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2014-05-15 05:37:03
Sydney Finkelstein
Get on the bus! How many times have we heard that one from managers exhorting
their team to buy into the project or strategy they are spearheading?
If you re not on the bus, you re not a team player, or even worse, you re a
negative influence. And we know what happens to people branded as negative in
an organization, don t we?
But what if this most common of conventional management wisdom is wrong even
dangerously wrong?
What s the point of having everyone rowing in perfect unison if you re going
the wrong way?
In the constant push to get everyone going in the same direction on the job
an admittedly critical component of leadership we ve fallen into the trap of
valuing alignment over insight. What s the point of having everyone rowing in
perfect unison if you re going the wrong way?
Getting on the right bus is only one of many aphorisms of business that can
cause more harm than good if followed blindly.
How about if it ain t broke, don t fix it ? Leaving aside the increasingly
recognised point that companies are much better off breaking what they re doing
rather than waiting for competitors to do so (which is why there are so few
durable industries left), invoking this old staple sends a not-so-subtle
message to your team about what you think of change.
It s hard enough to get people to challenge the status quo without relying on
evocative images that will make them think twice.
When I m working with management teams, I usually ask people to identify one or
two generally accepted notions about how their business works, and then I ask
them to entertain the possibility that maybe that conventional wisdom is wrong.
It turns out that starting with the premise that something might be broken is
effective to get people to start questioning assumptions that could be holding
them back.
For example, managers at a major retailer pointed out how their strategy was
based on their superior understanding of customer preferences. What they didn t
want to accept: their traditional customers were declining in number. The
millennial generation rising up to account for a bigger share of the overall
market played by different rules, making that deep understanding of customers
more of a disadvantage than an advantage. It s not that the strategy toward
yesterday s customers was broken, it was just becoming less relevant.
One of the most hard-wired bits of all conventional wisdom is that managers
have to make their number no matter what. The performance target is
inviolable. After all, companies without a powerful performance-oriented
culture seldom do well.
But this bit of wisdom comes with a downside, often a big one.
Imagine a company that engineers an improved technology in a core business, but
sticks with the older version of the technology because it s been successful
for them in the past. Making the number requires a return on the technological
investment, so you decide to earn royalties by licensing the improved product
to competitors.
This strategy boosts earnings in the short term: the division hits its
performance target, and everyone is happy. But one year later, the new improved
technology is starting to take off, strengthening those competitors. What s
more, because of your comfort level with the old technology, you continue to
stick with it despite the changes all around you. That happy story of making
the numbers is exactly what happened to Motorola in the mobile-phone business,
plummeting from a dominant market share to an also-ran by giving away a
potentially world-beating technology simply to generate that short-term pop.
Too many companies are too focused on making that number today, often at the
expense of what will happen tomorrow. This is not just a short-term vs.
long-term trade-off (although in modern business long-term keeps coming up
faster and faster). A slavish attention to hitting performance targets may also
account for bribery scandals at companies like Siemens in Europe and Avon in
Africa. And we re not even talking about the burnout pressure on all those
managers singularly focused on their magic number.
Conventional wisdom becomes conventional because it has an inherent truth to
it, or at least it once did. In our rush to adopt the shorthand of business, we
can easily miss the subtleties and nuances that should give pause, and thought,
to what we are doing.