some kids” about their ability to be better than the incumbent players, right away and on their way to stardom right now. Oh, and by the way, we really care about you and would never try to over-recruit your talent while you’re playing for us.  Just sign on the line, and forget about those other programs.

It was a thoroughly funny statement at the time.  After all, we were all elite players in a good program who had made our choices. In that world, it is the rare player who leaves a team.  And we liked this coach.  But, wow, the truth.

Fast forward 15 years, and that same group of budding football stars is now met with a plethora of headhunters.  The interesting part is that the recruiting pitch is hardly any different. “We have opportunities here.” “The career advancement potential is outstanding.” “The prior guys just didn’t have the horsepower.” “The company is on the upswing.” “We have no internal talent to fill this role.” “The prior fella just left to pursue other opportunities.” You know the drill–lie to some kids.  Only, in this case, it’s “stroke seasoned professionals with a shaded version of reality that could be construed as misleading.”

So, what happens?  Well, two things.  First, the headhunter gets paid, and second, you take the role and, as they say in the auto business, your mileage varies.  Recruiters, like stock touts and sports agents, have almost no stake in your success; their stake is in your decision.  Always be careful when dealing with anyone who only cares about your decision and not your health or success.

So, now we are down to it: Why I don’t believe in recruiters and what to do about it.

I don’t believe in recruiters because I believe the agency issues are real.  They have an incentive to lie, distort, and cheat to convince both sides of a transaction that the placement is good.  And they are doing it at the individual level; they are dealing with lives. The worst among them are no better than a Boiler Room broker dialing for dollars, except in this case, it’s dealing with entire livelihoods, not just components of someone’s savings.  The best among them know that score and go to work feeling icky every day.

Oooh, lie, distort, cheat?  Those are big, bad words, aren’t they? Well, yes, but just like Art Alexakis’s lyric on disbelieving, it’s my experience that leads me to the thought.  I have been on the client side, the candidate side, and  the observer side of headhunter transactions.  I have also witnessed the most corrupt personal ethics from individuals steeped in this profession.

That’s why I don’t believe in recruiters.

So, what is a corporate executive to do about it?

Well, the most important thing to know is that your best talent prospects already know everything I just wrote above.  They won’t be fooled by the players or the game.  You need to get ahead of that if you, in fact, have a great opportunity for them. Every recruiter from LA to New York will have already tried to pry them from their current roles with promises of candy canes and jelly beans.  You need to cut the crap and tell them why yours is the place to be.  Stop relying on recruiters; everybody knows they’re salespeople.  Sell the virtues of your company from the inside–don’t outsource it.

The second thing is to use recruiters for what they are: Market makers. They are exceptionally valuable in that role.  They are tools in your toolkit.

The third thing is to be aware of the perverse tendency of really great headhunters to embed and distort talent needs.  I’ve never met a headhunter who was good at assessing whether a company actually needed a certain type of talent.  I’ve also never met a headhunter who really wanted to know the company’s talent landscape; that’s the company’s job. But I have met really great relationship recruiters who convince executives that they are strategic partners. Here’s the test for you: How many times have your recruiters asked you to assess your internal people’s resumes (no ethical recruiter would try to share a client’s talent with their other clients, right?) to compare to the external candidates you are hiring? Very rarely, I’ll bet.

This post is all about the tendency of a certain professional niche to produce people and actions of questionable moral caliber. If you know this, and ensure that you are sufficiently isolated from it, you can make use of professional recruiters in the right way.  If not, you’ll just be another heavily stroked senior executive who was fooled by the game. Use recruiters, but don’t let them represent you.

Recruiters are tools…on every level.

It Ain’t What You Put Into It That Counts

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A foolish focus on the inputs can endanger your strategy, company, and career.

 

Have you ever heard someone say something like,  “I’ve worked 75 hours this week.” (Of course you have.)

Have you ever heard a manager or business leader expound on the dollars spent on something?  “We’ve spent ten million dollars on implementing this effort.”

Have you ever seen an approach to business strategy that focused solely on the available inputs?  “We have two factories, the strategy has to focus on those.”

Worse, have you ever witnessed an approach to strategy that only focused on organization, infrastructure, or edifices?  “Let’s build it and then figure it out.”

I’m betting you’ve seen at least one of these.

And really, what’s wrong with focusing on how much work you’ve done, or the money you’ve spent, or the assets you have in place today, or the capital you could deploy tomorrow? Here’s what:  They are all inputs.

A strategy, whether for wars, countries, companies, or individual careers, is about ends, outcomes, objectives.  A strategy without an objective is a dance.  It can be beautiful, but it is ultimately just a play…kabuki at its finest.

When “being strategic” means focusing on the hours you’ve worked or the dollars you’ve spent, you’ve probably already lost the battle.  Why?

For the professional individual, a focus on how many hours you’ve spent doing your job is frankly just silly.  I have a healthy respect for people who work hard; I really appreciate it.  However, if a person works an 80-hour work week when a smarter person would work only 50 and get the same result, why is the input of 80 hours relevant?  When people start to focus on time, particularly in knowledge work roles (we aren’t talking the factory floor here, folks), the organization will suffer.  It usually signals a transition in the conversation from the “responsibilities” of a role–generate an output that has value–to the “rights” of the individuals–work a reasonable work day.  The conversation for an individual ought to be about the product of the work, not the time spent doing it.

A wise senior leader of a global consultancy I know well once told me, “If you can’t consistently do this job in 60 hours a week, you may not be smart enough for the job in the first place.”  That’s a pretty interesting perspective.  A true pro focuses on the outputs of their work and negotiates the resources to ensure the right output at a reasonable input of their own resources.

For companies and senior leaders, the problem is a little different.  Business strategy is about deploying resources to achieve an objective.  Some senior leaders are exceptionally good at these sorts of things without even thinking about it, but some, frankly, are not.  The ones who are not good at it tend to use strategic planning as a reductionist exercise to meet “non-strategic” objectives–budget numbers, financial incentives, etc.–that in all reality don’t tie to the health of the company as a whole. A focus on inputs at a company level usually comes in the form of binding constraints that aren’t really constraints at all.

Instead of asking the question, “What would it take to win that account from that competitor?”, they say, “How can Ralph from accounting take on this new sales role and try to get some wins?”  When hunting elephants, bring enough gun.

To wit, managers use only the talent and capabilities they have today in thinking about their business strategies.  They focus only on the financial resources they have at this moment to achieve their objectives.  They allow themselves to focus on optimizing their existing pie charts of businesses, assets, resources, talent, etc. vs. thinking about what the future pie can look like.  In other words, they focus on the inputs.

So what?  

For yourself, watch out for a creeping sense of martyrdom about how much you put into your job; instead, focus on what’s coming out of it.  Shift the focus to results attained and only then zoom in on what it would take to sustain them.

For your company?  This is tougher.  First, management teams have to articulate practical business objectives for a strategy to be real.  “Take hill 1221 from the enemy” is a strategic objective; “cover 2500 meters and burn only 5,000 gallons of fuel” is not.  Yet we allow companies to run on goals and metrics (or budgets) that look like the latter, and in some cases, they operate with management not even knowing what hill to take.

All this is to say that it’s healthy to ask yourself whether you are too focused on the inputs of your strategy and not enough on the outputs.  It is not, however, to say that constraints don’t matter; constraints are important, and they should be reflected in any strategy.  To use my analogy above, a strategy that says “Take hill 1221 from the enemy using only a cigarette lighter, five rubber bands, and a Daisy bb gun” is what I would call a good start toward revising your objectives.

On hill 1221, that might get you killed.  In your company, such ignorance of constraints might just get you fired.  It’s the strategist’s job (and we are all strategists at some level) to balance strategic objectives with degree of difficulty and possible resources (not resources on hand…important distinction, that).

A foolish focus on the inputs can endanger your strategy, company, and career.

Now, if you’ve come this far, take a moment to leave a comment.  Hundreds of people read this blog, and your insights matter. 

 

Where The Money Is Made…

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Do you reward those who make the money or those who posture for it?

 

Operation Red Wings was a not-so-obscure military operation in the mountains of Afghanistan.  It started on June 27th, 2005 with the insertion of a SEAL reconnaissance team onto the side of a mountain near the suspected location of an Afghan insurgent leader. After circumstances that were made famous in a book and by Hollywood, 3 of the 4 SEALs were killed, along with 8 SEALs and 8 Special Operations aviation team members who were sent to rescue the original SEAL team when their helicopter was shot down. Marcus Luttrell became the famous Lone Survivor of the original 4 SEALs in this episode, as documented in his book and in the subsequent movie.

And yet…

In late June and early July 2005, I was completing a particularly challenging consulting engagement and then taking two weeks off to enjoy some paternity leave surrounding the birth of our second child.  I bet I complained about the long hours and the hardships I had to endure with a newborn in the house while I padded around in sock feet and drank the coffee of my choice while enjoying my air-conditioned house in Dallas, TX and my paid leave from a challenging but all-in-all cushy job as a consultant at a global firm.

Anybody see the irony, yet?

Somewhere, there is a fight going on.  You might be in the middle of it, and you might not.  It’s being carried out on your behalf, and you might not even know it.

In a recent conversation with a finance lead of a very strong business I work with, we came to an agreement on something.  The money isn’t made by the spreadsheet jockeys or the executives: It’s made by the gang who’s making product on the shop floor and the salespeople who are making sure the customer is happy and buying.

In other words, there’s a fight going on.  Somebody is out there sacrificing their own time and talent on behalf of the company, just like you, except if they don’t do their work today, there is no tomorrow. Perhaps we ought to acknowledge that.

What’s the implication here?  It’s nothing new really, but it is important. For all of us who live our lives off of the derivatives and commissions of real value, it’s important to stop and ask whether we are enabling value creation or hindering it.

I can hear it now:  “Oh, silly consultant… how could I as an executive be hindering value creation?  Look how much they pay me!”

Well maybe, just maybe, you are being paid for what you positioned for, not what you’re worth; it happens.  Usually it happens to other people, not to you (that is, I’ve never met someone who would admit they are overpaid–only a few people who admit their jobs were easy).

Yet there are innumerable vain corporate initiatives that create ungodly productivity taxes for organizations without really creating any value. I’m looking at you, activity-based accountants and demanders of the 90-page board report that nobody reads; they are everywhere.  Often, they are directed by people who enjoy plenty of time in their sock feet drinking the coffee of their choice while those who are in the fight struggle a world away. Except that a world away in instances like this could be just on the other side of the wall on the shop floor, or around the corner in the sales office.

I recognize that it’s a little bit strained to compare people who are struggling to get product off the dock or to make the next sale to Navy SEALs fighting in Afghanistan, but the imperative is the same.  Whether we’re talking about citizenship in a free society or our own work as executives, managers, and analysts, somebody out there is fighting on your behalf, and you’ll be a better pro if you recognize it.

So, do you reward those who make the money or those who posture for it?

 

 

The Force of Fewer in Strategy

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Fewer words, initiatives, metrics, and complexities just might unlock your strategy.

 

Did you know that Dr. Seuss wrote The Cat in the Hat using only 236 different words?

Amazing, isn’t it?

But, there’s more to the story. Dr. Seuss’s publisher bet him that he couldn’t write a book using only 50 words.

Seuss’s response?

Green Eggs and Ham. That’s one of the best-known children’s books of all time.

The moral to the story is that few can be good, and fewer can be masterful. This applies to our professional lives as well. How?

Well, if you read my stuff, you already know that I have a healthy skepticism for what I’ll call “one thingism.”  In an earlier post linked here, I used an old movie scene to set off the notion that strategies formed around “one thing” like earnings growth or engaged culture fall short of the richness needed.

But holy cow, how often we over-complicate things.  To wit:

I know professionals who have more than 15 direct reports. It’s a striking executive who can care for and nourish 15 people who all look to her for guidance.  In fact, I have still not met one.

I know people who go through every day with meetings non-stop. I’m one of them. Even when I have days without meetings, I feel naked and go schedule a few. That’s not all bad, but fewer meetings would still work.

I know of strategists who build strategies with more than 20 “key” initiatives.

I know of boards who try to manage 20 “key” metrics.

I know of CEOs who believe that the obfuscation of reporting on many business lines is superior to the clarity of a few themes.

I know of managers who write job descriptions with so many “prime” directives as to be unintelligible.

We can go on and on about fewer when it comes to professional life and strategy. While some of us are sitting around thinking about our professional lives as a massive, thousand-page tome like Atlas Shrugged, others of us are thinking The Cat in the Hat.

Me? I prefer Green Eggs and Ham, and a relentless drive for fewer.

The answer is not “one thing,” but it just might be only a few.

If I were to write a strategy for the world, a few words would work.  Why won’t only a few work for your business strategy? Fewer words, initiatives, metrics, and complexities just might unlock your strategy.

When Engagement Won’t Save You

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Engagement is important, but it can’t solve everything…

 

In the world of enlightened strategic leadership, the topic of employee engagement comes up.

A lot.

But, like so many good ideas in the world ranging from fried foods to financial derivatives, it has to be taken in moderation and in context with other good things.  Why?

Well, employee engagement is, at some level, a luxury.  Sure, there’s a base level of dignified square dealing that a company has to provide to maintain its employee base.  But, the actions that go toward fostering an engaged workforce or an engaged team can be dangerous in the wrong circumstances.

What circumstances are those?

First of all, it’s very, very tough to engage yourself out of a hole. Hard situations require hard decisions made by small groups.  The best Scandinavian consensus driven managers know that when hard times hit, engagement has to take a back seat. Deciders have to decide.  If your company is failing and you are surveying your employees, maybe you aren’t focused on the right things.

Second of all, engagement activities won’t work for you if you are disingenuous about them.  You can have all the free lunches and free snack bars you want, but if people think they are being played, your engagement strategies won’t make you Google…ever!  If you are offering a free t-shirt to your employees and they are spun up about your corporate jet and ten-thousand dollar watch, engagement strategies can backfire.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, focusing on engagement as a way of ignoring your strategic elephants is a bad thing. If you go rah rah when everybody else knows you should be hunkered down, you will look like the fool.  Good work forces appreciate honesty.

And perhaps that the point here.  Employee engagement is absolutely strategic, but it won’t “win” for you any more that a fantastic marketing campaign can win without a fantastic product.  In fact, just like marketing, it can backfire on you.

If your employee engagement plan is merely a topical salve or the business equivalent of whistling past the graveyard, re-think it!

You can’t engage yourself or your company out of a hole.

The Pain Of Mourning Alone…

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It’s the death you mourn alone that hurts the most.

 

I have to warn you up front: this one is going to read more like a philosophy statement and less like a statement on leadership or strategy than my usual posts. I hope you’ll understand.

A year or so ago, I had a conversation with a crusty, tough, absolutely stoic executive. He had completed countless restructurings, fired and hired multitudes of people, and extracted value from untold situations that others might not have been able to find. He had been through many tough times as an individual and as a professional, and I had never seen him respond with any emotion, much less sadness.

And then he told me about the death of his dog, and he crumbled. He told me what a mess he was at the death of his longtime companion, how he had been reduced to tears at even the thought of losing his pup. It was enough to make me go home and contemplate…

Without resorting to psychoanalysis of this particular case, let me just put it this way: It’s plausible to say that the most acute pain one can feel is the pain of mourning alone, the pain of not having others to share grief with. It’s the pain that nobody else can understand, because they never experienced the subjective joy that has been lost.

But why write about this on the blog of a strategy consulting firm? Good question. I’ll give you two examples of why this lonesome mourning is relevant to top-level strategists and executives. First though, let me let you in on a secret:  Senior executives have to deal with many lonely circumstances.  Understanding that executives mourn completely alone on some topics is tantamount to understanding their role in the world; to those below, the CEO looks like he has it all, but you may not know what he’s dealing with behind the scenes.

What?  No way.  You’d take a half-mil a year to be lonely any time, am I right? Well, sure.

Maybe.

But suppose that behind the scenes, your board or your CEO is actively working toward removing you from your position in the firm; while you’re conducting your day-to-day duties both pleasant and not, you know there’s a target on your back, and no one else does. Maybe some of you would be perfectly comfortable with having to glad-hand and present to the crowd of employees while knowing that your board or CEO is in the process of seeking your silent ouster, but some of you would not.  Either way, the emotional work required to maintain “state” duties while being silently attacked is an example of the emotional work of mourning in solitude.  That is, it’s a pain unlike any other, and part of it is that you’re experiencing that pain alone. The more you as the executive like your role and your team, the harder it will be for you to go through this alone.

In addition, the (solitary) pain for you increases the more ham-handed your board or CEO is in seeking your exit.  Having witnessed about a half-dozen botched senior executive firings from various points of view, I can tell you that there are both dignified and undignified ways to achieve a desired departure.

Which brings me to my second point.

Strategy involves big decisions including big resource moves, and sometimes, these kinds of decisions do involve putting people on islands and forcing them to deal with their plights alone.  It may be the sales leader who’s losing a territory, the executive who faces reassignment or termination, or the machine operator who now has to go from running a beloved machine to managing inventory.

All of these persons could–not necessarily will but could–have to go through their own personal mourning periods, alone, and you as a leader can recognize their losses and respect their dignity or dismiss them with no concern. Choose dignity. You never know when your executive decision has just murdered the pet of some otherwise stoic and crusty-tough player on your team, so it might be best for us to think about that when we foist change on our organizations.

This is not to say, “Don’t change.”  It’s to say, “Don’t be a jerk about it,” because you don’t know what others are going through, and—for you yourself as well as for anyone affected by your decisions—it’s the death you mourn alone that hurts the most.

 

 

What Makes a Great Company?

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Enduring companies share some common traits.  How’s yours doing?

 

When do companies become great? When do they become bigger than the person who leads them, bigger than their stated purpose or their value to their customers?

When do organizations become enduring?

It’s a question I ponder quite a bit. After all, our firm, WGP, is explicitly focused on “enduring” performance for our clients, and that sounds all well and good, but how does it happen?

Enduring organizations come in many shapes and sizes, but the truly enduring organizations I have been around or have been a part of have a few things in common. I think endurance comes from a number of things, so my list is incomplete, but it has to be.

The first aspect is vision. Proverbs 29:18 says “Where there is no vision, the people perish…”  Think about that for a second: Thousands of years ago, a lack of vision was attached squarely to death. The same is true in modern institutions: when there is no binding vision, fragmentation occurs; people find their own vision, and institutions suffer. Vision is about a state of arrival, except you may never arrive.

The second aspect is an overt lack of self-centered leadership. These leaders are harder to find these days, but it’s not impossible.  By lack of self-centeredness, I do not mean lack of self-interest; I don’t know that a leader who is not truly self-interested can thrive in modern institutions; a commercial mindset depends on an understanding of value and trade, which involves self-interest at some level.

What I mean by self-centeredness, or rather, the lack of it, is that there’s a stage when really effective leaders realize they have “enough” power, influence, money, or responsibility, and they become sharers: They are no longer focused only on their individual goals.

An iconic story on this note for me came from the primary builder of McKinsey & Company, Marvin Bower. I never met Marvin, but I came into McKinsey when people still knew him. The story is that when Marvin Bower turned 60, he sold the shares he owned–a substantial number–back to the firm at book value.  He could have easily sold his shares for market value, but that would have forced the firm into debt.  This truly massive gesture was one of a leader who had moved on from self-centered to merely self-interested; he worried about self-centeredness and what it could do to the firm he built. In his words to that firm:

“Have we begun to think too
much about money because
we’ve got so much coming in?”
he asked. “People who make a
lot of money get to thinking
about having four homes to keep
up, or maybe they want a yacht.
If an individual consultant has
to make a professional decision
on the spot and he has too many
obligations, I worry that he is
likely to make a decision to attract
a client who shouldn’t be
attracted.”

Check the last few words there:  Marvin Bower worried that self-centeredness could allow a consultant to attract a client who shouldn’t be attracted.  Money is a powerful motivator, but it isn’t the only healthy focus of a business. When seeking to build, find leaders who are primed to maintain a healthy self-interest, not those that are self-centered.

The third aspect is a healthy engine for developing leaders who think critically. It is fantastically hard for institutions that have grown as personality cults or follower farms to endure. Why? Because they create workforces that are devoid, nay, avoidant of critical thinkers. And, they create “leaders” who learn to spend their time in court politics and scapegoating versus actually solving problems and capturing opportunities.

One large company I had the privilege to get to know well was built by an iconic and temperamental leader. Everyone deferred to him on every detail. The rub?  He wanted to have great leaders around him; he actually wanted the engine to develop leaders, so he invested in human resources and performance management nirvana. But he wasn’t comfortable with his people thinking on their own, so he was unable to get out of his own way. This chairman, CEO, and absolute monarch built a company that was exceptional and generally well-respected but that struggled to develop leaders under his reign.

Ironically, the business itself had exceptional leadership disciples. People were motivated, smart, and able, but they just didn’t take much initiative in true leadership instances because that was the head guy’s job.  The company, a multi-billion dollar firm in the construction services industry, was filled with leadership ability and completely devoid of leaders, which happens if you have no engine for developing leaders who think and act critically.

The fourth aspect is a deep sense of “who we are.”  The greatness of a company is backed by a culture of alignment around greatness and by great defenders of the faith in that culture. Southwest Airlines has this culture: Everyone in the company knows that quality of customer service, on-time performance, and other aspects of great are expected of them every day.

But what gets missed is that Southwest had amazingly effective spiritual leaders in Herb Kelleher and Colleen Barrett for many years. Never lacking in willingness to tell others what she thought, Colleen would very explicitly ensure that the boundaries of Southwest’s culture were clear and attended to; she defended the faith for years and years.  Enduring companies tend to have people like this–people who, without demeaning others or making it a big deal, rule with an iron fist on culture, values, and boundaries.

The fifth aspect of endurance is a healthy focus on performance. Enduring organizations understand what feeds them, and they reward it well. Yes, they even do this in the short term, and they do it well.  For instance, aggressiveness in meeting short-term financial goals can be purposeful, for, e.g., freeing enough cash to invest in new projects or to restructure to ensure new capabilities or meet new markets. Enduring organizations have strategic rationales for short-term performance that, once thresholds for survival and fair returns are met, go to more than simply meeting metrics on a scoreboard.

Which brings up a sixth and final musing on what makes enduring organizations enduring. For this, I use an old Greek proverb:

Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they will never see.

That is to say, great institutions become great when the oldest among the population act on behalf of people who they may never meet. They place investments that pay off over decades; they take a flyer here and there. Honda has its first corporate jet in the market today: It was marketed first in 2015, but the project started in the 1980s!  What kind of journey must that have been?

Separately, I had the privilege of working at a private manufacturing firm, Milliken & Company, for a while. Milliken’s corporate headquarters is situated in the midst of a beautiful arboretum, which serves as a very cool metaphor for endurance. Over the course of decades, the company’s iconic leader, Roger Milliken, played out his passion of planting trees: He planted trees whose shade he knew he would never enjoy. Such “noble” trees are a fantastic metaphor for building an enduring company.

Enduring organizations have such planters in their midst, and that’s likely what makes them great.  If you’re in a company where the old men have decided to focus their endurance on merely surviving to retirement, consider what that means: If your old men only worry about getting to their own finish line, your organization’s culture and leadership have failed.

These are only reflections from my own experience. Enduring organizations arise for many reasons, and even if just one of these aspects is not enough, a few may be. One thing is sure, however: endurance is threatened when these aspects are not there.

What do you think makes the difference?

The Cage of Our Own Logic

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Logical simplicity is a cage that holds the strategist captive.

 

So many of us want to “optimize” ourselves, our companies, our careers, our families.  We want to find the thing that will allow our success (that one degree, that one tool…) and build on it.  Or, we want to find the thing that holds us back (a particular bias, a person in our organization) and eliminate it.

We want to optimize, but we want it to be simple.  As a matter of fact, the more senior we get in business, the more “simple” we tend to want things.  We want to ensure we can boil things down to a root cause and fix it, but we also want to be able to take really complex ideas like “how to transform a company” or “how to engage a workforce” and turn them into pithy phrases, like “be the change you wish to see in the world.”

In other words, and unfortunately, the more senior we get, we choose to avoid getting into the weeds of issues, and decide to skim the tops of them. In the process, we start to accept “simple.” Simple is, in almost any strategic context, insufficient.  In the big leagues of business strategy, the simple ideas played out years ago.

Simple is some other guy’s luxury. When we start to accept simple, we lose the fortitude to push to simple’s sophisticated cousin:  Synthesized.

Now, wait a minute, you might say. Synthesized vs. simple?  are we splitting hairs?

No.  Let me show you why.

Imagine your strategic issue as a birdcage constructed of wire. Your goal is to ensure a sound birdcage…to keep birds in. So, what do you do?  You examine the wire, right?

Wrong.  You examine the cage.  The unit of analysis was never the wire.

But, far, far too often, strategic analyses within complex organizations take the shape of examining the wire.  They focus in on a single tool or system (like an HR system or a Six Sigma curriculum) as the salvation, and fail to acknowledge (or in the best cases pay only lip service to) the integrity of the system overall.

Simplicity (we’re going to fix our HR system) takes the place of synthesis (we must have an easy organization to work with).

So, why the rant on this topic?  Easy:  We have to stop looking at the simple answers as though they are easy, and the systematic answers as though they are hard.  Many hundreds of millions of dollars have been wasted on consultants, advisers, and project teams installing the latest ERP system because doing so was the “simple/easy” answer.  Simple/easy is pretty darn hard when it’s un-tethered from overall strategy.

The answer to strategy that involves examining the wire vs. the birdcage will always be easier; and is often quite logical in a vacuum.  Go install a tool.  Go look at a market.  Go make an acquisition.  All are perfectly logical.  All make good, simple sense.  All are destined to fail if pursued alone.

It’s not the logic of the wire itself that makes a birdcage sound.  It’s the soundness of the alignment of the many wires that comprise the cage.  We must, in other words, not let the logical focus on a single, simple “solution” take our eyes away from the broad strategic intent we are implementing.  Many, many smart people fall into this trap.

A sound strategist can’t mistake logical simplicity for strategic synthesis.  In doing so, the logical simplicity becomes a cage, but it’s a cage that holds the strategist captive.

 

What Is A Leader, Really?

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In a world dominated by prescriptions and pithy sayings about how to be a good leader, sometimes you only need to act to be a leader.

 

What is a good model of leadership?  Quick, tell me. Strengths based? Fear based? Skill based? Self leadership? Team leadership?  Enterprise leadership? Level 5 leadership?

I’m reminded today that sometimes, the key to leadership is not to find your leadership “model” but instead to simply practice leadership. In other words, I can describe to you what a level 5 leader is, but I can’t really teach you how to become one; you have to act on that yourself.

For the record, “level 5 leaders” come in a few different flavors.  I’ve always been partial to the John Maxwell definition:  People follow you because of who you are and what you represent.

After countless discussions with hundreds of people in management, rank and file, and executive roles, I can boil leadership down to one thing:  Action.  Leaders take action.  Now, they might take action to prevent someone else from making a mistake, but such an action is still action. Sales leaders find ways to sell. HR leaders find ways to enable organizational effectiveness. Research leaders drive action toward breakthroughs.  Action is the common thread.

But what often passes for action is actually position.  Calling a meeting is certainly an action, but it isn’t capital “A” Action; it’s merely an act of position or power.  Leadership, like the prime mover on a locomotive, is about action that compels others to action.

So what brings this to mind?

For years, I have been fascinated by a couple of guys who call themselves Team Hoyt.  Dick and Rick Hoyt have completed more than 1,100 endurance races together since 1977, including dozens of marathons and 6 Ironman distance triathlons.

The catch?

Rick is a quadriplegic with cerebral palsy and Dick is his dad.   One day, Rick told his dad that he wanted to run a race, and Dick obliged, pushing Rick for 5 miles to come in second to last.  Rick told Dick he enjoyed racing, and the rest is history. Here is your link, see for yourself.

What model of leadership do Dick and Rick Hoyt represent?  I’d argue it’s one of action.  Personally, and as a father, I get breathless watching this father’s dedication to his son’s enjoyment.

Dick took Rick’s motivation and made it his own.  He became the engine for decades of amazing feats.  He is the model of action that I think many leaders miss out on, carrying someone less capable but feeding off of the act of service and the enjoyment it brings.

In our own lives, we may read all the books we want on leadership and take all the advice we can get on the topic, and I’m all for that. But we may also make all the excuses possible about how our team wasn’t skilled enough or we missed out on the right hire. We might also just be frustrated with our organizations, but none of that will get you anywhere.

We talk about servant leaders, but we rarely talk about servant competitors.  Dick Hoyt is one, and you and I can be, too. Just find the inspiration you can find, and use it to put yourself in action.

Is Your Executive Team On Tilt?

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Avoid going “on tilt,” and it will be ok.

 

It was a card room in downtown Stockholm, Sweden.

I did a bad thing–playing poker with only a finite amount of time available. I had a little time on my hands and wanted to play some hands, so I was “loose,” as they call it, firing out bets at a healthy clip just for a little entertainment. It’s a good way to lose money, but it can also be fun. Except then I suffered a bad beat–I think it was betting hard into a full house with a modest pair in my hand in a mid-level limit hold’em game.

I stayed with it and was crushed by a guy with a higher pair, and then I did something that is all too common. I took the aggravation of that hand and bet hard into the next hand with it; I had nothing in my hole cards, but I raised a couple times, and I was soundly blown out by the Swede sitting to my left. And under his breath, this guy who had spoken not a word of English for an hour or more said:

“Tiiiilt”

And despite wanting to jump up and take a swing at the guy, I took a second and realized he was right. I was “on tilt,” which is to say I was making stupid bets after losing a bad hand. Emotion got the best of me.

…

But you know what? The term applies in business as well: Managers and executives frequently go on tilt; they suffer a minor loss and then seek more risk to offset it.

We are not good at maintaining an even keel during times of rapid changes in risk; if we suffer a loss, we have a pernicious tendency to double down the next time around to make up the loss, and this leads to much stupid.

Case in point: a management team misses out on a highly strategic M&A transaction by bidding too low. They make a perfectly rational bid, but they lose. So the next time a deal comes along, the same management team goes on tilt, shading their bid not just to their economic disadvantage but often to the point of irrationality. They may win, but they suffer the winners’ curse: they pay a value that no rational actor, even one with a big strategic premium, would pay.

Another manager, in the midst of negotiating a deal, ignores rational advice that the deal is off the rails; he has to get a deal done, so he caves in to his counterpart’s demands after the counterpart walks away. He gets “played” in the negotiation because he perceives the walk-away not as a tactic but as a loss.

Another manager, on losing a highly talented potential new hire to a different offer, spends millions on upper-tier consulting support on the topic the new hire would have been expert on.

All of these are examples of being on tilt. The managers above have all made irrationality out of rationality.

How do you avoid it?

The first and best way is to avoid artificial constraints. In an uncertain world, constraints that have no bearing on value are dangerous. My artificial time limit at poker, the need to “make” quarterly or annual metrics, or the need to please management are all technically reasonable, but they don’t relate to value: You may get a deal done within the constraints, but chances are low that it will be a good deal.

Second is to seek advice.

Third is to understand your culture and the culture you are dealing with. How risk balanced are you? Rookies go on tilt far more often than pros, and so do insecure executives vs. seasoned ones.

Finally, know when irrationality is a possibility–and know what it costs.  You, like me in my poker game above, may be able to absorb some losses due to taking a flyer here and there, but you also might not.

All this is to say that you are likely to encounter circumstances in which you, your manager, or the executive team whose board you sit on is on tilt. They may be irrational to the extreme due to losses or perceived losses they’ve suffered, and this is especially true when it comes to good governance.  Management teams who have not made their numbers or moved the stock price in a while will have a tendency to up their risky behavior.

So watch out for examples of this type of behavior. Avoid going on tilt, and it will be ok.