Tag Archive for: Strategy

The Force of Fewer in Strategy

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.

What Makes a Great Company?

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

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 tool.  Go look at 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.

 

Finding the Pony in the Pile

Faced with adverse situations? Dig. 

 

I’ve written before on the benefits for strategists of finding strength and beauty, and you can look here for that.

But this post is a little different. This one is about finding strength from adversity. This is about the pony in the pile. If you don’t know the apocryphal story, here it is:

Once there were five-year-old twin boys,
one a pessimist and the other an optimist.
Wondering how two boys who seemed so alike could
be so different, their parents took them to a psychiatrist.

The psychiatrist took the pessimist to a room piled high
with new toys,
expecting the boy to be thrilled, but instead he burst into tears.

Puzzled, the psychiatrist asked, “Don’t you want to play with these toys?”
“Yes,” the little boy bawled,
“but if I did I’d only break them.”

Next the psychiatrist took the optimist to a room piled high with horse manure.

The boy yelped with delight, clambered to the top of the pile,

and joyfully dug out scoop after scoop,
tossing the manure into the air with glee.
“What on earth are you doing?” the psychiatrist asked.
“Well,” said the boy, beaming,

 “There’s got to be a pony in here somewhere!”

 

So that’s the pony in the pile in the traditional sense, but what about in your own professional life? How do you look for the pony in the piles of manure you’ve walked into?  Maybe the better question is, “Do you even look for the pony?” I can offer a few anecdotes that address my own stubborn growth on this topic.  I’ve reflected on these often.

About 12 years ago, I was an ambitious, strapping young lad who had just joined what many consider to be the most prestigious professional services firm in the world.  My second assignment as a member of this bastion of intellect and influence was to recommend elements of a massive downsizing for a struggling company.  It was not only a project that you had to swallow hard to take in the first place, it was also right in the middle of the holiday season. I have never hoped to have to say “Merry Christmas, you’re fired” to anyone as they are being laid off, but this was it. The pile of manure was tall, dark, and handsome, and to put it bluntly, I didn’t see a pony in sight.

It was, to most people involved, a distasteful project.

Then, about 9 years ago, I had the opportunity to lead a team in a gut-wrenching engagement to support the buy side of a highly complex, time-sensitive M&A transaction that involved multiple large corporations, multiple cultures, and a massive government component to boot. For all involved, it was an absolute mess of a project, and I got to sit right at the nexus. The pile of manure was standing tall once again.

These couple of instances of the “pile” and their separate trajectories through my life may be informative to you.

The first instance was dire, but it was clearly an opportunity to learn something I hadn’t learned before. Nobody was breaking ethical rules; the company was just sick and needed help. I was everything short of malcontent, and at some point, I even got there. But the work got done, I learned a ton, and to this day I believe that any young, self-righteously smart person ought to have to go through the effort of trying to turn around a dying company, even if only as an adviser. In short, here, the pony was staring me right in the face, and I only needed to look.

The second instance was exceptionally challenging. Through the hours, pressure, and politics, several people involved with the project struggled to recoup their professional lives after it was over. In that instance, I could sense that the learning experience would be a good one.  I could also sense–as the banker across the table from me fell asleep during the meeting–that the pain was shared across all parties; in other words, I didn’t have to dig too far to find the pony.  That was one of the most heartbreaking and energy-sucking projects I’ve had the opportunity to be a part of–one that I never want to relive–but the experience I gained from that roughly 10-week period of no sleep, constant travel, and absolute burnout strongly buttressed my professional outlook–although it left behind scar tissue that to this day has not gone away.

So why the serenade on heaps of manure and ponies? Really it’s because maybe somebody else can benefit from the little bit of perspective I’ve been able to accumulate.  Namely:

  • The worst experiences are often the best growth opportunities for your life, professional or otherwise.
  • Until you recognize adversity for the learning experience it is, it’s hard to look for the growth opportunity.
  • Many of us hide behind facades in order to avoid confronting the dung heap.
  • It’s better to start digging than to continue complaining.

I’ve never been accused of being an eternal optimist, but I have learned that when you’re presented with a pile of manure, dig for the pony.

How about you? You dig?

I Am Legend, But I Shouldn’t Be

As change agents, we must not become what we hate.

 

Vampires.

They were everywhere.

In Richard Matheson’s classic book I Am Legend, the protagonist, Robert Neville, is the sole survivor of a pandemic that has left the rest of the human population converted to vampires.  Those who know the book and not the movies (especially the Will Smith version) know that the vampires could still talk and interact.  They could, eventually, be coherent individuals–still infected with a terrible disease that prevented them from being in the sun.

Neville, the last uninfected person standing, goes about his nights barricaded from the night stalking vampires–studying their evolution and weaknesses. And he goes about his days hunting them down and killing them while they sleep.  He drives stakes into their hearts with aplomb.

Every night, the vampires stand at his barricaded door…calling his name.

Eventually, Neville is captured.  He recognizes, after his capture, that the society of vampires that has formed now views him as the monster.  He has become the stuff of legends… the boogeyman who kills “good” vampires in their sleep.

I am legend.

The insight

What happens when the radical change agent goes too far?

What happens when noble goals like turning around a company or re-invigorating a culture get personal?

I’ve seen (and been) in situations where the radical change agents, focused on protecting or implementing the “good society” of their dreams or experience, get off track. It gets personal.  Everybody around them becomes a vampire to slay.

Their vampires might be in the form of people who represent the “old” culture of a company.

Or, their vampires might be in the form of people who simply won’t do things the way the change agent wants them done.

The change agent–a new executive or consultant, usually–wants a new culture or a new way of doing thigns. So, he or she goes about studying the vampires.  He identifies weaknesses, patterns, and ways of disposing of them.

He becomes a drop dead vampire killer.

But something happens on the way.

On the way, the notion of a “good society” gets left behind.  Killing vampires becomes the end in itself.

Where do you see this transference of a noble goal for a personal one?

Well, in companies that have gone through significant turmoil, vampire killers look like cost cutters.  They get so good at their craft that they take their eyes off the reason for cutting costs in the first place. As times improve, they kill the company’s mojo.

In companies that emerged from periods of zero financial discipline, the killers look like the spreadsheet artists. They work to the right of the decimal and find a way to control every “vampire,” but they lose sight of why.  Discipline becomes an end in itself.

In companies with highly innovative pasts facing uncertain futures, the vampire killers often look like old line leaders who “protect” their innovative heritage at the cost of the future of the company.  They kill off the vampires that look like spreadsheet jockeys. They resist any change whatsoever, even when it’s fully in line with the “good society.”  They are vampire killers.

The lesson

The lesson, then, I suppose is this:  Check your premises.

If you lash out at the old guard (or secretly harbor the desire to terminate them) because, well, you have power and they are the old guard, you might be on your way to becoming a legend.

If you destroy anyone who represents the “other” just because they are other, then you might be on your way to legendary status.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, if you find yourself killing vampires just because somebody else said to–with no connection to the good society–then you are simply a legend enabler.  Lots of people pursue agendas triangulated solely from their impressions of what some other vampire killer wants.

Life is too short to only slay vampires.  Don’t become a legend.  Don’t let it be personal. Have a purpose beyond the practice.

Robert Neville started out by killing vampires to eradicate a disease.  He then grew to hate vampires, and became their killer for sport.  Even when the vampires in his story had a point, he still killed them.  He became a legend because he lost sight of his goals.

He became the vampire.

As change agents, we must not become what we hate.

The Most Important Distinction A CEO Makes

As CEO, be explicit about the state of conflict you face, and only go to war when it’s fully warranted.

 

“The board looks at us like we are the Navy Seals,” the executive told me. “We agree on a number and go get it—year in and year out—and we need someone on the team to soften that view.”

The exec was looking for a “softener” in the form of a person who could put a strategic wrapper around what amounted to a reputation for being single-minded financial performers. The Navy Seals comparison might have even been a little strong since the half-dozen or so Navy Seals I know would say that frogmen rarely just “follow orders.”  That’s what the Marines do, and they do it well, but it’s not as sexy to compare yourself to leathernecks.

But I digress. The gist is that the “person” the executive was looking for would be sorely misplaced. Let me tell you why.

Wartime vs. Peacetime

When it comes to C-level executives, there really are two different leadership mindsets: wartime and peacetime. This is covered very well by author, venture capitalist, and former CEO Ben Horowitz on his blog, here. I’m going to take a slightly different angle than Ben and say that a great executive can dial up both mindsets, but he or she has to be explicit about it. Specifically, in wartime, there is no tomorrow, and in peacetime, it’s all about tomorrow.

I write a lot about respect and healthy strategic outlooks for high-performing organizations, but I don’t spend a lot of time on financial and value-based performance. Why?  Because it’s a prerequisite; If you don’t create value or enable it as an executive, you’re probably not going to cut it. As I wrote nearly a year ago: Performance is the prerequisite. The latest management article on how mindfulness unlocks your team’s performance is all nice, but financial performance is where the median CEO is going to be evaluated. So, balancing performance needs and organizational “health” is, fundamentally, what value-based strategy is all about. In the purest sense, and in the short term, performance and health can be highly conflicting, and that is why executives—really leaders of any stripe—need to manage the balance, which is where the wartime/peacetime mindset conflict comes into play.

A wartime mindset means that decisions get made, by me, every day. It means I don’t have time for debate and discussion, that emotion and, yes, intensity are a part of the puzzle. In wartime, there is no comfort in comfort—it’s win or else. You fight through injury.  You forego pleasantries. Wartime mindsets are most appropriate in business during times of economic crisis, customer crisis, or product transition/launch/retirement, during deals, and, most importantly, during times of competitive attack. As Horowitz puts it, during times of existential threat.

In wartime, a leader makes an objective or else. Take that hill!  Hold that beach!  Cut 50 FTE!  Close that deal!  They are all the same. Mind if I curse? Was I rude? Oh, you didn’t like that I threw that document on the table? It bothers you to have to work past 7?  Comes with the territory. It takes a strong stomach. Suck it up. It’s wartime.

A peacetime mindset is one of building. It means that studies can be done. It means that I might defer a decision for a year (or more in some companies) because…bluntly…I don’t have to make it. It’s where investment and improvement come into play. It’s the mindset that focuses on people’s careers, the future of the company, and the weaknesses that need to be addressed (but not until the next employee conference). As Horowitz puts it, it’s the time to “focus on expanding the market and reinforcing the company’s strengths.”

It is a mistake to think of wartime as better than peacetime. They are different, and executives must understand the difference. Some will be much better leaders in peacetime than in wartime, although that’s beside the point.

What’s important is that great companies are built  with a peacetime mindset and sustained with a wartime mindset.

And so, the most important distinction

Executives, especially CEOs, must be explicit about the state of war a company is in; that distinction drives all others. Why must the CEO be explicit?  Because it’s not always obvious to others in the organization. To use the U.S. military’s old DEFense CONdition ratings:  When the CEO is at DEFCON 1 (signaling nuclear war) and the organization is at DEFCON 5 (signaling peacetime), things get discombobulated.

A CEO might be at war based on things the CEO and only the CEO knows, while the rest of the organization might be at peace because, well, things seem to be going well. This is a recipe for disaster as the CEO continually churns through people, disregards ideas,  and thinks short term without real rhyme or reason. If you operate as if it’s wartime and everyone thinks it’s peacetime, you will demoralize your people. CEOs who have overweening focus on the short term (layoffs, cost cutting, and general pressure) while extolling their company’s strong financial performance year in and year out run into this problem. They create cognitive dissonance in the organization.

A CEO might be at peace in an organization that knows it’s at war, and then the opposite thing happens: the CEO is fiddling with transformation or branding while the customer base is burning. If you operate as a peacetime CEO and everyone thinks it’s wartime, you will lose credibility quickly. There’s a reason we still talk about Nero: a CEO who fails to acknowledge that there are existential threats will lose his or her organization.

That is why leaders, CEOs and others, need to be clear on how they view their worlds. They need to be clear that DEFCON 1 behavior (slashing product lines and replacing people) is only warranted by DEFCON 1 threats, so they need to get people on the same page. Everyone also needs to be clear when DEFCON 5 behavior (delaying decision on a project viewed as critical by others or by a faction within the company) is warranted as well.

This is the most important distinction a CEO will make in the day-to-day operation of a company:  Wartime or peacetime.

A cautionary note on “artificial” wartime

Yeah, but we want a team of warriors, you say. So you continually keep the pressure on through artificial means—even lying to people about the true state of things to make them seem more dire—in order to ensure that people keep an edge or a warrior mindset.

I get it. It’s sexy, like saying you’re a Navy Seal. But it’s also dangerous.

From analyses on the topic of combat fatigue, it’s a known fact that normal people cannot sustain a wartime mindset for an extended period of time. Those who are in active, continuous combat for more than a month generally start to lose effectiveness. Those who are in active continuous combat for more than a couple of months typically become psychiatric casualties. This is true in actual combat, and I’d propose that it’s true in figurative combat.

Dave Grossman, a researcher on the science of combat and killing, outlines from an earlier study that after the beaches of Normandy in World War II, 98% of soldiers who survived constant combat for 60 days had become psychiatric casualties. The other 2%?  They were characterized as “aggressive psychopathic personalities.”

Let that sink in for a second.

The negatives of manufacturing a wartime mindset for your organization are legion. Not only do you (1) place focus on survival vs. building as outlined above, you (2) create an environment in which normal people struggle to thrive for any extended period of time and (3) facilitate the rise of psychopathic personalities who actually can handle the sustained pressure.

It makes no difference whether the artificial pressure is placed by the CEO herself or by some proxy, another C-Level executive or consultant tasked with “cracking the whip” so that the CEO can be the good cop.

So, be explicit about the DEFCON you face, and only go to war when it’s fully warranted. Again, this is the most important distinction you will make as CEO.

While executives (like the one in my opening story) may recognize that their boards see them as mercenaries who propagate a state of war because they act like it, they can’t solve that by adding peaceniks to the team; the peaceniks won’t be heard if the entire organization is charged for combat or thinks the C-level executives only expect combat mentalities. Culture, as I’ve written before here, will crush even the best change agents. The executives have to acknowledge—themselves—a credible state of war or peace within the organization and actually live it out.

And if they can’t change?  Well…

Never Go Full Framework

 

Frameworks exist to support decisions…not to make them. 

 

“Everybody knows you never go full [framework].” – Kirk Lazarus, Tropic Thunder

Ever work with a leader who was too wedded to a framework? Not in terms of using the framework to organize their thinking, but in terms of letting the framework do the thinking?

Plug and chug.

Rack and stack.

Rank and yank.

You know the kind.  They’re the ones who will not only enforce the rigor that a BCG growth / share matrix implies in evaluating a portfolio but also blindly follow its conclusions to divest, invest, or starve businesses in the company’s portfolio, real-world results be damned.

If you know corporate strategy, you know these people.  Sometimes they come in the form of consultants who are selling an approach or framework itself, and sometimes, it’s the executive who just really wants a complex world to be as simple as a spreadsheet.

So, let me just say it this way:  Never, ever go full framework.

A story

I spent years as a competitive athlete on the football field.  I had the opportunity to know and work with many truly great coaches (the greatest of whom are probably more nameless than they should be). In the highly structured and choreographed game that is American football, technical details, frameworks, concepts, and plays abound. Though it is a sudden and violent game, it is also a technical game: no play exists that doesn’t come with prescriptions for precise footwork, speed, and multi-person meshing of motion.

And you know what?  It’s all wrong.

What’s that you say?

Yep, it’s all wrong.  No great coach in football relies on his players to merely run plays as they are diagrammed, and no great team in existence runs plays that way.  The world doesn’t even work that way.  The moment the ball is snapped and the play starts, all bets are off.  The defensive tackle moves at the last moment, and suddenly you’re off balance.  Then the linebacker fills the wrong hole in the line, and now your path is blocked.

Precise footwork can become precisely wrong footwork, so for that reason, you do what it takes, not what the framework demands. Bad players will botch a play, go back to the coach, and say “I did all the right technique and it didn’t work.” They are “full framework.” Good players—really great players—read, react, and deliver.  They, to use a term I’m very fond of, overcome coaching.  They know when it’s time to go off script.

Which brings me back to my advice…

Going “Full Framework”

I have worked with management teams who decide to use extremely prescriptive financial or people metrics to run organizations; they use hard-and-fast logical frameworks, such as financial hurdle rates or scores on standardized tests.  They use the frameworks as tools to make decisions and, to put it bluntly, as alibis.

Frameworks give cover; they give comfort. And you know what? They too often also cause management to go home empty handed. The HR person who relies too much on standardized test scores is bound to miss out on natural players; the M&A strategist who relies too much on a framework of numbers and rules will miss out on attractive deals; and the sales manager who insists on having full attendance at 8:30 am every day of the week will miss out on productive salespeople whose style doesn’t mesh with such a rule.

The worst of cases

I’ve mentioned that going full framework gives cover and comfort, but what it can also give is moral distance. The framework says fire that guy, so you do.  Who cares if his wife has major medical issues and COBRA won’t cover them? The framework says promote that gal, so you do.  Who cares if she is completely loathed by the people she will manage—that’s their problem.  Your framework says you have to get to x dollars on price or you walk from negotiation. Who cares what other value is on the table? The framework says divest that underperforming division.  Never mind that it’s the division with the most promising talent your company contains…it’s underperforming.

You’ve gone full framework; it’s not your decision anymore, right? That’s where the worst cases come up—when you go full framework and you lose ownership of the problem, you lose values and a value-centric view of things.

I give these examples as the worst of cases, but in reality the worst of cases is when these alibis are used by senior executives; when they absolve themselves of the responsibility to interpret and decide in favor of letting frameworks or spreadsheets do the heavy lifting, companies suffer.

So what?

This is about you (and me).  You have to be able to overcome coaching, and you have to be able to overcome frameworks.  A good practice is to use frameworks for what they are:  ways of organizing thoughts and concepts for deeper consumption.  You use them rigorously to position yourself for decision making, but you don’t actually make decisions via framework; you make them via reasoned consideration of all available information, and no framework can capture that.

Sure, you diagram plays.  Sure, you use a profitability pareto to tell you which accounts you might need to change or fire.  Sure, you use a growth-share matrix to guide you to your most promising portfolio. Sure, you apply 5 forces, SCP, 7S, Blue Ocean, name your framework here to define reality.

But you still have to decide. Remember, you may diagram the play, but the defense will move. The framework can’t possibly represent the real world completely.  That’s for you to do.

Next time you are faced with an executive who has decided to go full framework, think about this picture of Simple Jack from Tropic Thunder, a fair if crude satire of many things Hollywood, business and otherwise:

simple Jack

Remember…He went full framework.

Now it’s your turn:  How do you ensure that you overcome coaching?  Ever gone full framework?  Leave a reply.  Start the discussion.

5 Ways To Be More Strategic This Year

In strategy, it’s sometimes the little things that make you better. Here are 5 for the new year.

 

It’s the new year.  2016.  And, of course with the new year comes a boatload of resolutions.  Perhaps you want to lose weight, exercise more, leave the iPhone at home one day a week, go to church, play more, or spend more time with your kids.  Resolutions of this sort come with a goal (pounds, hours, days, instances, etc.).  But, how do you resolve to do something more abstract or squishy?  How do you resolve to be a better person?  How do you resolve to love your partner more?

Appropriate to this post, how do you resolve to be more strategic?  Let me take that one and develop it in a way that almost anyone can use.

On being “Strategic”

At its core, strategy is about perceiving, processing, and acting.  There’s not much more.  We conjure images of egghead strategists and eccentric chess grandmasters, often to create an aura around strategy. But, in reality three things define you as a strategist: perceiving, processing, and acting.

Perceiving means watching and listening. It means having the gumption to stop and understand.  It means collecting data. It means having that moment of humility when you realize that you don’t know it all.

Processing means taking the time to assess position.  It means drawing conclusions about what you know and don’t know.  It mans being analytical, but in a way that ensures positive feedback loops toward the other two foundations of strategy (that would be perceiving and acting for those reading this before their first cup of coffee) Processing tells us whether it’s time to perceive more or to act more.

Acting means moving…hopefully forward (and, knowing that sometimes forward is backwards…or sideways…but I digress)  We tend to think of strategy as planning; but it’s not. Not exactly. No great strategist omits action from his or her repertoire.

Yes, strategy is that simple… And it is magnificently complex once you dig into the myriad ways of perceiving, processing, and acting.

5 ways to be more strategic in 2016

So, you are sitting here, at the start of 2016, wondering how you can be a more strategic businessperson.  Let me offer you 5 little ways to do it. These are relevant for the entry level analyst and for the CEO.  I’d bet that it’s a rare executive who does all 5 to start the year, so I hope there is something here for everyone.

You want to be more strategic?  Then do these 5 things:

  • Talk to 5 customers – That’s right, talk to 5 customers. But, I’m going to offer you a twist…You have to talk to them when there’s no deal on the line.  Try talking to customers just to perceive and not to talk about your own value proposition or features or benefits.  Go ahead, have a cup of coffee with 5 of your customers…just because.  Ask questions.  Try not to look too smart.  You might learn something about what they need.
  • Talk to 5 competitors – This one is a bit more dicey, but in the same vein as the first one.  Find a way to learn and share with market participants in your sector. You might (and I’ll emphasize might) uncover ways of growing the market.  Treat competitors as competitors. But, try–just for a bit–to treat the game as one that involves a growing pool of opportunity vs. merely a zero sum scoreboard.  You might surprise yourself.
  • Talk to 5 employees – This one sounds simple.  It isn’t.  Too many people say “I talk to employees all day long…” but what they mean is that they talk at employees all day long.  They go to meetings, they issue perspectives and orders.  What they don’t do is seek to understand.  The more senior you are, the more isolated you get. Employee interactions start to look more like town halls and focus groups vs. human interactions. Taking time to ask questions and listen of individual employees is challenging.  Your employees may not trust you enough to be honest…but they just might.
  • Outline the three risks you must manage in 2016 – Go ahead, make the list right now.  Refine it as you talk to employees, competitors, and customers.  Have a key person who isn’t happy?  That’s a risk to manage.  Have a key customer who may defect?  Write it down.  Learn something from your conversations in the market?  Refine your view of risks.
  • Outline the three major moves you can make in 2016 – This is where perceiving and processing start to move to action.  Take a moment, today, to define how you, individually, can make game changing moves.  If this is about business strategy, perhaps we are talking about a product introduction or an acquisition of a fellow market participant.  If this is about your individual career, perhaps we are talking about education or community service, or other enhancements to you as an individual.  Write them down.  Have a point of view on major moves.  Avoid “business as usual” where you wake up and suddenly it’s August and you haven’t done a thing that looks strategic.

There you have it.  5 little ways to be more strategic in 2016.  I figure that for the average manager or executive, the things I’ve listed above amount to 20 hours of conversation and contemplation. It amounts to upping your game on perceiving by listening to individuals you may only talk at.  It amounts to upping your game on processing by understanding risks and opportunities explicitly.  And, it amounts to upping your game on acting by taking a moment, now, to confirm the big moves you might make.

Ask yourself…is being a more strategic in 2016 worth 20 hours of time? Let me know in the comments below.

Here’s to a great 2016!

 

Christmas and The Real Meaning of Business

Finding “real meaning” in business gets personal, gritty, and small. 

 

‘Tis the season. Christmas season, I mean.  And, it has me thinking.

We sit on the threshold of a holiday that for most comes to symbolize the warmth of gift giving and the joy of a pause in life to reflect on gifts received.  Sure, it’s commercial.  Sure, it’s loaded with obligation to dangerously hollow things like no other holiday in the western world is.

But it sure is fun.

Driving along a few days ago, I was fortunate to hear an ad on the radio.  “Come, learn the real meaning of Christmas” it said.  It then went on to outline the extravaganza that a large church was investing the time, money, and people into to outline the “real meaning of Christmas.”  It was the “real meaning” that struck a chord with me.  I wondered what innocent bystanders (that is, people who are neither Christian, nor steeped in western “Christmas” tradition) would say the “real meaning” of Christmas is by observing the actions we take during the season.

Would they say the real meaning was entertainment?

Gift giving?

Celebration of the birth of a single individual so long ago?

Establishment of the basis of a world religion and interpersonal philosophy?

I suspect that the innocent bystander would attend the Christmas extravaganza and come away with a sense that Christmas is quite a show, but perhaps not a sense of the”real meaning” of Christmas.  They wouldn’t understand the deeper personal and metaphysical meaning of Christmas from watching a show any more than from seeing a Christmas tree…

…and, you know what?  That’s fine.  You know why?  Because real meaning comes from experience, not an extravaganza. A life changed through the Christmas story rarely (if ever) happens because “you said so.”  It happens through reflection and immersion and individual commitment and confession.

In other words, It’s what’s inside the box that counts…Not the wrapper.

And that, my friends, is where real meaning in the Christmas sense has applicability to real meaning in a business sense.

A legion of consultants, practitioners, executives, and managers have put their faith in the power of extravaganza to create change.  They–like the church in the radio ad above–put together light, sound, and live animal shows (ok, maybe not the live animals) in hopes of creating an emotional experience for their organizations or clients. They hire outside speakers, event planners, and communication experts to expound on the great position a company is in or the great new direction it will take.  They make it clear that a charged emotion is the key to alignment with strategy.

And they are right.

But they are wrong.

Because a charged emotion may be necessary to conversion, but it’s insufficient for sustained change.  All the focus is on the wrapper, and not on what’s inside the box.

So, if excitement about a clear vision delivered in a compelling way is the wrapper, what is inside the box when it comes to corporate strategies that actually steer an organization?

Well, personal meaning may come first.  Does the steering of the strategy touch on the personal hot buttons of the organization.  This can be purpose (what are we doing for the community, our customer, etc.?).  It can also be self interest (what’s in it for me and my career?).  It can also be about others (how does this strategy impact Milton down in the basement?).  Personal meaning comes in different flavors.  One wrapper can seldom hit on them all.

The second is probably leadership credibility.  If I see the extravaganza, it hints at credible change to come. A leader is born.  A changed organization, renewed purpose, or new challenge are all both frightful and compelling things. They need credible leadership.

The third thing inside the box may have to be an honest appraisal. And, this is where the wrapper of an extravaganza most often falls short. In the push to put a glossy finish on the strategic vision of a company’s strategy, we lose the factual appraisal that we just rode for miles in pain on the back of a donkey and gave birth in a stable after being rejected from the local hotel.  Our circumstances aren’t glossy.  They are as humble as possible.  Sometimes, we have to admit it once we are inside the box.

The fourth thing inside the box deals with what people have to bring…It’s the requirements.  Our glossy wrappers tend to minimize requirements.  They tend to underplay the difficulty of actually steering an organization in a new direction. They underplay the late nights.  They underplay the hard conversations.  They underplay the personal commitments that will be challenged, change, or even cancelled. In the Christmas story, we focus so much on the baby in the manger that we often forget the journey of the kings, or the sacrifices of the parents. Transformative change comes with requirements.  Those are hard to convey in a glossy wrapper.

And, finally, I’d have to say that from personal experience we all need to have a sense of the consequences likely from the strategic vision.  Glossy extravaganza wrappers are great at booming out a new vision, but awful at being candid about the consequences of that vision. The Christian tradition actually does this quite well, once you get past the secular Christmas wrapper.  Adhering to the true meaning of Christmas is actually hard. It was likely hardest for the man the baby in the that feeding trough eventually became. But, it was still hard for anyone who chose to actually follow.  In corporate terms, consequences belong inside the box. Not all will make it to glory in a given strategy.  It’s ok to say so…Humane, even.

In this holiday season that has become so overrun with glossiness.  Let’s not forget the dank and, yes, small circumstances that underpin the real meaning.  The thing that corporate strategies that actually create changed organizations have in common with Christmastime conversions that stick is a focus on the gritty, dirty, and simple realities inside the box at the expense of the glossy, gold plated wrapper on the outside.

Maybe your organization can benefit from some time inside the box.  If you are reading this…Maybe it’s up to you.

Merry Christmas.

 

 

You Have Voted

When it comes to strategy, leadership, and life, you vote more often than you think you do.

 

Choices are everywhere.  You make them from the moment you wake up in the morning to the moment you fall fast asleep at night.

This is an article about choices…Votes, if you will.

When it comes to your life as a professional, you vote all day every day. No, it’s true. You vote for lunch (you know…”What do you want for lunch?” “Salad.” Easy, right?). You vote for when the next meeting will happen.  You may even be in a position to vote for what direction your company will go.

All of these are moments when you cast a vote.

But what about all the votes you make that you don’t even know about? The seemingly little votes that are actually huge?  You may know them as votes for poor sales strategy or a bad leader or a toxic company culture, but whatever the case, you are likely making them because you are staying put and shutting up.

One of the aspects I absolutely loved about the large professional services firm that I spent a good portion of my career within was a concept called the obligation to dissent.

The obligation to dissent was the notion that all people, whether the least tenured or the most, had the obligation to put their dissenting point of view on the table during any interaction.

Disagree with the path a strategy is taking?  Put a competing point of view out there. Think someone isn’t living up to the values espoused by the firm?  Say so. You had an obligation.  Voting “present” was not expected of you.

So how does this apply to you, today, as a professional?

I’ll give you one hint, and I ask that you act on it—here it is: Ask a question.

Yep, that’s all.

Ask a question.

You see a strategy that is poorly structured or conceived?  Ask “What about this better structured alternative?”

You see a leader who is behaving in a way that does not reflect the values of the company?  Ask “is this how you expect me to act with my people?”

You see people complaining about the status quo?  Ask “so what are we going to do about it?”

You might be listened to, and you might just retain a little bit of your own self respect.  In fact, the way people around you react to your placing a thoughtful, constructive question on the table will tell you plenty about where you stand.  Try it out.

Legendary rock band Rush has a classic track out there called Freewill, and it contains this doozy of a lyric:

“If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”

So, yes, you bear the blame for choices (or “votes”) you didn’t make. You work for an unethical leader?  Well, you voted for him, so stop complaining. You are executing a strategy that might be termed “crappy?”  Well, you voted for it. You live within a corporate culture that is toxic?  You got it:  All on you, my friend.

Some might say I’m blaming the victim here. They will say that I’m ignoring the personal situations of people who stay with bad leaders, companies, spouses, what have you.  To them I’ll say this:  You have a choice to be constructive or destructive. Endorsing a bad leader, environment, family situation, or whatever is destructive to you and to the people who are the victims of your tacit consent.

The sincerest form of constructive behavior, whether it be in forming global corporate strategies or simply deciding how to live your life, is to name the issues and work on them diligently.  If you are one who is content to run out the clock on your career by passively voting for a world you wouldn’t intentionally subject others to, just remember…

You have voted.