Tag Archive for: management

Discourse Tactics of the Weak Minded Executive

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Watch out if you use these arguments…they show you are lazy.

Now and then, you come across a management tactic that is as frustrating as it is weak.

This article is about a few deflection tactics I’ve seen managers use, and why they convey a weak mind.

Picture it:  You are recommending a course of action to a senior manager.  You’ve done your homework, figured out the right course, and put together a solid set of facts.

And then you get smacked in the face with a bit of lazy logic…only it’s the kind of lazy logic that can’t be argued with…because it’s the kind of argument that, if you call it out, proves the arguer is a raving lunatic.

Try these on for size… 5 argument tactics of weak minded executives.

Type 1:  The Straw Man

You:  We really ought to protect Bill in accounting during this round of layoffs…he is a strong contributor.

Them:  Yeah, but we can’t save everyone…

Hey…mister manager…I didn’t say “let’s save everyone.”  I said, “let’s save Bill.”  There’s a difference.  “Saving everyone” is a straw man.

Type 2:  The false dichotomy

You: Investigating the salty snacks segment has merit.  There could be a few gems in there.

Them:  Yeah, but I’m not going to sink millions in capital to get in there, so why bother.

Dear leader: There wasn’t an investment proposal, much less one that requires millions.  You made that up.  Your idea that it’s all or nothing?  That’s a false dichotomy.

Type 3: The ad hominem

You: The marketing team put together this outstanding set of data that says we should pull back from the frozen snacks area.

Them:  The marketing team?  The next time I get a good recommendation from them will be the first time.

Dear boss:  Perhaps this is the first time. Attacking the group that created the data does nothing to advance your strategy (or reputation as a critical thinker).

Type 4: The pocket veto

You:  We are ready to make a decision on the omega project.

Them:  Where’s my jacket, I have a lunch appointment.

Managers who won’t make decisions are worse than those who make bad ones.

Type 5: The reductio ad absurdum

You: He’s a bit high priced, but he’s the best sales rep I’ve seen, and I’ve seen a lot.

Them: Yeah, but if we hired everyone at this price, we’d go out of business.

This manager not only makes an absurd generalization, but he also betrays ignorance of how talent markets work.

I’m sure you have plenty of examples of argument tactics used by managers when they just want to avoid the issue.  The key for all of us is to address decisions directly. Using weak minded tactics not only proves that you are a lazy leader, but it makes you look bad, too.

These are tactics used by little minds everywhere. Often, some of the “smartest” executives go to them on a daily basis.

What do you think?

It’s Your Value Proposition, Stupid!

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The missing link in too many strategies is the master link.

 

Have you ever walked into a store and said “I’m buying brand X because they have the best scientists?”

How about “I’m going to buy this car because the maker has an outstanding leadership development program?”

What about “I’m buying from them because they are going to double the size of the company in 5 years?”

Probably not.

When we are customers, we buy based on a really strange thing called a value proposition. That is to say that we buy something because it is worth more to us than the time and money it takes to (a) buy it in particular and (b) buy it or anything else from someone else in general.  That’s it.  That’s how you win.

The crazy thing, however, is that I see corporate and business strategies spending less than an iota of time defining a true value proposition. They instead tend to focus on internal capabilities or realities and pose them as value propositions.

Have you ever seen this?

“Our strategy is to be great at business to business sales.”

Okay, fine, but does the customer who actually buys from you really care?

“Our strategy is to use our impeccable R&D capabilities to drive innovation.”

Um, maybe, but unless you sell R&D services, the customer doesn’t buy R&D from you, they buy a different product or service.

I’ll leave this one shorter than it needs to be: Your value proposition is what wins you business. Your strategy has to encompass your value proposition. Sure, it can also encompass other competitive advantages like operations, unique skills, or low-cost assets; but if you cannot articulate your value proposition (which may very well be delivered via your competitive advantages) to the customer, then your strategy is probably a waste of space.

Are you wondering why your growth strategy isn’t resulting in growth? Are you struggling to figure out why your customer acquisition strategy isn’t acquiring customers? Are you clueless about why your operations strategy hasn’t given you the boost you expected?

Then, check their links to the value proposition you are delivering to the market.

It’s your value propositions to the customers you hope to serve that determine your success…and too often the customer value proposition is disregarded in favor of some internal, known, but altogether insufficient drivers of success.

Your value proposition is far too often both the master link of your strategy, and the missing link.

Mind your value proposition, stupid.

What do you think? 

Strategic synthesis: The art and corruption of brevity

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Pithy management insights have their place—and their perils.

Geoff Wilson

I dig synthesis. I mean, I really enjoy enlivening concepts by making them simple and direct. You say, “I want to have the best service, best product, best operations, and the best brand.” I say, “You want a delighted customer.”

See what I did there? Same concept, synthesized. But synthesis is a Goldilocks proposition: too much and you get burned; too little and you’re left cold. Take the above example. Is it sufficient feedback? I’m not sure. That mostly depends on the leadership team receiving the synthesis.

I know some leadership teams that would take “delighted customer” and turn it into a map of service, product, operations, brand, etc. And I know other leadership teams that would hear “delighted customer” and knuckle down on their customer service function. It’s obvious, right? Customer service is the function that delights customers … right? Wrong.

That’s where synthesis is dangerous. Excess synthesis make you pithy. Pithiness is useful in some contexts. Look at the typical internet meme and you’ll see pithiness writ large. But go too far down the pithy path and you end up at pithy’s dangerous neighbor: glibness.

If synthesis is a beautiful red wine, pithiness is a wine cooler, and glibness is a nasty bottle of Boone’s Farm. Dilettantes guzzle Boone’s until they suffer the consequences. Boone’s is cheap, shallow, and insincere—just like a glib statement.

boones

To wit, I’m struck by a meme that recently passed through my LinkedIn feed. It depicts Simon Sinek and a quote about hiring attributed to him:

sinek-skills

This statement epitomizes glib, dangerous advice. Would you select your surgeon based on demeanor? Or choose a mechanic based on attitude? Of course not.

The advice is so extremely context-driven as to be useless. It’s not pithy, it’s shallow—glib, even. Such thinking may apply to the most basic entry-level or noncritical jobs, but adopting the same philosophy to hire your CFO would not only be moronic but could also put you in jail.

While I’m not trying to disparage Sinek—I don’t even know if he approves of the use of this particular quotation—I am denigrating truthiness in management advice. Sinek, I suspect, may know better. Synthesis is an art of the highest order. It delivers precisely what you need when you need it.

Pithiness is an art, too, but it’s a corruptible one. Pithy bullshit sells. But that same pithy bullshit can also get you in deep trouble. Leaders, strategists, managers, and people of all sorts must be skilled at hearing a pitch, proverb, or proposal and searching for the bones beneath it.

If I tell you to “delight your customer,” you may be able to find the full skeleton of a well-built customer-value proposition. At that point, I may have done my job. But f I tell you to “delight your customer” and you then zero in on only the customer service function, I haven’t done enough. I’ve delivered you a wine cooler when you actually need more wine.

If Sinek tells you to hire for attitude and then teach skills, and you rightly ask how that works when hiring senior software engineers, you have properly looked for the bones that were never there. You’re calling bullshit on a tidy, pithy, pseudo-synthetic glass of glibness. Think Boone’s Farm.

Such swill is from the bottom shelf of management thinking—just like a $2 bottle of “strawberry-flavored citrus wine” (a description that sounds like the recipe for a bad hangover). You can live with a wine cooler now and then, but if you’re swigging Boone’s Farm, you’re in for a rough awakening.

What do you think?

Don’t Forget Your Change

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The focus of strategy should be on what needs to change, but too often, we leave the change behind. 

 

For those of us who still pay in cash, there is the experience of going through a modern checkout line, paying with paper money, and receiving paper money in return from the clerk, while coin-based change is chunked out by an automated machine.

Invariably, this setup requires the clerk to say “Don’t forget your change!”

Why?

Because what used to be a one-part activity (receiving change from a clerk) has now been split into two parts. This post is about not forgetting your change.

…

Allow me to outline two modes of strategic planning.

First is the mode that business owners tend to engage in–let’s just call it owner mode.  Working with owners on strategic planning tends to be very interesting and engaging for someone like me because you can dispense with the pleasantries of multi-constituency narratives and logrolling and just go straight to the spreadsheet.  Private equity firms are my favorites at this. My best private equity clients don’t want the PowerPoint; they want a well-structured and justified to-do list and a spreadsheet that outlines the costs and benefits of the action we came up with.

The same can be said for owner/operators.  A CEO client of mine who happens also to be an owner, when asked by one of his team members, “What do we need to do to start implementing the plan?,” simply said, “Why aren’t you implementing it already?”

While owners want to see justification for change, they only want so much before they put it in place: they want their change, as it were.  Private equity firms and owner/operators derive benefits from and demand near- and long-term changes in performance.

The second mode of strategic planning is manager mode; manager mode is extremely common in companies that are populated by managers who are not…you guessed it…owners.  The manager mode of strategic planning tends to be more status quo oriented, and there’s a reason for that:  current management doesn’t necessarily derive great benefit from explaining to its owners how wrong they have been over the past few years.

Face it, nobody walks into the office every day saying “Today, I’m going to do a bad job.  I’m going to misallocate resources and tamp down our sales culture with massive bureaucracy.  In fact,  I think I’ll demotivate a few people today.”

Nobody says that, not even the worst managers.  Everything happens for a reason (or at least has a story for why it happened), even current structures and processes that really make no sense. So managers tend to focus more of their time on strategic planning and justifying why they are where they are vs. why that should be blown up and rebuilt.  They entertain their boards with creative narratives. They “kill the clock” with their owners and boards so as not to confront hard things. And they build plans that are heavy on narrative but light on change, and this is especially true when it comes to the specificity of change implied in manager-driven plans.

So with those two modes of planning outlined, the enlightened strategist has to understand that effective strategic planning, especially with manager-driven strategic plans, is a two-step process: There is the step of creating the paper plan, and then there’s the step of producing the hard change that will ensure competitive endurance.

So I’ll just leave this with you:

Strategic planning from a manager’s point of view can devolve into an argument for the status quo and why change is hard, while an owner’s point of view tends to ensure a focus on change sooner, faster, and deeper. In every strategic planning exercise, there must be a moment where the planners–whether or not they are owners–put on the owner hat and test for whether recommended changes are sufficient. 

A strategic plan should envision changes to meet challenges.

Don’t forget your change.

 

A Song For Me at 23

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If I could tell my younger self what matters in professional life…I would tell him this.

I walked out of college a free man, but I didn’t know it.  I may have been a free man with a limp and a headache thanks to a few too many days on the football field, but I was free.

I had no money to speak of and drove my girlfriend’s car. Luckily, I now know, I also had no debt. Along with that, I think I had a healthy appreciation for hard work.

Still there are a lot of things I wish I had known at that age as they relate to business and executive life.  There are things you just don’t learn in school, and many of them relate to interpersonal or even personality-based observations. That’s why I’m writing this. I figured that I can put out a few points that I wish I had known at 23, and I figure they might help someone else along the way.

One thing is for sure, they will help you understand my professional worldview.  If you read this blog, you know that it’s about worldview, and these points represent scar tissue; none of them has been fatal (totally), and some of them represent processes that have made me the professional I am.  Read them, and then tell me where I’m wrong (or right).

____________________________

 

Dear 23-year-old self:

You are about to embark on a career.  It’s going to be fun, frustrating, and probably not as fast-moving as you would like, so I’m going to list a few suggestions here that will give you a leg up in your career, and perhaps in your life.  Many of them you won’t be able to understand until you’ve experienced the situations themselves, and that’s just life, but some of them might help you be better prepared for the situation.

  1. Invest the time on your own or in a class to learn principles of accounting and finance cold.  I know it’s an odd “reflection” to start with on a list like this one, but it’s true. Sure, your liberal arts education is valuable because it helps you to think…Sure, whatever.  But what’s really valuable is knowing how to assess organizations’ financial health, understand the time value of money, and peer into how decisions are made vs. how they should be made based on the numbers. No matter where you sit, knowing the numbers gives you a leg up, so you need the tools to learn how to know the numbers.  If you don’t know what a T-account is or can’t explain why a company would invest in a project that will lose money for five years, you need to go back to school.
  2. Acquire a healthy skepticism for title and wealth. These are not always an indication of the quality of person you are dealing with.  Like British accents, titles and wealth can lead you to a false sense of security that the person you’re working with is smart and accomplished, and that is in fact often the case, but not always, and the same goes for degrees and credentials–the guy with the engineering degree from State can often run circles around the Harvard MBA.
  3. Beware anyone who thinks work hours are defined by the calendar.  “My” holidays and “my” vacation are signs of a paycheck player.  If you’re on a professional track, opportunity comes at all times in all shapes.  That guy who calls you at 9 pm on a Friday?  He probably has something important to say.  I once had a manager answer the phone in Europe at 2 am local time when I called from the U.S.  I had no idea where he was, and he made no protest during the call.  I didn’t find out until later that week, after he had returned to the U.S., that he had even been in Europe when I called. I asked him why he answered, and you know his response?  “Might have been important.”  I love that guy.
  4. Working harder than other people does not guarantee you success or wealth.  It might provide you with some dignity, however.  Remember Boxer from Animal Farm?  He was the noble horse who always worked hard for the cause, no matter the direction.  The work didn’t take away from his nobility, but it did kill him–he literally worked himself to death.
  5. Learn and understand the snowdrift problem in game theory.  This one is kind of nerdy, but it’s real everywhere. There will always be people whose first move in a tough situation will be to wait for somebody else to do the hard work.  Be sure that you think about accountability carefully, and if you’re always the one shoveling snow, be bold enough to get out.
  6. Recognize that there are people without consciences, and they are probably better at the political game than you.  I once observed an executive execute the most deceptive game of bait and switch I’ve ever seen, and shortly after that, he offered advice and support to the person who had been baited.  The kicker?  The executive knew he was being deceptive–he offered his advice with the phrase “I don’t know why you would trust us, but here’s the advice.”  The nerve.
  7. Find a way to serve.
  8. Learn to manage for the short term, but get out of any situation that manages to only be short term, because your life will (hopefully) be long. It’s important to learn how to manage for the short term–to cut costs and rein in spending or maybe seek additional sales to cover a shortfall elsewhere. And it’s okay to manage to the short term–that’s where we all eat.  But it’s also important to realize that just as alcoholism is the diseased extreme of enjoying a good drink, short-termism is both a disease and a kind of addiction: The more you do it, the more it becomes insidious.
  9. Hotheads aren’t always bad.  I had a boss early in my career who was the greatest guy to ever throw his keyboard across a room; he was a tantrum machine, but he was also a guy who genuinely cared.  Know the difference between a grade-A jerk or asshole and a good person with a strong sense of duty but also a temper.  There is a difference.
  10. Where there’s no contract, there’s no contract.  Here’s a piece of advice that’s going to sound more cynical than it is.  No, I’m not saying “always have a contract”; I’ve negotiated multi-million dollar consulting engagements that were founded on the client’s trust and the consultant’s commitment to excellence, and I believe in the power of a person’s word and handshake. But, and this is an important but, many people like to use the ambiguity of no contract to gain advantage.  So my advice to you is to always know when there is no contract–know your counterparty/client/customer, and your boss (see what I did with that last one?), as well as you know yourself.  Don’t rely on contracts, but know when you don’t have one; no amount of flattery and gushy feelings at the start of a relationship will overcome the poor values of a counterparty who won’t define or fulfill commitments.
  11. Beware anyone who goes out of their way to say they are giving you friendly advice.  They probably are neither giving you advice nor being your friend.  True friends don’t have to reiterate the point; you know them by their deeds.
  12. Liquid net worth provides flexibility. Whether you’re a shop floor worker or a CEO, money is important, but it’s really liquid net worth that matters; I know plenty of senior executives who are miserable but completely locked down to a bad team, bad company, or bad leader due to their own financial choices.  Always keep enough liquidity on hand to be able to walk away without regret; that means you should accumulate a few thousand bucks when you’re just out of college, and it might mean hundreds of thousands of dollars once you’ve “made it.”  Financial handcuffs are tough, which brings me to my next point…
  13. People make really bad decisions when they’re under financial stress.  This can include executives cooking the books (or even “just” shading them surreptitiously) to make their bonuses, but it can also include things as innocuous as salespeople treating customers poorly or manufacturing workers doing their jobs poorly.  You really don’t want to have a workforce that’s worried about whether they can make their next grocery bill, and more than that, you don’t want a CFO who will make rotten financial and personnel decisions just to make a bonus.  The love of money is the root of all sorts of bad things–I read that somewhere.
  14. Care.  Yes, I mean that: Care.  You will be tempted (in fact, encouraged in some environments) to acquire social and emotional distance from the people some think you will have to hurt to be successful; it will come with the challenge to “do what it takes” to keep your job.  But don’t be fooled–care.  I was once offered a role that implicitly came with the need to fire a couple of people I had coached and mentored and whose capabilities were strong. It wasn’t the right thing to do, so I didn’t; I chose to leave.  On the way out, I was goosed with a comment and critique about not doing what it takes, but that’s just a consequence of caring.  You know what else is a consequence of caring?  Loyalty, love, the ability to sleep well at night.  In short, your life will be better because you took the time to care.
  15. Trust is cumulative…in both directions.  You will live life with a sense of trust in people you know you can rely on, but you have to learn to know when you have enough evidence to know you can trust someone, and also to know when you can’t. 
  16. Respect the dignity of other people.  There are a lot of instances in life when it’s easier to double cross, lie, shade the truth, and walk away–resist that temptation. Stripped bare, we all rely on others. So respect that, and you’ll go a long way.
  17. Life and business are not zero-sum games. You’ve made it through college, and maybe played some sports.  If so, you’ve gotten used to winners and losers, but life isn’t like that.  In life, there are winners of all sorts and losers of all sorts, and sometimes there are situations when everyone is a winner (or at least not losers).  Really effective executives I know think about when they are playing a zero-sum game and when they have the opportunity to grow the pie, so learn to realize the beauty of growing the pie.   Zero-sum games are in actuality very rare–we only make them common. On a related note,
  18. A spreadsheet can’t show you how to grow the pie.  Unfortunately, math without vision only leads to reductive incrementalism.  Very, very few spreadsheets would have predicted the rise of Standard Oil, the emergence of digital music, or the turnaround of Apple Computer. Numbers don’t lie, but they don’t think either. Vision has to be injected into that spreadsheet; don’t mistake tools and math for strategic vision.
  19. When it comes to people, where they (and you) stand depends on where they sit.  Upton Sinclair famously noted that it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his livelihood depends on his not understanding it. Perspective matters, and if you get good at taking different perspectives, you’ll start to understand how other people think, although it does take time and practice.  By altering where you sit and then thinking about where you stand, you start to think interesting thoughts when it comes to business strategy.  Funny thing is, you also start to think differently about the world.  Perhaps John D. Rockefeller (of Standard Oil) really did save the whales; perhaps Steve Jobs is actually the cause of a generation of hearing loss and an epidemic of traffic fatalities; and perhaps, just perhaps, what you’re being paid to do isn’t good for the organization or the world.  Get beyond your salary when it comes to what right and wrong look like. Stretch your thinking, and be bigger than your smallness.
  20. No matter how much garbage they eat, seagulls are not really good creatures to have around. Seagulls fly in, beg for food, take a dump, and then cackle a lot; some people are enamored with them, but in reality, they’re just rats with wings (as we used to say back home on the Gulf Coast).  Seagulls live at the beach and the dump, and in human form, they often live in corporate environments.  My advice for you is to learn to be a problem solver, not a problem finder; cultivate a constructive approach to life, not just an observational one. Justify your existence, and don’t be a seagull.
  21. Know how to incrementally assess situations.  The incidence of “good from far, but far from good” in people and companies is increasing because the channels of communication are increasing; it’s far easier for companies to cultivate high-profile brands that cover up lowlife cultures.  On the flip side, it’s far easier for motivated individuals to learn a lot about any situation in a short time frame. Learn to assess situations at first glance, after a few minutes, after a few days, and after months.  Learn to take the time to sleep on decisions, and do your due diligence, but also trust your gut.  This is especially true about people: If people look and smell unethical even though they’re wearing ethics as a badge, disregard the badge and go with look and feel.
  22. Don’t be a “yes” man, but realize that being a “no” man is just as bad.  Yes men are common in any culture; they go along to get along.  It’s a fact of life, but not a very edifying existence, so find a way to have your own point of view or else you’ll be redundant.  But the opposite position is equally bad; the “no” man rarely encourages growth or expansion.  Try to think about growth as coming from a combination of yesses and nos, and live in the mess between the absolutes.
  23. Be exceptionally careful about “following orders.”  Just following orders can give you a mental freedom that allows you to ignore basic ethical principles, and ultimately it can corrupt your values.  Have the self-respect to reflect on orders, and recognize that they shouldn’t supersede your humanity.
  24. Your network is everything, but you have to know what a network is.  A real network is not the number of people you’re connected to–it’s the number of people who will do something for you if you’re in need, and there is a huge difference between the two. In my early days, people thought networking was collecting business cards; nowadays it’s probably LinkedIn connections–but both are wrong. Networking is finding reciprocal relationships that help you by your helping others.
  25. If you’ve made it this far, you probably already know this, but reading is a highly underrated skill.  I’d argue it’s second only to listening.
  26. Finally, and perhaps as a wrapper…Preserve your self-respect.  There will be plenty of times in your career when you’ll be faced with choices that can erode your self-respect; sometimes it’s just as simple as taking a call in the middle of a family event, and sometimes it’s worse. You’ll find months of your career that are bad for your health–it is going to happen. But even if one day you find that you have to make a choice you know is wrong but you have to do it to preserve a broader agenda or position, just be sure you know the stakes.

I’m sure you’re off to a fantastic career.  Enjoy it, and maybe one of these points will save you from a scar or two.

Sincerely,

Your much older self

The Best Praise For a Pro

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What it means to be “fire and forget.”

 

“Fire and forget…”

It’s a term used to describe smart weapons that can lead themselves to a designated target.

It’s also quite possibly the best praise a professional can receive. As in: “He’s fire and forget, put him on the problem and tell him to call you when it’s solved.”

The phrase is worthy of a blog post here because, put simply, it’s something that we focus on developing in our work with our clients.  While the vast majority of our work is focused on working closely with our clients, there are times when data just needs to be found, or interviews conducted, or analysis completed in order to solve a problem.

And that’s where being or having access to “fire and forget” resources can make the difference between professional life and professional death.  Being a resource of this kind means a few things.

It means you are competent.

It means you are reliable.

It means you are trusted.

It means you are credible.

It means you are resourceful.

It means you are responsible with resources.

And, so if fire and forget is the ultimate in professional attainment, why are so many professionals lacking this level of trust?

My answer?  A mis-designation.  We think some people are professionals when in reality they are simply role players.  They have a job, not a profession.  There is a difference.  There are plenty of ways to define what a professional is, but I know of only one good way:

The professional gets the job done the right way. 

But, becoming a professional is a process. Sure, there are some intrinsic aspects of a worker that are hard to coach–how curious they are, how resilient they are, whether they act with purpose or watch the clock–you probably know them.  But so much of being a pro has to be learned.  Show up.  Get results.  Do real work.  All these are marks of a great pro.  But, so is sensitivity.  So is practical judgment.  So is empathy.

You want to gain the highest professional compliment?  You want to be “fire and forget?” Better yet, do you want to retain or hire true professionals?  Start looking at their track record on these attributes.  Start looking for people who act with purpose and judgment, even early in their careers.

Oh, and when your professionals aren’t professionals?  Make the move.

I’d love to know your thoughts on this one…

Strategy That’s Liquid At Room Temperature

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Formulating and deploying effective strategy during good times is hard…A few basic practices can help you along.  

 

One of the fascinating things about most people is their ability to rise to the occasion during times of stress.  For many of us, stressful times create focus.  They foster creativity. They engender a competitive edge.

Apply heat to most of us, and we respond well. Crisis cuts through the crap. It liquefies culture and allows it to flow.

Nobody questioned the need to change when responding to the global financial crisis.  Nobody questioned the need to drastically re-think homeland defense following the 9/11 attacks.  Those things, by themselves, liquefied old thinking.

But a crisis shouldn’t–can’t–be the only way to create strong and responsive strategic discipline.  How do you get all of these really good things–focus, creativity, edge, and responsiveness–during times of plenty?

How do you, in short, create a strategy that is liquid at room temperature?

I’ll describe one way that might work for you and that I’ve seen work well in many circumstances. And, I’ll give you one that probably will work but that is the wrong way.

Strategic Search As A Liquefying Agent

The fundamental mindset underlying strategic discipline is search.  A spirit of inquisitiveness–about one’s flaws, one’s strengths, one’s competition, one’s product, and one’s customer–is the spirit of fluidity that strategic discipline requires.

In your organization, you probably need to build periodic search time into the calendar on each of these aspects.  Sure, you can complete a yearly SWOT analysis and get there to some degree (to be clear, a surprising proportion of business leaders don’t even apply that level of periodic discipline). But, a relentless search for the facts in good and bad times is the catalyst of fluid strategy. Why? because without facts and data, you can’t test hypotheses.

So, how do you get there?

One means of getting there is building a strong and ongoing intelligence gathering apparatus. A fatal flaw of too many strategic plans is that they are built upon fact bases that were crammed for the test.  A far, far better approach is to constantly scan and gather competitive and customer data as a matter of course, and to use periodic strategic planning sessions to draw implications from the data, rather than to try to gin up data and implications at the same time. Investing in just a bit of excess capacity to gather and disseminate good business intelligence can be a godsend.

Another means of getting there is to enlist a broader set of people in the search for insight. A typical corporate approach to strategic planning during good times is to gather a few experts and draw on their expertise on the way to an incremental adjustment to the plan.  Let everyone else keep executing because, well, they are busy with good stuff…

The problem with this approach is it tends to confirm the good times and avoids looking for any canaries in the coal mine.  An approach to creating employee, supplier, customer, and other focus groups as critical inputs to strategy on a periodic basis can keep your strategic plan liquid at room temperature.

Finally, the notion of “liquid at room temperature” has to permeate your leadership culture. If your leaders believe that the good times are permanent, they are much more likely to shut down their search for strategic insights before the work is done.  Your leaders have to install search as a fundamental part of their job, vs. a reaction to poor business conditions.

A method to avoid…

That last leadership point brings me to an approach that may work for you, but that is best to avoid.  I’ve been near leadership cultures who use secrecy as a means of manufacturing a crisis mindset.  Leaders were good at masking how good things really were and creating a tense sense of unease among their subordinates…even going so far as to set vastly different performance expectations for subordinates than they set for themselves.  This absolutely created liquidity and creativity when it came to strategic search…

…but it’s an approach that, put simply, lacks integrity.  Now, if you are the shareholder of your business, you may do as you like. However, if you rely on fooling people into a false sense of insecurity, it will eventually come around to bite you.

To wit: the best example of this is when subordinates, spun up into a sense of crisis by goals that they have to attain in order to meet highly inflated “false crisis” metrics, create and recommend options that senior management never seems to act on (because senior management doesn’t have the same compensation metrics and knows that their own life is good).  They conduct a frantic search for options, senior management cherry picks a few and disregards the rest, and subordinates are left to wonder why their superiors don’t share their own sense of urgency–given to them by their superiors.

Do that for a few cycles and people will catch on.

Creating strategy that is liquid at room temperature requires a leadership culture that engenders search, and that builds search into the very fabric of strategic management processes.

Feel free to comment on this below…

 

Say and Do: Partners In Success!

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People hear what we say and watch what we do…

 

Among the things that people appreciate–whether you’re in professional services, in a corporate organization, or just living life–are consistency and reliability. What you “say” and what you “do” ought to be congruous. Your “say-do” reputation may be the most important reputation you can build.

Anyone who’s been in a leadership position or who has engaged service providers who have inconsistent say-do practices can appreciate this post. If I tell you that I will deliver a product on Thursday at 3 PM and then don’t tell you until the following Monday that the product will be late, you are going to be disappointed. And most people who deliver product understand this–any operator you ask will talk to you about on-time delivery and production schedules.

The issue, however, arises when we talk about services, general delivery, and interpersonal circumstances.

Let me tell you about an example:

I recently had a repair person come to my house to look at an appliance. The appliance required a small part that the repair person committed to ordering and that I was told, on requesting a timeline, would be here within two weeks. The repair person has responded to exactly one request in six weeks, and I am standing here confounded.

This is a true story that is happening right now.

What would you do? I suspect that most of you would say “Fire the repair man!,” and I completely agree. In this case, the appliance in question is not all that important, and I’ve let the timeline run out as a sort of experiment: Suffice it to say, I’m disappointed.

So, when we think about delivering service, whether to out clients, our bosses, or even our spouses and families, what we say and what we do must be aligned. Say-do practices are sacrosanct, but that doesn’t mean that every deadline is immovable.

I’ll give you three examples of delivery via management of say-do.

  • Example 1 is straightforward: I tell you I’m going to deliver and I do it, on scope and as stated.
  • Example 2 is more complicated: I tell you I’m going to deliver, and then I manage timing in order to do so fully. So, I deliver on time–against new time, or on revised time–and otherwise on scope and on quality.
  • Example 3 is even more complex, and generally arises when circumstances of delivery are so ambiguous that quality can’t be guaranteed: Imagine a project that requires market knowledge via primary interviews that may or may not be extremely valuable. In this case, I may revise timing in order to get to the required quality, I may revise scope or quality expectations in order to ensure that expectations are met, or I may just decide the deliverable isn’t worth delivering at all.

Each of these three scenarios has something in common: communication and consistency of commitment and delivery.

The scenario that you don’t see is the one that involves late delivery of a substandard product with no communication. That, my friends, is breaking the say-do rule. No one–not your kids, your clients, your customers, or your boss–wants to hear excuses after the fact.

I would enjoy your comments on this topic. Please feel free to engage below.

Cheap and Costly Leadership

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Real leadership has a cost.

What does it mean to practice sincere leadership?

It’s actually a very difficult question to ask, because the notion of leadership gets so diluted across so many different axes of meaning.  Steve Jobs was an astounding leader, and a really bad one. It just depends on which leadership lens you look at.  He was either a fantastic industrial visionary (true) or he was an awful individual leader (probably true, too).

After contemplating cases like Jobs, I think it’s fair to say that there really are two kinds of leadership…let’s call them cheap and costly leadership.

If you’ve made it this far and are of a certain persuasion, you may recognize “cheap and costly.”  That’s because I’ve stolen the notion from mid 20th century Christian martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s book The Cost of Discipleship.  In that book, Bonhoeffer outlines two kinds of grace within the Christian faith: cheap grace, which can be “sold on the market like cheapjacks’ wares,” and costly grace, which “costs a man his life.”

Cheap and costly leadership are analogous.

Cheap leadership is only winning. It’s the notion of “by hook or by crook.” It’s making your numbers but not your reputation. Cheap leadership is telling people what they want to hear. It’s knowing the price but not the value.

Cheap leadership is handing out books and forwarding memes.

Costly leadership, on the other hand, is winning and building at the same time.  It’s saving something for later.  It’s investing time in both the mission and people. Costly leadership is costly because it takes time.  It’s one on one meetings that do more than check the box on some HR form.  It’s envisioning someone else’s career without doing it to serve yourself. It’s letting people go…and grow…and flourish.  It’s taking the time to think about how your decisions impact others.

Costly leadership is taking that time on a Friday evening when you are utterly exhausted to talk with your team member about his career.

Interestingly, costly leadership is also about delivering a few swift kicks and pointed corrections. Some subordinates may flock to the cheap leaders who never give them real feedback, but their careers will show it eventually.

Costly leadership is what we should aspire to. Why is it costly?  Because it doesn’t have an immediate payoff.  Because it takes time and energy that may not feel on mission.  Because it, in short dear reader, is not about you.

And that may be the final thought I’ll leave you with:  Costly leadership is about what you build, both on the financial balance sheet and the one that shows the people you’ve built up along the way.

Now, it’s your turn… How do you think about practicing costly leadership?  

 

About That Horse You Rode In On…

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What’s your second act?

 

In 2001, at the time of the 9/11 attacks, it’s arguable that Delta Airlines was sitting in the best position of any other airline in the industry.  With a strong balance sheet and strong industry positioning, Delta was arguably best positioned to weather the impending shocks to air travel that 9/11 would bring.  Only the world changed even more than a strong balance sheet would cover…and Delta’s longstanding brand and culture were forced into bankruptcy.

You could call it a lack of agility.  I might call it a lack of awareness.  The company had seen many changes to airport security and customer mindsets before and was in a strong position.  Its leaders probably didn’t think they needed to change all that much…and that inertia was fatal. Delta’s leaders knew where they were, but failed to understand that how they worked would not work in the new world.

So, as for you: You may know where you are.  You might have a view of your “strategic context.” That’s usually the starting point of a solid strategic plan…assessment of where you are today. The tools are legion: SWOT, MACS, SCP, etc. etc. etc.  Call me, I’ll probably be able to name a few more.

But, strategy isn’t about the tools, it’s about knowing what you want to BE and finding out what you are going DO in order to BE that thing in the future. In other words, it’s about figuring out what the future requires and getting to it.  Having a vision for where you want (or need) to be is all the more important if the world is changing quickly.

So, if you are like the average executive, you’ve probably figured out a play that you run for success. You probably have a routine, an approach to leading people, and a default set of questions you ask…no matter the context.  And, just like the average executive, you probably really can’t figure out how to change your routine.

I’ve got bad news for you…The horse you rode in on is probably tired.

You need a new horse.

So, how do you do find it?

As an individual executive you have to find a source of renewal.  You have to be able to look at the world and try new things.  It’s not a bad thing, and it might even keep you young. That guy who won’t shut up about something new he wants to try?  He might be your key to flexing your muscles a bit.  That advisor who just might have a new idea or two, perhaps you should listen to her.

Organizations are different, and in some ways harder to cause to switch horses. Why?  Well, put simply, they are a collection of individuals.  If it’s hard to get an individual to change, then that level of difficulty is compounded in organizations.  Some executives might be energized to change at one point, while others are not…the whole organization, then, starts to look like a slow speed traffic jam…where some executives are speeding up while others are coming to a stop.

What to do? Half the battle is admitting it. The other half is being thoughtful about how much horse you really have left, and what your next horse really needs to look like.  In our practice, we take the time to listen to the context of an organization before working with our clients on the next step.  If the next step means a new horse, it’s certainly important to know the rider’s style of riding.  Otherwise, the attempt to switch horses will fail.

I encourage you to think about where you are, and (if indicated) be proud of what got you here. But, I encourage you to realize that the horse you rode in on is probably tired.  The chances of that are much higher if you are in a rapidly changing (or shocked) sector.

One thing is certain: the world is change.  That horse you really liked is probably going to mature and decline.  That is true whether the horse is a business, a technology, or even a set of management practices.

You need fresh horses.

Be willing to get help looking for them.

What do you think?  Have you ever seen an organization run out of horse?