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Reprinted from Keep the Joint Running.
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ManagementSpeak: He operates at a strategic level, not the day-to-day work you’re involved in.
Translation: He sits in his office, reading the Wall Street Journal
and playing Sudoku, and will get the credit for anything you achieve.
This week’s anonymous contributor is lousy at Sudoku, but excellent at spotting nonsensical phraseology.
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I’d call my friend Willy Chaplin a “character” if it weren’t subtly demeaning.
That wouldn’t be appropriate for a guy who, in addition to “getting” the Web before most of the rest of us (”The thirteen commandments of the World Wide Web,” Keep the Joint Running, 6/9/2008), has been at one time or another in his life a weapons designer, spy, programmer (if you enjoy backgammon, his on-line version is a must), commune-founding hippy, consensual bigamist, fugitive, jailbird, parent and grandparent.
Also
an autobiographer, and an honest one at that. If you grew up after the
’60s were over and are curious, or if you enjoy reading about unique
lives, Hick
is worth your time, so long as your sensibilities aren’t overly
delicate -- Willy leaves nothing out and doesn’t restrict himself to
businesslike language.
Hick won’t make you a better CIO. On the other hand, it’s
sure to broaden your horizons more than reading yet another book by yet
another retired CEO.
The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century, (Steven Watts, 2006), on the other hand, has a lot that’s directly relevant.
Ford was a brilliant innovator, marketer and self-promoter. He was
also a ruthless businessman and unerringly self-serving. He betrayed
every investor who ever helped him and was outspoken in his belief that
all financiers are economic parasites. Initially an admirer of working
stiffs, paying employees radically high wages, he later hired thugs to
intimidate them and brutalize union organizers.
He invented what we now call “Lean” and in doing so demonstrated its
hidden hazard, loss of flexibility: Introducing the Model A cost $250
million (more than $3 billion adjusted for inflation), plus six months
of lost production, to reconfigure factories that had been perfectly
optimized to start with iron ore and finish with Model Ts.
Ford exemplified a trait common among successful business leaders --
a sense of infallibility in all things. Profoundly ignorant outside his
domain and seriously bigoted besides, he bought a newspaper to
publicize his strongly held opinions about history, economics, foreign
policy, the Jewish threat and the moral hazards of adopting any part of
black culture.
Ford’s life demonstrates both the importance and danger of
confidence. He invented the idea of building automobiles for average
people, ignoring all skeptics and steamrolling all opposition. It made
him enormously rich.
But his confidence meant no opposing voices were tolerated: Long
after GM’s multiple models and annual model releases had given it
industry leadership, Ford fired or marginalized any executive who dared
suggest he replace the Tin Lizzie.
Executive ego is one interpretation of how Ford’s success turned into its near demise. For another, read Adam Hartung’s Create Marketplace Disruption: How to Stay Ahead of the Competition (2008), also his blog, http://www.thephoenixprinciple.com/blog/. Hartung would have diagnosed Ford’s problem as “Lock in.”
Hartung divides the “lifecycle river” of typical businesses into five stages: Wellspring, where the business “finds something that floats”; Rapids, where growth and innovation are fast and the business “Locks In” to a “Success Formula”; Flats, where growth slows and the marketplace stabilizes, but lock-in prevents a return to the Rapids; Swamp,
where the Success Formula has failed, business leaders continue to do
what they know how to do (they’re Locked Into it) and the result is to
get completely stuck; and Whirlpool, where the marketplace sucks what little remains into oblivion.
And, he provides recent examples of all of the above, along with
illustrations of the corporate behavior that ensured the eventual
demise of a variety of companies whose leaders let themselves slide
into the Flats and beyond without ever recognizing the problem.
It’s a thought-provoking book, and I mean that literally.
Hartung’s diagnosis of how companies paint themselves into corners,
and why they then insist the corners are wonderful places to be, is
compelling.
His prescription is less convincing. That he has few examples of
companies that successfully “stayed in the Rapids” is understandable --
few companies have managed the trick. He has no way of knowing the
failure rate of companies that have tried his formula for ongoing
success ... the Phoenix Principle as he calls it ... and failed in the
attempt, either.
So the successes are anecdotes rather than data, his cure is at this
stage hypothetical, it’s unclear whether there are alternatives, and if
there are it’s unclear how to determine which fit which circumstances
best. They’re questions I expect to ponder for quite awhile.
As I said, thought provoking. I recommend it.
Robert Lewis is president of IT Catalysts, Inc., a consultancy focused on improving IT organizational effectiveness and integration with the enterprise. Contact him at
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Copyright 2009, IS Survivor Publishing, all rights reserved.
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