Tag Archive for: management

Who’s your customer, really?

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In a “customer-centric” world, we too often lose sight of the customer.

“But I paid no attention to what mattered most”

— Ty Herndon, “What Mattered Most”

Geoff Wilson

I’ll level with you: I espouse a professional-services ethic that is decidedly “client first.” It’s frustrating to some who have worked alongside me, and perhaps edifying to others. I’ll write on where it comes from one of these days.

What “client first” means for me is this: If you’re working for or with me in serving a client on a project, the only productive discussion is one that reasonably focuses on the client mission within the defined scope.

However, I’m also experienced enough to know that not all service providers are bought into this mentality. WGP has at least once engaged specialist consultants who simply can’t step outside of their own rate structure to figure out what is best for the end client (or even WGP as their own client). The “job” is to spend time on an account and to bill fees.

What a boring mission. What a boring definition of “customer.”

In that mode of consulting, the product is hours or days of work, and the customer is actually the consultant, who seeks ways to serve herself through development of fees. The true client—the “Big C” client paying the bills—is incidental to the process.

If you employ consultants or employees who focus more on their time, their process, and their rights than on your problem to solve, you are incidental to the process. You’re like Facebook users—important to the business model because you make it go, but incidental to the business.

If you’re an executive, you have multiple customers: likely a boss, board, shareholders, and the Big C customer. And you have yourself. If you find yourself trouncing Big C in order to please your other customers or pad your income, you’re probably doing it wrong.

Some of the best consultants and executives I know make income, fees, and work nearly incidental to the client relationship. Good service is well compensated, unless you do work for bad clients (or bad bosses). But then again, why would you want to help them?

The “client first” model that we work hard to champion at WGP is simple: Listen, bring something new, do real work. Too many in professional services do too little of each of these, and then wonder why they look and act self-centered.

The key is in knowing who the customer is. Do you know yours? Is it the Big C customer, or some other customer you’re serving.

What do you think?

Don’t be friends with the monster

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Honoring functional leadership above all else creates monsters in today’s over-scienced organizations.

“I’m friends with the monster that’s under my bed”

— Rihanna on “The Monster” by Eminem

Geoff Wilson

Let’s say you’re a leader of a corporate function. Pick one, it doesn’t matter. You may lead supply chain, procurement, human resources, information technology, corporate development, strategy, finance, accounting, or any other.

If I told you, right now, to find me a treasure trove of best practices for your function, you could do so in an instant. Starting with the old standby, Harvard Business Review, you could extend and expand your Google hunt to a dizzying plethora of functional associations, business school publications, case studies, consulting publications, and puff pieces that would provide you with more best practices than you could ever digest. Ever.

And that’s the kicker. Functional leaders now have access to more best practices than ever before, and that abundance has the potential to create a monster. How? In our pursuit of functional excellence within organizations, it’s easy to lose collective sight of business excellence. That’s right. Compliance with functional mandates can have monstrous consequences for business performance and productivity.

Consider an organization with a well-meaning leadership team that empowers several functions to demand compliance from line leaders on their own functional initiatives—all at once. To functional leaders, this is nirvana. They get to install “world-class HR approaches,” or “sector-leading procurement approaches,” or “outstanding business planning,” or “structured strategic planning.” But to the line leader, such initiatives manifest themselves as barbarians at the gate. They are monstrous.

Why? Consider the line leader who suddenly has to spend hours in meetings with functional teams. For some leaders, a specific functional team will hit the spot. The meeting or new approach will be extremely valuable. For others—say, a leader without real talent gaps, who is forced to sit through days of talent reviews and plans—they’re a waste of time. But they’re mandatory. They are “the way we do things now.” And they are, quite often, entirely wrong.

They sap productive selling and organizational-development time from line leaders who usually know they are wasting time. In the worst cases (“Hey, Bob, just fill out these talent templates and we’ll see you next Tuesday.”) they simultaneously kill morale and productivity while adding no value.

How do you avoid creating a functional monster in your organization?

The answer is hard because all the management scientists and consultants peddling best practices will find holes throughout an organization that adheres to it. But it’s simple: Have the guts to empower line managers, provide them with great tools, and get out of their way.

Let there be a rational discussion and rule set for allowing business leaders to spend time with customers vs. internal functional teams. Set the menu of initiatives and manage opting out closely, but allow it. Allow the gal whose business team has no credit-and-collections issues to skip the “best-practice contracting” seminar. Allow the guy whose team has high productivity and zero turnover to avoid the talent and recruiting review.

It’s OK. Really. And I say this as someone who has perpetrated plenty of broad-based, high-value corporate initiatives. Outside of obvious risk and legal areas, “compliance” to one-size-fits-all approaches to functional “excellence” results in a distribution of gains from that excellence that very clearly hurts some players who comply.

This isn’t to say that no functional initiative is applicable to all, but rather that you should know whether or not it is.

Don’t be friends with the monster. Don’t allow honor and appreciation for good functional practices to kill productivity and morale in your line organization. Know when to let your business leaders opt out of frightful functional initiatives.

What do you think? 

Avoid the fifth stage of organizational (in)competence

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Arrogant incompetence is a barrier to learning and strategic execution.

Geoff Wilson

On some level, every strategic leader must have a healthy appreciation for social science and psychology. Success is elusive without it. But what happens when the best that psychology has to offer actually fails?

Picture it: You’re working to ensure that a key manager in your organization executes on a project that will deliver the five key customers you absolutely must have to make plan this year. You provide all the tools, resources, and feedback that a person in the role needs, but they just don’t get through. The manager, convinced of her correctness, takes the project off the deep end. It fails, and so does your plan.

Sound familiar? I’ll bet it does. But what happened? I’ll put it mildly: You probably never learned that there’s a fifth stage of competence. And it’s the most insidious one.

I’m a huge fan of the four stages of competence learning model. The gist of it is that we progress through four phases of capability with any skill. The stages are:

  1. Unconscious incompetence: We don’t know what we are bad at, or even why it’s important. We must recognize that we might have a gap.
  2. Conscious incompetence: We realize we are bad at a skill, and why it’s valuable to improve at it.
  3. Conscious competence: We learn a skill “with reps,” as it were. We concentrate on being good at the skill.
  4. Unconscious competence: The skill is second nature and embedded. We are free to learn other things.

Those stages are outstanding, but there’s another one. Let’s call it Stage Zero: Arrogant incompetence. This is the stage where the manager’s ego lets her think she has it together, without even needing to consider that she might be wrong.

Arrogant incompetence is the realm of people who can’t stand to be critiqued or judged. It afflicts entry-level hires and CEOs alike. You see it when the entry-level hire bristles at feedback—and when the CEO ignores sound advice. It festers in organizations that close ranks to outsiders when their performance is poor.

Arrogant incompetence destroys trust. It is the opposite of truth-seeking.

Why is this important to know? Well, you’re likely reading this because you have an interest in strategy, and strategy means putting people in position to affect change. If you place your bets on people who choose arrogance over inquiry, you’re taking chances on those least likely to accept feedback, seek progress, and positively impact your organization.

The fifth stage of incompetence is a barrier to the flexibility required in today’s strategic organization. Avoid it at all costs.

What do you think?  

Doing hard things means good things for business

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Managing core tasks is important but expected. Greatness lies in facing true challenge.

Geoff Wilson

We spend ample time in strategic discussions talking about challenges and how to overcome them. Challenges exist within the market, organization, product development, sales, and myriad other business strategy topics. The conversation then turns to incentives, and it all gets muddled.

Things get murky because we often confuse the incentive to overcome a challenge with the incentive to “look like you’re doing something.” And that’s where this conversation gets very personal.

I know people who have worked their entire lives on straight salary (or even hourly wages) who will risk their jobs in the name of doing the right thing or simply taking on a new challenge. That is hard.

I’ve also known individuals who have had tremendous financial incentives—amounting to multiples of their salaries—whose go-to moves were delaying and deferring decisions for the sake of prolonging their reign. That is easy. The difficulty lies in knowing both which person you are (a) led by and (b) modeling yourself after.

Most who know me know that I detest using chess as a metaphor for strategy. The game is too constrained. All the moves are mapped out. The board is obvious. Chess is tactics, not strategy, as I’ve previously written. However, the world of chess holds many valuable tools and ideas for strategy. One of those is the Elo rating system.

The Elo rating system was devised years ago to help predict player strength without requiring every player to play a series of matches against one another. The key to the Elo rating system is how strength points are traded. When a strongly rated player beats a weak player, the strong player gains minimal points, and the weak player loses minimal points. But when a weak player beats a strong player, the strong player loses many points while the weak player gains many. Accomplishment in the face of difficulty is highly rewarded, whereas flubbing the easy stuff is mightily punished.

This is your career in a nutshell. People are (or eventually will be) looking at the challenges you face and your relative performance on them. If you’re great at accomplishing things that should be easy for you, that’s fine and good. Now stop patting yourself on the back and find your next true challenge.

Few things are less compelling than a person who talks about their great work on low-difficulty endeavors. If you want to be great, do hard things well. This is true for yourself as an individual, and it is true for your business.

If you lead a business in a sector where table stakes include on-time product delivery, you deserve minimal credit for achieving on-time delivery—it’s merely expected of you and your business. Don’t bother to tout your “great” performance. Go find a way to deliver on time and redesign the product for future customer needs. You are fighting last year’s war. Move on to the next one.

If you’re a five-year professional who does a magnificent job of keeping a filing system in order, you (again) deserve little credit for getting it right. That’s expected of an experienced person. Find a more compelling challenge to solve.

As I noted in my example of executives seeking to extend their reigns, the chess world has struggled with the trend of highly rated players avoiding competitive play in order to protect their ratings. According to the previously linked Wikipedia entry, “…the rating system can discourage game activity for players who wish to protect their rating…”.

Knowing this, you want your reputation and rating to be fresh, so you have to think about your “masterful” self or organizational performance as having a rating that is in constant deflation since the last time you set the bar. And you have to evaluate your people in the same way. “Emeritus” is a title that should be awarded with grudging irregularity in today’s business world.

But here’s the real key to all of this: Be sure you don’t flub the easy stuff while you’re seeking that next big challenge. You must do both. Losing on product-delivery performance while you’re transforming your company is a classic “executive” example. Failing at basic time management while trying to do a bigger job is a classic “individual” example. They’re the kinds of things that get people fired.

Keep in mind, the more experienced you are—the higher your Elo rating—the less points you gain for doing things that inexperienced people do, too.

You want good things? Do hard things.

What do you think?

Don’t let butt brushes bite you from behind

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The small things that turn people off from doing business with you can cause big damage.

Geoff Wilson

Millions of people shop every day. Thousands of retail executives spend millions of dollars each year trying to pinpoint what makes people lock in and buy their merchandise. They discuss store formats, look and feel, customer flow, sales interactions, and numerous other concepts. And then, some guy comes along with a perspective that attacks high-concept with a decidedly low-concept insight.

That’s what Paco Underhill did in his book Why We Buy. One of my favorite insights from that book concerns the “butt-brush effect.” Simply put, the butt-brush effect is an observation that customers tend to stop shopping when they’re touched from behind. So, when racks in stores are packed too closely together, people negotiating the cramped quarters are more likely to brush their rear ends against one another. And when that happens, they tend to get uncomfortable and stop shopping.

Butt brushes are easy to describe in a retail environment. They are, literally, butt brushes. But butt brushes exist in all business contexts. They are small portions of customer or vendor experience (yes, I’ll include vendors) that make executing your strategy just that much harder. They make people uncomfortable.

In your business, butt brushes are unintended impacts. They come from people who aren’t setting the strategy. They sometimes even occur from people just “doing their jobs.” Those are the ones that are the most insidious.

What are some examples?

  • “Aggressive attorney” butt brush: You know him. He’s the guy who makes closing the transaction a complete slog. He’s the one who focuses on the minute details to the exclusion of the relationship. He makes it hard for others to like your company.
  • “Credit Nazi” butt brush: Similar to the aggressive attorney, the contentious credit guy is a sales-prevention army of one.
  • “Purchasing” butt brush: You’ve gotten to know the senior managers of your prospective vendor. They like you. You like them. The deal is as good as done. Then, you have to pass them off to the purchasing department. Things get… brushy.

There are also the many tiny butt brushes you offer up to your prospective customers and strategic partners every day. A fantastic example is the “My smart phone is more important than you” butt brush. Yeah, you get it.

You’ve invested untold time and money into customer insights and strategy. You’ve established a path and process to get there. So why let butt brushes ruin it all? Seemingly small discomforts (sometimes driven by small mindsets) turn people off in a big way.

Keep an eye out for butt brushes before they bite you from behind.

What do you think?

Data rich, insight poor

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The secret to your organization’s success is rarely more data.

Geoff Wilson

I woke up this morning and stood on my bathroom scale. The scale is, like many things nowadays, networked and bluetooth’d. It takes my weight, heart rate, body fat percentage (don’t ask), water percentage, and something called “pulse wave velocity” that I’ve yet to understand or investigate. It logs all that data for me to shamefully view on my mobile phone whenever I like, thanks to an app that connects to my bathroom scale.

An APP that attaches to my BATHROOM SCALE, people! The United States landed a man on the moon using slide rules to calculate, and here I am today with a scale that can instantly dispatch my disgrace around the world.

But it isn’t enough for information to simply be collected and “there”—it’s what you do with it that matters. And on that note, let’s shift from the topic of my body weight (nothing to see here, folks).

Data rich, insight poor

Modern institutions have astounding arrays of data sets to access. The sets are often not only overwhelming but competing as well. One client we serve measures revenue at least three ways, and gross profit margins can be viewed in at least three more ways—as in, we could apply three different margins to each of the three different revenue stream metrics.

Management teams have access to operational statistics, people statistics, economic data, customer surveys, sales force metrics, supply chain metrics, and countless additional data bases and data points. They can, quite literally, send measured data anywhere, anytime.

So-called “big data” is here—but it isn’t always what it’s supposed to be. That’s because there’s a paucity of insight accompanying that data. For all the richness of data at our fingertips, we’re poor when it comes to insight. In the worst cases, we are paralyzed by the sheer volume of data we can access.

At one client we recently served, a long-range forecast of a global market turned into the ultimate merry-go-round, as the forecast assumptions were tweaked and adjusted to the point where debates raged about long-range global growth rates and whether they should be .1% higher or lower over 10 years. The debate, while comforting to those involved, didn’t really matter.

That, my friends, is the consequence of being data rich and insight poor. And it’s a frequent problem.

The answer

So, what’s an action-oriented executive to do? I’ll put it simply: Know when enough is enough.

Sure, employ data scientists to ensure you’re getting the right cuts of data and analysis, but be sure that you’re also focused on insight. That means you’re identifying meaning in all those numbers you can pull. Just because you have access to mountains of data doesn’t mean you have to (or should) use it all!

Bill Clinton famously wrote that he got involved in some unsavory executive behaviors because he could. In other words, he engaged in unproductive activities because his great power enabled him to.

Many of today’s executives, analysts, and advisors participate in navel-gazing exercises that result in really cool charts but no action because they have access to never-ending data and capacities to manipulate it, without the will to stop and ask two key questions:

  1. What does the data we have mean? Interpret data for insight. Don’t just admire data for merely existing.
  2. What would more data really do to improve our understanding of that meaning? Analyze for decision-worthiness. Think of data availability as a question of “enough to make a decision” vs. “enough to make a comfortable decision.” By the time you make a comfortable decision, the competition is already there.

Our mission at WGP is “to improve our clients’ strategic positioning and enduring performance by providing practical strategic data, analysis, insight, and advice to top management.” It’s true. We wrote it down. We are focused on the fact base, but we fail if we deliver no insight from it. If we can present meaning and action, we are successful. If we merely deliver data, we aren’t doing our jobs.

Our clients appreciate us for this fact-based yet practical approach. In today’s data-rich and insight-poor environments, it’s important to have a partner to help sort through the morass.

Your bathroom scale may be able to send you data while you’re chowing down on fried chicken, but does that really matter if it doesn’t result in changed behavior? Knowing is only half the battle.

What do you think? 

Mars, Resilience, and Resourcefulness

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What do you do with what you have?

 

One of the cool parts about having a 13-year old homeschooled son is that I get to ride along for some of his lessons.  He is currently taking a class that revolves around watching a broad set of historically and ethically relevant films and reflecting on them.

Last night, the assignment for this class was to watch The Martian.  If you have not read this most entertaining book or watched the visually and emotionally stunning motion picture, you might be missing out on a really great science fiction narrative rooted in a very real approximation of real world scientific constraints.  But, that may be beside the point.

As I mentioned to my daughter this morning on the ride to school (she, one of our three non-homeschoolers), the lessons from The Martian are not only good lessons for a person who might one day be trapped on Mars.  They are very much real life lessons applicable in junior high or in the boardroom of the largest organizations.  They are lessons in resilience and resourcefulness…and they resonate.

Here are a few aspects that stand out from The Martian that just might save your life or career right here on earth.

First, things are going to go wrong. It’s how you respond to crisis that matters.  The main character in The Martian is a guy named Mark Watney (played well by Matt Damon in the film).  He is famously stranded on Mars after a confluence of events that make your head spin.  But, once faced with the reality of his situation, he takes stock of his situation–which is exceptionally dire–and gets busy figuring things out.  He, faced with a painfully narrow chance of surviving in a harsh environment, famously says “I’m going to have to science the shit out of this…”

We are all faced with times where we have to “manage the shit out of” bad situations. They can be immediate crises with clients or customers, or they can be the slow train wreck of a deleteriously competitive market.  Mark Watney’s example of reacting to reality is instructive.  Take stock, let the emotions work themselves out, then get to work.

Second, your resources are going to be limited, but often not as limited as you think. For me, the most amazing aspect of The Martian (and one that is far better fleshed out in the book) is its overt display of resourcefulness.  Watney is forced to confront his resource constraints in terms of power, water, air, food, warmth, physical strength, ability to communicate with the rest of the world.  He then goes about tackling, one by one, the constraints he has, and he uncovers new ways of solving his own problems. Without going into detail, I’ll simply say that Watney’s ongoing calculations of his resources form a centerpiece of the book, and his continual pressing against those constraints is instructive.

You and I are going to have to face constraints.  We can only make so many sales calls, close so many deals, and coach so many people in our organizations.  We can only spend so much capital.  It’s a fact of life.  But, many creative managers out there get more productivity out of their sales forces, work forces, and capital because they try. They don’t have to be Watney-esque, they just have to ask the question of whether constraints assumed are constraints for real.

Third, it helps to have moments to reflect…and a sense of humor.  This one seems easy, but it’s actually one of the best lessons for high stress professionals anywhere.  Watney is the king of the one liner in both the book and the movie; and he is the king of the reflective vignette that frames his awful circumstances in positive light.  In one instance, the character reflects on the fact that no matter what he does on Mars, he is the first person ever to do it.  And, that’s kind of cool.

Professionals anywhere tend to know the value of a moment of humor in a terrible circumstance. Gallows humor isn’t that hard.  What is hard is stopping for a moment and positively framing challenging circumstances.  Then, you get back to work.

Fourth–and I’ll stop at four–The entire book is a treatise on the need for resilience in problem solving.  If you aren’t failing, you probably aren’t working on hard enough problems, or you aren’t working them fast enough.  The Martian is a book about failure.  There are failures of systems, people, organizations, tools, and even imagination.  The book and film are so outstanding because of their display of resilient problem solving in the face of failure.  You get blown up by your improvised water generator, and you light that mother right back up.

Resilience is something that we are, unfortunately, breeding out of our culture. That is, perhaps, a topic for another blog sometime.  But, the fact remains that as our levels of professional, political, and social understanding narrow, we feel the buffets of perspective shocks far more than we used to. As professionals, we need to be resilient because the world changes.  We may not face life and death circumstances for our bodies, but our ideas may live and die constantly. Have the courage to keep going.  Have the courage and grace to allow your organization to keep going.

The Martian is about Mars.  And, it’s chock full of life lessons for us right here on Earth.

May we learn them.

Are You Too Smart To Be Great?

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The best executives aren’t too smart for their own good.

 

Have you ever worked for the smartest guy in the room?

I don’t mean literally, I mean figuratively…as in he thought he was the smartest guy in the room, and so he disregarded good counsel constantly.

There’s a segment of leaders out there who got where they are by bringing a lot of horsepower to bear.  They got there by answering the question.  They got there by making A’s on tests and getting the top grade in the class.

And, on the way?  They lose their ability to be good executives.

I once worked near a senior executive who was an insufferable, arrogant boor to everyone around him. He wasn’t a boor in the “gets drunk and makes off-color jokes” fashion.  He was a boor in the “don’t even bother to argue with him” fashion.  He was the smartest guy in the room, even when it was demonstrable on the facts that he was not, in fact, right.  This habit–one of being always certain but only sometimes correct–drove people away from him until he lost all effectiveness.

In my 4 lives as an investment analyst, a “big firm” management consultant, a corporate executive, and now a boutique strategic partner, I’ve witnessed the foibles of dozens of senior and chief executives up close (not to mention my own).  And, given that experience, I think being too smart is a tremendous hindrance to effectiveness.

Why?  Let me count the ways.

First, executives who are too smart for their own good tend not to delegate.  Why? Well, nobody else is smart enough to get the job done right.  Executives, by definition, have to drive organizations. Being too smart to delegate is a killer.  This does not mean that they necessarily micromanage…they just don’t give freedom to their less smart underlings.

Second (and only slightly less bad), too smart executives tend to try to delegate via control and process.  They institute “simple” processes that muck up management culture and drive people who aren’t so smart absolutely crazy.  The next time you wonder why your TPS reports have to have three covers on them, you will think about the executive who is too smart.

Third, and building off that point, executives who are too smart tend to overcomplicate.  This is especially true in today’s data rich and insight poor environment.  The too smart executive wants to study more, build in that extra variable to the model, vet and validate assumptions, and generally create intellectual friction.  They drive complication.  The worst of them drive complication and then ask their teams why things are so complicated.  It’s exhausting.  Watch out for the executive who always orders studies and never makes decisions.  He’s probably an over-complicator.

Fourth, and final for the purpose of this post, the too smart executive runs the risk of being dismissive of outsiders.  I watched one C-level executive consistently disregard questions and encouragements from his board.  The board “just didn’t get it.”  A slightly less smart executive learns to take it all in.

And, my friends, that may be the key to this post:  Listening.  Executives who are smart enough learn to listen to outsiders, insiders, superiors, subordinates, and others.  They listen for signs that their own intellect may be getting in the way.

Go out there and be smart…but not too smart.

 

Selfish Selflessness

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Hard-nosed pride makes it all possible.

It’s Thanksgiving weekend, so how about a post on football?

I was an offensive lineman.  That fact has left physical and mental imprints on me that are hard to ignore.

The paradox of the great offensive lineman (and, to be clear, I make no claim of greatness…) is that he is able to take a fantastically selfless objective and make it selfish.

Yes, you heard that right. An offensive lineman, who toils ideally in anonymity (unless he’s doing it wrong), has to be at once selfless and selfish. He has to be able to work selfishly at a trade that is intensely individual–working for a win on every single play of a football game against another man–while at the same time doing all his work for the success of others and team.  He doesn’t carry the ball.  He doesn’t score.  He just puts in work in hopes that others will, too.

I played in 35 college football games and started 30 of them. In my college days, I officially touched a “live” football perhaps twice (on fumble recoveries), and never in a position other than on the ground.

That is twice that I actually had the football in my hands, out of perhaps 2200 total plays I was a part of in official collegiate football games.

Every single other play required absolute dedication to a job that resulted in somebody else’s ability to move the ball down the field.  It required dedication to playing within a unit of four other offensive linemen plying their trades at the same time, and dedication to doing whatever it took to help the ballcarrier get down the field.

The interesting reality of a lineman’s role is that the lineman can have a massive victory against his opponent on a play that goes nowhere, and he can get beaten on a play that results in a touchdown (ask me how I know). What matters is a commitment to the success of another person and an absolute commitment to getting the job done.  There is an odd sense of humility in knowing that you can be a dominant player and a failure at the same time.

There’s an odd selfishness that one must develop in the job. More importantly, there’s an odd selflessness that one must develop in the job.  It’s selfish selflessness, perhaps best described as pride.

It’s pride in doing what it takes to help the team.

The play called requires you to sprint on sprained ankles to hit a 320-pound defensive tackle with your left shoulder–the one you just sprained–to use your head (connected to your neck which has been sprained since that game three weeks ago) to cut off his path to the ballcarrier?

Get it done.  It’s your job.

It has been a long time since I’ve been on a football field as a player.  But, you know what?  I miss the simplicity of that sort of grinding pride.  The pride in being a key but anonymous part of moving the team forward.

And, I’ll tell you this: Finding people with the right combination of selfish selflessness is exceedingly difficult.

We live in a fantasy football age.  Everybody scores points. It just ain’t so in the real world.  When you find someone with a combination of true ability and pride in being able to help others that can be characterized as selfish selflessness, hold onto them.  Their less interesting counterparts–the ones more focused on their rights than their responsibilities–will pale in comparison to someone who can combine ability with personal pride.

As the proprietor of a now years old consulting firm, I get to apply my sense of selfish selflessness every day.  It’s embodied in the bar that I hold for myself and for my teams in delivering for clients.  We don’t carry the ball.  We don’t score touchdowns.  We work hard to prepare the ground and direction for the ballcarrier.

We hear words like “selfish” and “prideful” nowadays, and they sound very negative.  That’s because we impute some negative traits along with them like arrogance, stubbornness, and greed.

Those things don’t go along with the kind of selfish selflessness I’m writing about this morning.

I’m here to tell you that pride in a job well done, whether one is carrying the ball or wallowing in the mud in front of the ballcarrier, is one sports analogy that truly does convert to the business world.

Hard-nosed pride–combined with a selfless mindset of helping others–makes it all possible.

What do you think?

When Your Karma Runs Over Your Dogma

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What goes around actually does come around every now and then. Choose your methods wisely.

 

The recent U.S. presidential election and the veritable smorgasbord of delicious irony–current and impending–has me thinking…

This is not a political blog.  But, it’s hard to ignore the very real strategic insights that come from an election that gives us:

  1. A winning candidate whose methods of winning have left a lot of scorched earth to recover–whether you think him a buffoon, a fighter, a genius, or simply a flawed person (like all of us).
  2. A media sector whose methods have demolished whatever trust remained in it for the time being, leading up to the New York Times editorial board needing to redouble its efforts on “reporting America and the world honestly” (an astounding non-admission if there ever was one).
  3. A set of supporters of the non-winning candidate who now realize that the methods of powers that were behind some of the biggest “wins” for their side (budget reconciliation, as a starter…) probably could be used against them once power passes to someone they simply don’t like.
  4. A vastly smaller set of people who have chosen to protest, riot, and in general cry foul while breaking things in response to what was a fair outcome (not policy outcomes…the person, mind you).

So, what’s the insight?

I’ll give it to you simply, and it’s nothing original.  It’s this:

If you live by the sword, be prepared to die by the sword.

If you live by bullying, shouting down, ignoring, and using unique devices to get your way, then just know that turnabout, while not always fair, is in play.  Yes, in this case I’m referring to the healthy proportion of Democrat Party supporters who have taken off their “open minded, tolerant” masks to show that actually, it was really just either “our way or broken glass.”

But, the truth is we all resort to such conveniences without thinking about it.

We all choose what our dogma says we should, and ignore the blow-back that is likely to come later.  in the 2000’s, U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan stemmed from a neoconservative dogma that everybody, eventually, responds to the big stick.  That dogma is flawed (and, ironically enough, proven wrong by the very existence of the United States of America).  The blow-back the U.S. has experienced both internally and externally since deciding to prosecute those wars is instructive of the flawed dogma.

The same is true in the private sector.

I know of multiple executives–some of whom are recently “returned to the market”–whose own arrogance, conspiracies, and secrecy-driven styles ultimately boomeranged on them.

The blow-back was real, and easily foreseeable for anyone who knew the nitty-gritty details.

One in particular was so dogmatic about a social Darwinist approach (and their own superiority to others within that worldview) that, when faced with feedback about their own behaviors and how such behavior could get them figuratively offed from the organization, just cruised right on into oblivion perilously ensconced in the calm self-confidence that such dogma can bring.

One might, in fact, call it karmic justice that the individual faced a sudden and unceremonious ouster from a cold, unfeeling, and similarly dogmatic (about other important character traits) boss.

It’s kind of like what we have witnessed in the “how could we be so wrong” set of 2016 election pollsters who were, in fact, so wrong about the election. The pollsters couldn’t measure the number of people in their polls who, uncomfortable with being called deplorable or bigoted for voicing their support for President Elect Trump (it’s still a stunning reality to write that, by the way), simply didn’t answer the polls correctly. The pollsters’ dogma was in the numbers and not the very real human elements of strategic prognostication.  Human character traits matter.

Sometimes, character traits that can only be measured in actions or lack of actions–not numbers–are the ones that carry the day. Executives who perform beautifully on the financial numbers but who ignore their own character flaws and how those might be viewed by other powerful people are similar.

They succumb to blind spots.

But, they are blind spots only to those who don’t understand the notion of living and dying by the sword.

If you are a strategic jerk–pitting customers and employees against one other for constant gain–then don’t be shocked when someone comes along and beats you at your own game.

If you are an organizational jerk–saying you hire and fire people for their performance but really only when you like and dislike them–then don’t be shocked when someone comes along and simply…doesn’t like you.

If you are a political jerk, using false promises and propanda to fool and lie to people in order to get them to follow you, then don’t be shocked when someone comes along and appropriates your own emotion driving style, and beats you at your own game.

The incoming Trump administration and pretty much any of us presiding as executives ought to take heed:  When your dogma gets run over by your karma…it ain’t pretty.

If you find yourself in a position of believing there is no way you are wrong, then you probably are already wrong.

Choose your methods wisely.

You’ve just taken the time to read this…now take the time to comment.  What do you think?