Monthly Archives: June 2019

Alignment, Analysis, Business, Conflict Management, Finance, Sales

Conflicting Internal Forces

I have talked in the past about the three internal organizational resources required for business success, and their trade-offs and interrelationships: Time, People and Money. The idea that if you have less time than desired to achieve a goal, it will require the expenditure of more people and more money to achieve it. If you have fewer people for the goal it will require more time and money. And so on.

I am now going to talk about the driving internal functional forces that are acting upon desired organizational goals. There are again three of them and to put them at their simplest, they are Sales, Finance and Engineering. I think in order to be a little more accurate it would be better to look at the conflicting goals of each of these functions with respect to the desired goal of the organization, instead of just the function itself.

The goal of sales is to get orders. There may be additional sub-requirements placed on them, but it is almost always quota attainment, as it pertains to orders, that is the measuring stick for sales. Achieve your sales order goal as a salesperson, and you get money, fame, glory, respect and most importantly, you get to keep your job. Fail to achieve your sales order goal and you don’t get the money, fame, glory or respect. More importantly, perhaps the first time you fail you may get a pass on keeping your job, but probably not the second time.

Sales in general doesn’t really care about finance or engineering. This is primarily because they are not paid to care about them. They are paid (usually in the form of commissions) to get orders. Sales usually wants the highest quality and lowest price possible as this helps enable their sales. The greater profitability desired by finance usually means a higher price, which usually makes sales more difficult. Sales will usually align with engineering on generating the highest quality solution but diverge when the costs of such solutions are taken into account.

The goal of Finance is margin or profitability. Again, there may be other sub-requirements, but finance’s primary role is to make sure that the organization brings in more money than it spends. Finance keeps score. It’s not enough to just bring in more than you spend. Finance quantifies how much more money needs to be brought in than is spent so that the business’s ongoing and future success can be assured. Future investments and corporate overheads (as well as salespeople’s salaries and commissions, etc.) have to be paid for.

Finance is usually focused on what could be called the margin percentage versus margin value balancing act. It is desirable to have a high margin percentage and high profitability on each sale. However, having high margins with low volumes will not generate enough profit to drive the business forward. Just as a high volume of sales with low margins will not generate the desired margin value. There is a desired financial equilibrium where both margin percentages and values are maximized.

The goal of Engineering is to make sure that everything gets done right. Engineering makes sure that products and solutions are configured properly. They make sure that components and solutions are available in the desired time frames. They make sure that services are costed and allocated correctly. In short, they make sure that the organization can in fact do whatever the salespeople are trying to sell.

Engineers are also believe that they are the primary group responsible for doing the people, time, money, analysis. Engineers are not usually interested in the sales aspect, other than recognizing if there are no sales there is no need for engineers. And they are not particularly focused on finances, as margin and profitability again have little direct effect on them. They are usually focused on the accuracy of the solution and will include whatever they deem appropriate (the people, time, money resources) to that solution to make it ever more accurate.

Of the three functions, sales is probably the most difficult. Sales is competing with external entities for each order, in addition to trying to balance the internal goals associated with the financial and engineering functions. Finance and engineering are only associated with internal functions, including sales. There is no competing engineering or finance function claiming that their financial wizardry or engineering prowess is superior. When they are forced to deal with external forces, it usually only through sales.

When these internal functions, and their associated goals are in balance, an organization can operate at near its peak efficiency. Sales pushes for orders, finance makes sure the sale is profitable and engineering makes sure that the sold solution is done correctly. Life can be good.

It is when an organization gets out of balance that we start to see significant issues. When an organization becomes too sales focused, margins and profitability can begin to slip as the quickest way to increase sales is to reduce price (this is just baseline economic theory). We saw an example of this some time ago when some stocks started being valued based on the assumptions of future sales and sales growth instead of the more standard stock and organizational valuation criteria. These stocks eventually came crashing down when it was realized that they would in fact have to start making money if they wanted to stay in business, regardless of how much they sold.

When an organization becomes too financially focused, growth, expansion and development can slow, again causing issues for the organization. Strategic opportunities can be missed because they may be deemed to either represent too much risk, or not enough return (margin) to be pursued. Being too safe from a financial point of view can be just as deadly to an organization as being too risky and focused only on sales.

With the increased global awareness and focus on the “cost of non-quality”, or more accurately the cost of not doing things right, there seems to now be an organizational drift toward becoming more engineering focused, since they are the organizational force associated with doing things right. I also think that this approach potentially has the greatest capacity for generating corporate issues in the future.

When an organization becomes engineering focused it has a tendency to lose sight of both sales and finance. With decreased input and parameter focus from sales and finance, engineering will continue to focus on accuracy and reducing the risk of an incorrectly engineered solution, almost to the point of trying to generate perfection in its solutions.

The issue here is that perfection usually comes at a very high cost.

Finance will continue to try to demand specific margin levels, while sales will want lower prices to enable the generation of orders. This is the recipe for the perfect organizational storm. Engineering generated increasing costs, finance generated desired margin levels, and sales generated reduced pricing demands to meet the market competition.

The point here is that the market, more or less, sets the market price for the organization’s goods or services. There can be some variations, sometimes based on the quality of your sales team, sometimes based on the quality of your solution, and sometimes it is based on other factors (such as the regulatory exclusion of a competitor from the market, etc.). If you raise your prices too much in response to the engineered increase in costs, sales volumes and hence margin values will decline. If you reduce margin percentages, again margin values can decline. This can become a lose-lose situation.

The organization won’t make any mistakes, but it may not generate enough business, or margins to survive for very long.

In allowing an organization to become engineering focused, you start down the road to becoming a cost-up pricing organization. This is the least market responsive type of organization. Since engineering nominally has no focus or interest in sales or margin, when an organization becomes engineering focused, it becomes almost entirely internally focused.

It is usually the position of the market that an organization that loses its focus on the customer or the market, doesn’t get to enjoy the benefits of that customer or market for very long.

Engineering in an organization is about reducing the risk associated with achieving a goal. But like everything else, this risk avoidance comes with a cost. It is not enough to tell engineering to make sure that the solution is correct. This direction invariably leads to the inclusion of all kinds of failure avoidance constructs, and their costs to be included in the solution. And since engineering can be a complex function, there are few outside of the engineering function that can understand or question it.

In the long past world of “Five Nines” of reliability, this was once the recipe for success, but in today’s “short life-cycle” disposable product world, few can afford it, and even fewer are willing to pay for it.

I mentioned earlier that engineers see themselves as the group that is responsible for solving the Time, Money, People resource equation. It is obvious that when none of these parameters are set, the solution is much easier to obtain. And without limits to these parameters, the costs of the risk-adverse solution can grow quite large. Organizations need to understand that the Time, Money, People equation requires parameters to be set. Time frames and budgets need to always be set before being handed to engineers to configure a solution.

Engineering is a key component to any solution. The functional internal conflicts between sales, finance and engineering will always come into play, and must always be balanced out. As organizations seem to continue to drift into a little more of an engineering-centric approach to customers and solutions, it should be safe to assume that left unchecked, the commercial and financial aspects of these solutions will re-emerge in the customer decision making process.

It is safe to say that you do indeed get what you pay for, but it is also safe to say that sales will have difficulty selling, and customers are probably not going to be willing to pay for an over-engineered solution of any type that does not take into account their commercial needs.

Alternatives, Analysis, Culture, Facilities

The Territorial Imperative

“The Territorial Imperative”, or more correctly, “The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry Into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations”, was written in 1966 by Robert Ardrey. It along with the “The Naked Ape”, or again more correctly “The Naked Ape: A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal” which was written in 1967 by Desmond Morris, are probably the first two books I read that were not written by Theodor Geisel, more commonly known as Doctor Seuss.

I didn’t choose to read them at that time. They were assigned to me one summer. I was getting ready to enter the fifth grade and attend a new school. I was told that they were preparatory work that needed to be completed before I could go to the new school.

I personally thought this concept sucked at the time, as summers were supposed to be school free, and here I was being required to read a couple of books.

What is interesting to me is that now, all these years later, these books and the topics that they covered are now coming back to me in the business world.

Initially both of these books were considered somewhat ground breaking in that they sought to explain the source of some human behaviors. Till then man (man as homo-sapiens the species, not man as a gender, for those of you who might have been getting ready to go full scale gender bias ballistic on me) was viewed as primarily a cognitive creature. What these books examined was the idea that man was also driven by certain instincts which also affected its behavior.

This was pretty radical and somewhat heady stuff for that time period. I’m pretty sure that as a would-be fifth grader I didn’t fully grasp a great deal of what the authors were trying to get across. I knew that it made me feel somewhat funny though. That is funny-strange, not funny-haha.

For those of you who have not read The Territorial Imperative, the following is a quick synopsis:

“It describes the evolutionarily determined instinct among humans toward territoriality and the implications of this territoriality in human meta-phenomena such as property ownership and nation building. … Ardrey posited that man originated in Africa instead of Asia, that he is driven by inherited instincts to acquire land and defend territory, and that the development of weapons was a fundamental turning point in his evolution. The Territorial Imperative further explores these ideas with a special emphasis on man’s distinct preoccupation with the concept of territory. It goes on to elucidate the role that inherited evolutionary instinct, particularly the so-called “territorial imperative”, plays in modern human society in phenomena such as property ownership and nation building.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Territorial_Imperative

More simply put Ardrey posited that one of man’s driving instincts is to own and defend territory.

With that idea in mind, now look back at every business organizational structure and office / cubicle arrangement and apply this thesis to it. It ought to be somewhat enlightening. It also ought to explain why, when we are hired on, we are given “our space”, be it a desk, or cubicle, or whatever. It is now our physical, as well as metaphorical territory. We instinctively know that we must “work” in order to defend it.

As we matriculated up through management we acquired larger physical territories (bigger cubes and eventually offices) as well as larger spans of control over others and their cubes and offices. These territories were then defended against both internal and external competitors.

But it seems that times are changing. At least when it comes to office space. Business organizations have started to move away from the concept of the business territorial imperative. Office size and location are seeming to be done away with as companies move to the “Open Office” concept.

In the open office structure, no one has any more territory that anyone else. In fact, there are no specific assigned locations of any kind. Instead of having “your” desk, cube, office, territory, it is first-come first-served in the seating arrangements. Desk, or more accurately table-space is shared. There is no distinction between levels and spaces. It is positioned as egalitarian and a better office structure for all those involved.

It seems to me that the more things change the more they stay the same. I was looking at some old pictures of office spaces in the 1950’s. It was some pretty interesting stuff. Below is one that caught my eye, primarily because it was in color. Most of the rest of them seem to be in black and white. For comparison’s sake, I didn’t want to try and compare a black and white photo to a color one. Take a look.

This is the modern office, circa 1958. That’s more than sixty years ago. It’s neat. It’s orderly. It’s “open”. What is not to like about it?

Now let’s fast forward a little more than sixty years to today. Here is a look at what is called a “Mezzanine Floor” open office design.

Except for a little better photography and perspective use, I’m not seeing a whole lot of difference, read “progress” here.

The difference is that in the 1950’s you had “your space”. You were assigned a desk. As small as it was, it was your territory. That is where you went to work. Now, you don’t. In the “open office” you can come in and sit anywhere. If you are promoted and given more responsibility, or assigned a new role, you still come in and the same rules apply. You come in and sit wherever you choose.

I don’t know how good or bad, this new (or in this case “old”) open office concept is going to be. I haven’t had the opportunity to try it out yet. But it appears that I will have this opportunity soon. I am going to be interested to see how this return to the past is going to work and how it will affect a workforce that has not been in this environment before.

Many people I know have said that they have in the past or are now currently working in such environments. I also notice that a very high percentage of them now “work at home” in a home office. This high correlation between open office environments and working at home is probably just a coincidence.

Really.

It is probably also a coincidence that “your” home office is a fixed location within “your” home.

The Territorial Imperative was a ground-breaking book. It submitted that man, while being a reasoning creature was also driven by certain instincts, one of which was to define its own territory. It was shown that the defining and defending of these territories was one of the basic drives, and a significant driving force in human growth and evolution.

Maybe I am reaching, but I find it interesting that the same principles could be applied, to a greater or lesser extent in organizational and office dynamics. I also find it interesting that we seem to be in the midst of a period where organizations appear to be actively removing this behavior driver.

In the past, the “trappings of office” were recognized as one of the driving forces that was a cause for people to input that extra amount of effort. You wanted the bigger office. It was a symbol of your success.

I guess on the other side of the coin, your bigger office might have been a symbol of someone else’s lack of success. In today’s age of participation trophies and ninth place ribbons, the desire may not be so much to remove the symbol of success, but to remove the symbol of the lack of success of others. I guess if everyone sits at the same sort of desk, with the same amount of space, with no predefined location, no one can feel bad, or good about their territory, or their apparent lack of it.

On the other hand, in today’s hyper-competitive business environment, reducing the office space allocated to each employee, regardless of relative organizational position, might be a pretty good way of reducing what was once thought to be a relatively expensive fixed cost.

It is interesting that the reintroduction of an office environment that was evolved away from, more than half a century ago is being viewed as a “new and improved” (to borrow from most new products advertising mantras) step forward. It will also be interesting to see how it changes office behaviors.

Will there be an increase in the flight from the office to the home office? Will there be a reduction in the commitment to the assignment and the company on a greater level since there will no longer be a defined territory associated with the office? Despite these and other potential questions, as well as the recent research that shows such open office environments are not particularly conducive to organizational productivity, (“The impact of the ‘open’ workspace on human collaboration”, Ethan S. Bernstein and Stephen Turban,  Published:02 July 2018 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2017.0239 https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2017.0239) I think we are all going to get the chance to experience the open office for ourselves. We have seen that man is an adaptable species. He lives in igloos in the arctic and grass huts in the rain-forests, and just about everywhere in between. I guess he can try working in an open office as well.