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Reprinted
from Keep the Joint
Running.
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ManagementSpeak: We appreciate you being proactive on this.
Translation: Butt out.
We appreciate this
week's anonymous contributor's decision to do his
civic duty by providing this excellent interpretation.
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Physicists should add the Edison Ratio to
their list of fundamental,
universal constants. Edison's formulation for genius -- 1 percent
inspiration and 99 percent perspiration -- is as invariant as the speed
of light in a vacuum.
Purveyors of business panaceas appear to have reached a different
conclusion. Whatever else happens in the corporation, they appear to be
saying, it's what happens in the executive suite that matters. Setting
the right direction, whether through strategy, scenario-based planning,
enterprise architecture, or Ouija board, is, in their view, what drives
success. This perspective explains, perhaps, the ongoing rise in
executive compensation and continuing decline in what regular employees
receive.
A dozen years ago, in InfoWorld's "IS Survival Guide," I
expressed my concern that employee empowerment was turning out to be
nothing more than a short-lived management fad ("Management's
retreat
from involvement," 4/13/1998).
Except that as the
Edison Ratio is a fundamental universal constant,
executives ignore it at their peril.
What seems to have
happened is that the business punditocracy has
discovered the value of pandering to its audience, delivering seriously
awful advice: That the direction executives set (inspiration) is far
more important than the ability to execute (perspiration).
This also explains
why business schools are more likely to teach
strategy and finance than project management and negotiation.
If you don't believe
execution matters more than strategy, here's
evidence, in the form of one of those dreaded sports metaphors people
like me like to inflict on people like you, namely, this question: Which
is the better strategy in American football -- a passing game or a
running game?
Answer: Whichever you're better at, and you'd better be good
enough
at the other, too, so you can keep your opponent off balance.
Not that the direction a company decides to follow is entirely
irrelevant to its success. Without a doubt, every company has an
opportunity to fail by moving in the wrong direction -- by (for example)
offering products nobody wants anymore, or pursuing customer segments
that are both shrinking and broke.
But you never know. Imagine Ubuntu rather than Apple had
offered up
the iPad ... otherwise identical in every respect to what you saw
advertised for free on the cover of Newsweek, (other than allowing
Flash to run in its browser, perhaps).
Sometimes, customers want products because of excellence in
marketing
execution, not because of the product itself.
Nor are the company's executives solely and uniquely competent
to
define company direction. As counterpoint:
Two popular approaches to setting strategy are S.W.O.T.
analysis
(strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, and it should be
T.O.W.S. because
strengths and weaknesses are only meaningful in the context of external
threats and opportunities); and scenario-based planning, in which a
company hedges its bets by investing in responses to multiple likely
ways the future might play out.
For companies that use T.O.W.S., imagine the company's
executives
sent out a short questionnaire to all employees, asking this question:
"Based on your personal experiences and conversations, please list the
three biggest threats and opportunities we face in the outside
marketplace today, and explain your reasoning."
Do you think members of the company's sales force might know
something about what customers are asking for that might be significant,
or that a twenty-something in Marketing might be more aware the company
is being bad-mouthed on Facebook than the Chief Marketing Officer?
Follow it up with a second survey that lists the highest-ranked
threats and opportunities, and asks about strengths and weaknesses.
Think the folks on the assembly line might know something about how
defects happen? That a front-line supply chain employee might be more
aware of what it's really like to do business with Chinese suppliers? Or
that IT's developers might point out that more project effort goes into
twiddling increasingly fragile interfaces than into new features and
functionality?
If your company prefers scenario-based planning to strategy:
Instead
of the company's top executives figuring they have the best handle on
likely futures, imagine they organized a contest, where the three
employees who do the best job of proposing and justifying likely future
scenarios, also supplying the strongest business plans for dealing with
them, are promoted to either running the new venture they suggested or,
if not ready for that responsibility, to a senior advisory
role in
making them work.
Think the company might get something more interesting and
imaginative out of the contest than out of a senior executive retreat?
The business punditocracy seems to think those in the executive
suite
have all the answers. Just my opinion: They might in some companies. In
others, they have a more important role:
Asking the right questions.
Robert
Lewis
is
president
of IT Catalysts, Inc., a consultancy focused on
improving
IT
organizational effectiveness and integration with the
enterprise.
Contact
him at
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
.
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2010,
IS Survivor
Publishing,
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