Category Archives: Accountability

Accountability, Achievement, Meetings, Process, Self Analysis

Meeting Volume vs. Meeting Value

I think I may have telegraphed this week’s topic with that title.

It is no secret that I have been looking at the topics of Process, Meetings and Virtual Offices and the effects that the changing norms for each of these topics have had on each other. As more process is driven into the business organization, the requirement to have more meetings as a part of the review process increases. As people who were once in the office now work from a virtual office instead of the brick and mortar organizational location, they attend more and more meetings “virtually”. Meetings are now really little more than what would once have been described as very large and elaborate conference calls. Against this new backdrop I can’t help but wonder if what was once a vital aspect of corporate culture and progress has become little more than an opportunity to answer emails and texts while partially listening to someone talk on the phone.

I think process has a place in business. It should provide guidelines and directions as to what potential next steps need to be taken in a given situation. This is probably particularly important in those disciplines that deal with crisis situations (such as critical system failures, etc.) or those that deal with repetitive situations where uniformity of approach, response and output are desirable.

I am sure that there are probably others, but for now a think that a little process guideline setting can go a very long way.

I have written in the past that process is invariably input into an organization as a replacement for judgement. The human brain, when properly applied, is a spectacular difference engine. It is capable of correlating seemingly unrelated inputs and creating leaps of faith and imagination that no process could ever hope to replicate. This is what “judgement” is.

And yet we continue to put more structures in place with the purpose of curtailing this capability. We continue to input more process into business as a replacement for judgement, and then react by trying to input even more process when it comes the time for good judgement, and there is none available.

One of the hallmarks of process is the requirement that there must be review meetings to make sure that the process is being followed. Otherwise, how could anyone be sure that the process even existed, let alone was being followed. These are events where everyone associated with the process attends, mainly it seems because the process indicates that everyone associated with the process should attend every process review.

Process review meetings are usually pretty large affairs. As we have increased the application of process to business, we have also increased both the number of meetings, particularly process reviews, and the number of attendees at those meetings.

Virtual Office arrangements have also contributed to the ever-expanding meeting numbers and sizes.

Back in the olden times, when people actually all went to a specific place to work together, it was usually somewhat apparent what everyone was doing and how busy they were. You could see them. You could see what they were doing. Even if you weren’t talking to, or directly interfacing with them you were at least peripherally aware of what was going on.

But now with the proliferation of Virtual Office arrangements, no one can be really sure what any of “those people” who are not in the office are actually doing. This phenomenon is also not lost on the people who are in the virtual office. So, what do the people in the virtual office do?

They attend more meetings.

There can be no doubt regarding someone’s work status when they are always in meetings. There is no question as to what they are doing if their calendar shows that they are attending a meeting.

Meetings have now evolved into a vehicle that allows the once “invisible” virtual office worker to not only be more visible, but to be more visible to many, many people. Since meetings have devolved from face to face events where you could see who you were talking to, to expansive conference calls where just the slides appear in front of you on your personal computer screen, and are addressed by a voice on the telephone, they seem to have grown in size.

That doesn’t mean that they are any more popular, or more useful. They are just more easily attended.

In a face to face meeting, it is readily apparent to everyone else in the meeting is doing. You can look over and see. Are they paying attention? Are they engaged? Are they making eye contact? Are they asking questions? What, if anything are they getting out of the meeting?

This is no longer the case.

We now have an ever-increasing slate of meeting attendees, most of which are no longer even in the same building as the meeting host. We have an increasing number of meetings, attended by an increasing number of people, for an increasing number of reasons. Just because we now have more people at these meetings doesn’t mean they are paying attention. Chances are more than pretty good that they are not.

The only thing that seems to be decreasing when it comes to meetings is the actual interaction that goes on during the meeting.

Since there is usually no one in the room with any particular presenter during a particular meeting, they are no longer presenting “to” anyone. They are presenting “at” them. And since there is no longer any direct ownership associated with the reception of the presented information, there seems to be fewer and fewer questions associated with what has been presented.

Meetings, events that were originally created to enable the two-way exchange of information, seem to have been reduced in importance and capability by the very technology that was designed to further enable the meeting’s reach.

I think that this has been an ongoing phenomenon for a while. I, like I am sure many of you, looked to see who is in virtual attendance at the meetings I attend. I then noted the number of questions that are asked. The number of specific items that are addressed. The number of dates that are selected or identified. The number of action items that have been taken, or given as the case may be. The deliverables that are to be expected. And the number of people who speak.

It seems that the actual number of any of the above listed events occurring during a meeting is going down. Meetings no longer seem to be events where discussion occurs. The give and take dynamic seems to have been lost as meetings have become more process driven and virtually attended. Meetings now seem to be designated times where slides are presented, and the most important aspect of the meeting is to make sure that it ends on time in accordance with the process that is being followed.

Meeting attendance seems to have evolved into some sort of barometer associated with individual activity levels and importance, where actual participation in the meeting, the value added in attending a meeting, has continued to decline.

Meetings used to be recognized as having a specific purpose. Meetings used to be designated as a face to face event. It took people out of their specific environments and put them in a meeting. While they were in the meeting they were not busy or distracted with other activities or demands on their time. There was a goal associated with the meeting.

As we have continued to implement more and more process into the business system we have generated more meetings to track our progress against the process. As we have virtualized our offices, so have we virtualized our meeting attendance. What was once a designated time to exchange ideas and leave with a goal achieved has evolved to a time to call and review charts on-line.

We seem to be meeting more, but getting less achieved at each meeting. In many instances, it seems that instead of having a goal, the meeting is the goal. Instead of challenging each other, due to the size and impersonal nature of virtual meetings, we are presented at. If we have issues or concerns, they are probably best handled off line.

In short, we seem to now attend meetings. We no longer participate in them.

I have yet to hear anyone suggest that they are not attending enough meetings. Perhaps it is time to participate instead of attend, and expect more from meetings. Asking and being asked questions, assigning and accepting the assignment of action items, and challenging as well as being challenged need to be expected parts of all meetings.

It is going to be through these attributes that value is driven back into meetings. The meeting needs to evolve away from its current spectator – presenter arrangement, and back to its original participant structure. Meeting minutes need to be taken at every meeting and distributed. If you are not going to be a participant in the meeting, you should not attend. You can read the minutes.

Reducing the number of spectator attendees, assigning and accepting action items, and delivering meeting minutes afterwards seem to be simple requirements. But meetings should be simple. They should be to exchange ideas and challenge each other. I think that is where the basic value in them lies. Not in the number of them that you have or attend.

Accountability, Achievement, Challenge, Change, Differentiators, Goals, Leadership

Don’t Do Your Job

Although we all like to think of ourselves and our careers as fully and totally unique, I think there are some experiences that we have all probably gone through, to one degree or another, that are probably somewhat similar. It is how we react and respond to these experiences that creates the differences in careers and career trajectories. As I think back on all the roles I have had in the same organizations as well as in new or different ones, I think of one thing that pretty much all of them had in common. They all had a specific job description.

They didn’t all have the same job description. Each role had a somewhat different or unique job description. It was usually that job description that helped the then hiring manager define the combination of experiences, traits and capabilities that led them to choosing me to fill that role. I think it’s probably the same for just about everyone else who doesn’t have some sort of genetic or familial tie to also trade upon in the organizational world.

I think we can all remember those first days in a new position (any new position) where the first thing you do is try to ascertain both what is expected of us and what we will be reviewed and rated on. This is only natural. We all want to do what is expected of us. We want to have objectives to work toward and be measured against. We like to know what we have to do to get ahead.

We then dig in and go on our merry way in trying to achieve or even possibly exceed our goals.

The end.

When review time comes around we are then tasked with the objective of trying to define whether we exceeded our goals in such a way as to merit an excellent “super-star” status (or some such similar ordinal ranking), or just merely a good, exceeded what was expected. Was it really an “exceed” or was it just in reality a “strong achieved”. Did the objective get achieved, or could it in reality have been done better.

It seemed what was once a defined and specific object has now turned out to be open to some interpretation, as it were.

Then there is the ever-present worry regarding whether the ratings that are being discussed are a true reflection of actual individual performance, or is it influenced by, or the result of the organization’s requirement that only certain percentages of the organizational populace can and must fall into certain ranking categories. The dreaded forced rank stacking.

This sort of ranking has been put in place to make sure that managers don’t neglect their responsibility to differentiate employee performance. Instead of having real, and sometimes difficult discussions with their individual team members, some managers have been known to give everyone a “good” rating, regardless of organizational performance.

It’s sort of like this grade inflation thing that everyone seems to be talking about in schools these days. I still don’t understand how you can do better than a 4.0 (straight “A’s”), but apparently, it is possible.

This employee ranking and review is also a good thing in that even outstanding organizations probably have some team members that could benefit in some areas by increased focus, and poorly performing organizations probably have some team members that have performed above and beyond the call.

What this has all led up to, and the point I am trying to make is that when you follow a job description and just do your job, it becomes a question of relative ratings when it comes to reviewing your performance. There is a certain amount of qualitative that inevitably seeps into the quantitative review.

Contrary to what you might think, in this age where the “process” has taken on ever increasing importance, where you would probably think that as a result the quantitative aspects of performance review would be at their strongest, the qualitative aspect of reviews has probably increased.

Think about that for a minute.

As processes continue to ever more granularly define roles, jobs, and their inputs and outputs, the ability to differentiate performance among similarly defined jobs, at least at the high level, becomes smaller. It can almost come down to interpersonal and soft skills as one of the differentiators between similar performers.

Now think back for a minute about that last statement. Have you ever seen that occur?

So, what do you do when just doing your job leaves you open to these types of performance interpretation vagaries?

Don’t just do your job.

Just doing your job is the easy thing to do. You have a job description. You were probably selected because your experiences and abilities matched that job description in such a way that there was a perceived high probability that you would be able to perform the tasks that were outlined in that job description. That was what made you uniquely qualified to fill that role. You were the chosen one.

Don’t flatter yourself.

There are a significant number of people in any organization that can perform any and each specific role in that organization. You may have been selected for that new role, but that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t anyone else around that could do it. Chances are that there were several candidates for that role, and from them they selected you.

I have had it explained to me in a couple of ways, that I will share. The first was that in business, all candidates that make it to the interview portion of the job search are judged to have all the requisite technical and experiential capabilities for the role. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be called in to talk. All candidates enter the interview process as relative equals. It will be their soft skills demonstrated in the interview(s) that differentiate them.

Remember what I said about soft skills and reviews earlier?

The next is that if we each are truly “one in a million” as the old saying goes, and there is in fact close to eight billion people on the planet, then there are at least eight thousand people that are like each one of us.

There are a lot of people that can fulfill each and every job description.

I guess the point I am making is that the job description is the table stakes in the game. It is going to be what you do above and beyond that job description that sets you apart. Performing against only that job description, regardless of how well you feel you have, or even how well you may be able to demonstrate you have, still puts you somewhere on the “achieved” continuum when it comes review time. You are demonstrating that this is the role or job that you can do and no more.

Regardless of how well things were going, every role that I have been in had facets or areas that could be improved. Sometimes these opportunities for improvement were within my defined responsibility, but many times they were not.

This is where for leaders; the process focus must change. There must always be a bigger picture view that the leader must hold, and be able to rationalize against the more detailed and specific needs of the business. It is not enough to just do your job and fulfill a job description.

You have to recognize on the larger level what needs to be done, and then chart the way to do it. What needs to be done may not reside in your job description. It may not be within the realm of your responsibilities. It may not be immediately obvious and may take time to identify.

The issues that are causing the business issues will however become clearer for you as you perform the tasks that are expected of you. It will not be so much the identification of these business issues that will set you apart. Chances are that the issues are already very well known. It will be identifying the causes of these issues, and the resulting solution that you create (and potentially implement) that will be what sets you apart. Remember what I said earlier about how we react and respond to these issues will define careers and career trajectories?

Again, in short, it will not be doing what is expected of you via fulfilling your job description and objectives that will enable you to continue to move forward. It will be doing the unexpected. It will be questioning some of the basic business assumptions that “everybody knows are correct” and creating a new model. It will be questioning and causing issues as people are challenged by you to move out of their comfort zones.

It will be looking at old problems through the new eyes of someone coming into a new position. New employees in new positions are not yet beholding to the status quo. They have not yet become stakeholders in the existing process. It will be those who are not content to do their job that see the answers to questions, many of which may not have even been asked, and identify the new ways to move forward.

It is not how well you do what you are supposed to do that sets you apart from everyone else. It will be how well you do what you are not expected to do that will differentiate you. It will be important to don’t do just your job if you are to get ahead.

Accountability, Analysis, Change, Creativity, Employees, Leadership, Organizations

Automation

Automation used to be a word that was welcomed into business. Back then we were a disconnected, manual world. If you needed to get more things done, or if you were growing, you had to go get more people to help meet the demand. There was a time that I remember seeing competitors driving advertising trucks around the outside of our business campus in an effort to lure our employees away to meet their growing demands.

But times have changed.

It’s fashionable to discuss off-shoring and out-sourcing when companies now reduce their staffs, but the force that is now causing the largest reduction in demand for employees is automation.

It has been easy to look at China, or any other relatively low wage country and discuss the economics associated with moving production and manufacturing to those locations. It is a very easy way to reduce the cost of labor associated with that production. I have discussed it in the past. We all can probably name several companies that we are aware of that have taken advantage of the economic model.

But do you know what is even cheaper than paying people less in low cost countries to manufacture goods that used to be manufactured in relatively higher wage countries? It’s really a simple answer.

Not paying anyone to manufacture your products.

From 2007 to 2013 manufacturing in the US actually grew about 2.2% per year (~17.6% total), however the number of manufacturing jobs fell. Approximately 13% of those job losses came from off-shoring. More than 87% of the job losses came from automation. (http://fortune.com/2016/11/08/china-automation-jobs/)

Now let’s fast forward only a few years. When you hear the word “automation” it can strike fear in the heart of anyone who is currently working. The active word in that last sentence is “currently”. And it is not restricted to just those in production or manufacturing based positions.
As I have also noted in the past, business and organizations continually try to apply those successful approaches used in the reduction of costs associated with production and manufacturing, to other disciplines in the organization. An example of this is where once only manufacturing were outsourced, so now are other disciplines such as finance, accounting and human resources.

So how does this trend affect automation?

The same rules of organizational cost reduction are going to apply. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) has recently released a study that is predicting that up to 38% of all jobs in the US are at risk for being replaced by automation in the next 15 years. These are not just manufacturing sector positions. They also predict the finance, transportation, education, and food services sectors are also going to be significantly affected. (http://money.cnn.com/2017/03/24/technology/robots-jobs-us-workers-uk/index.html)

In case you missed it, that means that automation isn’t just for manufacturing anymore.

Just about any position that has any sort of a repetitive nature to it can and probably will be a candidate for automation. It is predicted that many of the first positions to go will be those focused on the consumer sector. The continued automation of teller based functions will further reduce the number of people in your local bank. Baristas at the local coffee house may also be endangered. How repetitive is it to take an order for a fixed set of options and then write a name on a plastic cup? If there are relatively similar activities being repeated, the function will be looked at for automation.

Look what Amazon has done to the previously brick and mortar based appliance product purchase process. What was once a trip to the store where you dealt with sales associates and waited downstairs for them to bring out your purchase, is now an online search for the best price, the tapping of a few keys and then answering the door when they deliver your purchase, in some instances in as little as one day.

Of course these trends will be somewhat balanced by many consumer’s distaste for dealing with systems instead of people. But even that is changing. Each new generation of consumer has less and less of a tie to the human touch and is more technically savvy than the previous. And even the preceding generations learn the value, simplicity, speed and most importantly the economic benefit to their own personal finances of the new automated model.

Amazon has been successful not only because they have worked to improve the shopping and purchase experiences. They have been successful because they have also reduced the customer’s cost and simplified their search. No more driving around, visiting stores and malls and looking for a sales clerk to answer your questions and wondering if what you want is still in stock.

If you don’t believe that this is the case, the current number of retail stores that have announced they will be closing starting in 2017 now stands at over 4,500. http://clark.com/shopping-retail/major-retailers-closing-2017/.

These are also concepts that will be applied to organizations and business to business commerce.

However, as noted above, I think they will be primarily focused in internal corporate activities, instead of any functions that deal with corporate customers. I have already noted customers distaste for not being able to deal with and have direct human interaction when it comes to their requests for support when they have an issue. I think we could expect an even stronger reaction if corporate customers were asked to interface with a machine for their complex equipment and service needs.

I would also expect even this type of resistance to reduce in the future as each successively tech comfortable generation matriculates up through management to positions with purchase decision responsibility.

The drive for automation within corporations and businesses has started with the internal functions. Just as the automation of spreadsheets reduced the need for the number of accountants in business, so is the drive for on-line processes, tools and tracking systems reducing the need for the number of other types of support staff.

As processes continue to be implemented and refined, and as tools for the tracking of work continue to expand and go on-line, the business environment becomes ripe for automation. Sales opportunities are now tracked from suspect to prospect to bid to contract to implementation in on-line tools. How much data resides in that tool that can be automatically reviewed, with the generation of sales forecasts, booking reports and expected profitability projections made available with just a few key strokes.

Costs are likewise automatically tracked via on-line time charging and the utilization of already automated production and shipping capabilities. How much easier will it then be to generate booking, shipping, revenue and profitability reports.

People in these support and accounting roles who have up to now been providing these periodic reports and functions need to be aware of which way the automated wind is blowing.

So where does that leave us?

First I think everyone is going to need to “up their game”. People are going to have to get reacquainted with the risk-reward scenario. The relatively safer “support” type roles are going to get squeezed almost out of existence. You are going to have to be able to “do” something, not just support the people who actually are doing something.

It is always the “new” or next great thing that is prized in business. People will have to relearn that following the past methods of success will not now provide them with success. They will have to get used to looking forward and trying to predict what will be needed and then trying to move in that direction instead of relying on what was once needed. The creative spark will need to be reignited in all workers as those who wait to be told what they need to do will probably be automated (or off-shored) out of their current roles.

Everyone will truly have to get used to and good at selling. Selling their products, their services, their vision, their ideas, their value, their future. It will probably not be good enough to align with and support someone else who is able to do this.

Everyone will also have to get good at delivering. Customers will want their solutions in ever shorter time frames. Look at how Amazon is driving toward same day – immediate gratification – delivery for their customers. Customers will be defined as those that use your particular service or value. That means that they can be internal to the organization, external to the organization or both.

And value will not be a report. It will have to be more along the lines of an idea, or the fulfillment of an idea.

Automation is coming. The capability to automate will only continue to expand. However, it will be the ability to generate ideas and conceptualize that will be the most difficult to automate (if ever) and will hence increase in value. The person who can think of new ways of doing things will increase in value.

It will also be the person who can actually deliver and implement the products, services and processes of the future who will also be in demand. As I said, it will be those that are able to “do” things as opposed to those that enable others to “do” things that will be in demand in the future.

I guess it has always been that way to some extent, except with automation the gulf between the two will become that much greater.

Accountability, Analysis, Change, Change Management, Employees

The Five Stages of Change…..and Grief

A friend of mine asked me to look over a document that he was going to issue to his most prized customers. He wanted to prepare them on how he saw things were going to change in the coming (if not already here) digital world. I was flattered. Normally the only people who ask for my opinion are some of my myopic golf buddies when they are having trouble reading a putt. My friend wanted to make sure that his message was not viewed as just another document to be scanned and thrown on the pile of other documents his customers read. As usual, this got me to thinking about how we can relate to and react to the now inevitably changing processes, as they continue to barrel down the tracks at us.

As is also usual I first went out and looked around to see if there was anything written on the five stages of change. I wanted to know if I was capturing some original thought or possibly just rehashing something that someone else had already said. It was with only a modicum of surprise that I did indeed fine information on the five stages of change. According to the article I found, the five stages of change are: precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, maintenance. I correctly assumed that anything that includes both precontemplation and contemplation in its description is somehow academic in nature and not fully business oriented. You too can see this at: http://www.cpe.vt.edu/gttc/presentations/8eStagesofChange.pdf

I have never really encountered “precontemplation” in a business environment, but I will now be on the lookout for it. Most of the time I am both surprised and thrilled if I run across anything that even resembles contemplation, let alone precontemplation. For those of you wondering what precontemplation is, it is the point in time when people are not even considering (contemplating) change.

I had to look it up because I didn’t know either.

The five stages of change that I want to deal with are a little more basic and deal more with the human factor associated with change. They are, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Some of you may recognize these five stages of change also as the five stages of Grief. Since there is very little in business these days that causes more grief than change, I think that they are most appropriate.

I have had the opportunity to be a change agent in several different roles for several different organizations. I have found that the two primary reasons that businesses need to change are: The business is doing well and it is anticipated that the market will require the change, or, the business is not doing well and the change is required by the market if the performance is to improve.

Pretty simple, huh?

In either instance, you are almost guaranteed that the universal initial response by those who must change will be denial. They are already doing everything in accordance with both their objectives and the existing process. It will be others who must change, not them. And they are usually at least partially correct. However, I have found that the proper response to such a denial is that others will also change, not just them.

Denial can be one of the longest lasting stages of the change process. Too many times change is seen as an invalidation of what the business has been doing. This not and should not be the case. All business environments are dynamic. Change is an inevitable requirement.

I promised myself that I would try to avoid platitudes of that type. I guess I will continue to try and promise myself that after that last statement.

The next stage in the change process is anger. If denial is not the longest stage of the process, then anger is. When people are made to do something that they don’t particularly want to do, they do tend to get emotional and this usually translates to a little angry. They can also perhaps be a little angry that they were not the ones that recognized the necessity of the change, or that they were not the ones that proposed the change, or even perhaps that the change occurred on a Tuesday as opposed to a Monday or Wednesday.

The idea here is that the response to change can be emotional. And the first rule of dealing with an emotional response is to not get emotional in return. Understand why the response is present, but don’t slow down or alter course.

So now everyone is denying that a change is necessary, and they are now also angry that you are not paying attention to their denials. What’s next?

Bargaining is next. This is an interesting stage in the change-grief process. It denotes the understanding that some change is going to occur. It is also the beginning of the internalization process for that change. It is the methodology by which people begin to take ownership of the change.

It is always good to engage in the change-bargaining process because no one has a corner on the market for good ideas. You never know where the next one will be coming from. Listening to the team that is preparing to change is always beneficial. There is one thing to remember though:

It is not a negotiation.

There may be pieces and parts of proposals that can and should be incorporated into the change process, and there may be those that may best be ignored. Most organizations will not change of their own volition. It takes someone to change them. And it will take will power to overcome the inherent resistance to the desired change.

Once the bargaining is done, along with all the associated renting of clothing, gnashing of teeth and general keening, there is usually a quiet period. This is where the depressing truth of the pending change sets in. It’s going to happen. People will have to change the way they do things. There may even be pending changes to the people themselves.

It will be up to the change leadership to do two primary activities during this period. The first is to make sure that the period between the acknowledgement of the pending change and the actual implementation of it is minimized. It is up to the leader to keep this stage of the change process as short as possible. They need to minimize the length of this negative effect.

The second is to continuously communicate with the changing team during this time and process. Over communicate. Be visible. The change leader must assume the responsibility for moving the team, not just the process, forward at this time.

Finally, if everything has gone right, and the implementation of the change has begun, there should be the final stage of the change-grief process: acceptance. And as with almost every other stage in this process, there will be varying levels of acceptance. Some will embrace the change and move forward with it, and some will begrudgingly go along with it. The only way to make sure that all are on the same page is to take one more additional step.

Review.

What was the reason for the change? Why was everyone put through the grief inducing process? What was the outcome of the system before the change as opposed to the now current outcomes?

In short, show the team what the benefit of the change was. Look at the business performance before and after. Document what is was before, what the implemented change was and what the performance is after.

The idea is to close off the change-grief process with a review that (hopefully) shows that all the effort was in fact worth it to the business. Having a final review of what was the situation and performance before the change and what the new baseline is after the change closes the loop with the team that has gone through the change.

There is no doubt that change induces grief into an organization. Even the prospect of change can and will generate grief. I think that organizations might have a little better response to change if they focused more on dealing with it as grief instead of just change. While the idea of change has its own connotations, it does not engender the appropriate management response. Change is almost an intellectual concept.

Dealing with the organizational upset generated by change from a grief point of view enables management to understand more of the human response and emotion that is created. After all we like to think of change on organizational levels, but it is really on the human level within the organization that the meaningful changes actually take place.

Accountability, Achievement, Empowerment, Excellence, Leadership, Objectives, Process, Responsibility

The Illusion of Choice

I find it rather interesting that I read a many different articles and books from many different sources, that become the genesis of many of my own articles. This fact isn’t really that interesting, unless you consider it interesting that I read things that consist of more than one hundred and forty characters, require a certain amount grammar and literacy capability, and don’t use emojis to convey how the author feels about the topic they are covering. What is probably a little more interesting is that I like to write about business, sales and leadership, and that I rarely find the inspiration for my articles in literary sources that are purporting to be specifically about business, sales and leadership. I seem to find my thought applications from other sources that resonate at a little more elemental and hopefully timeless level.

Such is the case today.

By and large I have found most business articles to be somewhat bland and derivative of other previously written sources. They are also somewhat ephemeral and short lived. There was “The One Minute Manager” and then “The Fifty-Nine Second Employee”. Really. They all seem to be related to the idea of “get rich” or “get successful” quick sort of scheme. After all, if someone actually wrote the definitive text for how to successfully run a business or organization and get rich and successful quick, what would all the other authors have to write about?

Some of my preferred sources can go back hundreds or even thousands of years. I think I have mentioned “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu, “The Prince” by Machiavelli, “The Book of Five Rings” by Musashi and the “The Art of Worldly Wisdom” by Gracion on multiple occasions. Fortunately, my inspiration today was not from these sources, although, come to think of it some of what Sun Tzu said could apply…. I’ll leave it to those that have read both sources to comment.

Today my ideas sprung from a few words by the man who was the coach of the team that lost, yes lost, the last national collegiate championship game for American football this year. For those of you that missed it, it was on TV. I bet you can find it on YouTube. Clemson scored on the last play of the game to defeat Alabama. (I make sure to define it as American football, as I do have friends in the rest of the world where “football” is something entirely different. It is what we in the states would call “soccer”. I don’t know why.)

You would think that there would be far more to learn from the Clemson coach, the winner of the championship, than from the Alabama coach, the man whose team lost it. After all, it was an upset. Alabama was favored and was supposed to win, and it fact, almost did. There may be much to learn from the Clemson coach, but those lessons may not apply to business, sales and leadership as well as what the leader of the Alabama team had to say. At least for me in this instance.

Coach Nick Saban, of the University of Alabama has enjoyed sustained success in his field, the likes of which has probably not been seen in decades. He is successful. He has already won a total of five national championships (across 2 different schools) and is annually expected to be a contender for the next championship playoff. He is the example and standard of what every other coach, school and leader wants to be and do.

But he still lost, last year.

When he was asked what he is going to change, and how much he was going to do different next year in order to win the championship, he responded with what can best be described as an old school response.

He said that he understood all the new offenses, defenses, systems and processes that are out there, but that he was not going to overhaul a system just because he had lost in this year’s championship game. He came in second out of three hundred and seventy-five schools, which when thought of in that way, wasn’t really too bad. Yes, the loss hurt, but there are literally hundreds of other schools and coaches that would have wanted to be there in his place. He understood what it took to get there, and he also understood what it would take to get back next year.

It was at this point that he made the comments that resonated so strongly with me. He discussed that having learned what it took to be successful, he learned that there are no short cuts. He referred to it as “the illusion of choice”. He said that so many people want to make the easy decision, or take the supposed easier road to success. A new process, or a new system were the quick cure. He said this was an illusion. If you wanted to be successful (in his profession) there really were no choices.

It required the recruiting of the best talent available. Alabama’s recruiting classes of new freshmen out of high school are routinely viewed as some of the best in the country. Think about the fact that every three to four years, he (like every other college football coach) has close to one hundred percent turnover of his team. But every year he contends for a championship.

It requires a work ethic that is second to none on his part, and it has to be transferred and translated to the rest of his staff and the players on the team. There can be no illusion that talent is enough. It takes hard work and dedication. There is a base line process and preparation that needs to be adhered to.

Many have heard me discuss my aversion to the perceived over-utilization of process that seems to be plaguing businesses today. Yet here I am praising it. Here process is used to prepare the team. They have practiced and been trained on how each individual need to prepare, perform and act as part of the greater team. A process is not used during the game or against the competition. If so the competition would quickly adapt and defeat it. There is a game-plan, but not a game process.

He assembled the best staff possible, that he vested with the authority to get things done and that he held accountable for those various aspects of the team (Offense, Defense, Special Teams, etc.) he had assigned. However he only held himself responsible for the outcome. He never blamed anyone else. It was his responsibility.

It was this litany of decidedly unglamorous basics that he pointed out were responsible for getting him and his teams (multiple, different teams) to arguably the acme of his profession. He pointed out and reiterated that there really was not choice if you wanted to be successful. It took talent, it took outworking the competition, it took everybody’s commitment and buy-in for the team succeed. There were no “get rich” or “get successful” quick schemes.

That didn’t mean that he wouldn’t change and adapt. He is also recognized as one of the best leaders at innovating and modifying his game plans when his team’s talent, or the competition called for it. He has noted that the basics of the game have not changed, but how you apply them can vary greatly in each situation.

As I noted, by design his team membership turns over every four years. He also turns over his leadership (coaching) staff with significant regularity. His assistant coaches are in high demand to become the leaders at competing college programs because of their success and what they have learned. No less than seventeen of his assistants have gone on to lead their own programs.

It looks like the players are not the only ones that are mentored, taught and become leaders.

Sun Tzu, from almost twenty-five hundred years ago, also talks about talent selection, training and preparation as immutable keys to an organization’s success. He is also quick to point out that flexibility and the ability to adapt to new and different situations, and to be able to take advantage of them while either in or on the field are also the keys to success.

It looks like the idea of putting well trained teams in the field and letting their leaders lead them is in fact an idea that has been around for over two millennia. It sounds to me like Nick Saban may be right when he says that if you want to be successful, and enjoy a sustained success, it really is an illusion of choice. While a new process or system may come into vogue, success is really built on the basics of talent, hard work, and planning, and then letting your leaders lead, and not relying on the illusion that some other process or system can be a substitute for one of those basic building blocks of success.

Accountability, Challenge, Decision Making, Leadership, Problem Solving

The Review Process

I got to thinking about all of the reviews that I have had the pleasure of sitting through, or have been sentenced to, as the case may be. Both the ones that I conducted and the ones that I just got to attend. They are a sometimes interesting, and sometimes not so interesting mix of development, product, marketing, finance, sales, operations and ultimately business reviews where there was a little of each of the previously mentioned disciplines covered. They have ranged in length from the relatively short one hour to the interminably long multiple days in length. I have traveled internationally to attend, present or conduct them as well as done the same over the phone. Throughout all of these reviews, the most important thing that I learned is that it is up to the review leader, not the review process, to make the review useful.

I think it is reasonably apparent that no one likes to be the bearer of bad news in a review. We all like to feel that we can and should be able to march triumphantly into the review and present as well as receive only good news. Schedules are being met. Sales are up. Earnings are good. Enough said. Take a bow. Let’s get out of here.

Admittedly I have been in only a few reviews like that, very few.

However, most of the time I have found that a review usually contains some good news, some bad news and more than a significant amount of extraneous information. Extraneous information is the information that is presented about the activities conducted by the presenter, that are other than the assigned topics that they were given to present on. Extraneous information is what fills up the extra charts and time in almost every review. It has evolved to almost become and expected part of the review process.

I think this might be another opportunity for the coining of another one of the specifically not famous “Gobeli Laws of Business”:

“If allowed to go unchecked the amount of extraneous information that is included in each successive periodic review will grow to a point where it renders the review almost useless.”

Since everybody likes to present good news, and since not all news is good news, people will almost always try and compensate for any possibly perceived bad news in a review by presenting more and more other extraneous information. This information, while possibly interesting to the presenter, and is usually positioned to sound like highly functional activity levels and good news, while in reality it is likely of limited use to the person conducting the review.

This type of information distracts from and obfuscates the important information to be imparted at the review, while continuing to maintain the appearance, flow and process of the review. Unless it is specifically cited and prohibited, almost every presenter at a review will probably include some of this type of information “filler”. The result will be overall less time available to deal with any potentially germane or relevant review topics.

I think I have mentioned before that I matriculated through management within the General Management business model as opposed to the seemingly more in vogue Process Oriented business model of today. It seemed then that objectives were mandatory and processes were guidelines as opposed to the current structures where the reverse seems to be the rule. Ownership of an end to end deliverable objective made reviews that much easier. Progress against an objective is always easier to measure than progress on a process.

The purpose of objective oriented reviews is two-fold: the avoidance of surprises, and the identification of actions for the resolution of issues. They are not and should not become opportunities for everyone to tell everyone else what they are doing.

One of the first rules of business is that there should be no surprises when it comes to performance. Everyone should have an objective, know how they are doing against that objective and be able to succinctly report that information. This approach should be applicable to every business discipline. There can be no excuse for “surprise” misses to sales targets, or budget overruns, headcount and staffing levels, profitability, etc. Providing this type of information is the responsibility of the review presenter.

Once a potential issue or objective miss is identified in the review, a plan of action to bring the objective miss back under control should be the next function of the review. A specific set of activities, and activity owners need to be identified and assigned. Performing this type of function is the responsibility of the review owner. Notice that I didn’t say solving the problem is the review owner’s responsibility. I’ll get back to this point later.

I think this also might be another opportunity for the coining of another one of the specifically not famous “Gobeli Laws of Business”:

“The best type of issue to have in business is one that you prepared for, and avoided.”

This is the focus of reviews. To enable the team to foresee, and take action to avoid issues associated with objectives. It should be with these review objectives in mind that reviews are conducted. If the material covered does not directly apply to these objectives, it should not be included.

There may also be a secondary focus on understanding the cause of the identified issue so that steps can be taken to avoid similar issues in the future, but I have found that these types of root cause analyses should probably be taken outside the review. This has the benefit of keeping the review to a shorter more manageable length, as well as minimizing the impression among all attendees of creating a negative environment for reporting issues.

Everyone has issues at one time or another in obtaining their objectives. A public examination of why they missed as opposed to a public plan on how they can recover will usually generate a more conducive environment where issues are identified and discussed as opposed to being glossed over.

If a review is allowed to become a matter of process, where the purpose of the review is lost in the extraneous information that each presenting group imparts to the other presenting groups detailing all the activities they are doing, but precious few of the issues they are encountering, then its value is lost. They should be times to challenge both management and each other. They are opportunities to do better.

I always looked at reviews as opportunities for the team to suggest solutions to issues. Issues are to be expected. Field Marshall Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke, who was Chief of Staff of the Prussian General Staff in the mid nineteenth century is credited as saying:

“No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force.”

This has also been simplified and paraphrased down to:

“No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.”

What this means is that once you start the implementation of anything, stuff happens that requires you to adjust both your plan and the way you implement it. In short, issues occur. And how you deal with them will directly affect the success of the endeavor and the achievement of the objective.

The sooner the issue can be identified, and the more information that can be supplied about it, the better the resulting response can be.

This again, should be one of the driving goals of the review. Everyone wants to avoid issues. The best way I know how to do this is to get them identified as early as possible and then take the requisite steps to mitigate, and hopefully avoid them.

I think the hidden key to the review is that each reported or identified issue needs to be accompanied by an associated solution. It should not be the review leader’s responsibility to solve all the issues. This is a situation that seems to have evolved in a process driven organization, in that it is usually only the leader that has purview over the entire system. Hence any issue associated with any step falls to them to resolve.

In an objective oriented review, it should be the responsibility of each individual that identifies an issue to also provide a suggested course of resolution. They are the ones who identified the issue. They should be the ones closest to it and in the best position to affect its resolution.

It will be the leader’s responsibility to accept, reject or modify the recommendation. It should not be the leader’s responsibility to generate the recommendation.

It seems more and more common that reviews are becoming just another step in a process. A box to be checked off. They seem to have lost some of their true purpose. That is a shame.

I have been in plenty of reviews where the time was spent and the motions gone through, and not much else was accomplished. But I can also remember many of the reviews where issues of substance were identified and dealt with. Where team members got to display their leadership capabilities when it came to solving their own and others issues. And where things got done.

They were challenging reviews where performance against the objectives was reviewed, hard questions were asked, and answered, and where the results were what drove the process.

Accountability, Analysis, Decision Making, Empowerment, Leadership, Process Management

Judgement

I read an article the other day by Stephanie Vozza in “Fast Times”. (https://www.fastcompany.com/3068771/how-employees-at-apple-and-google-are-more-productive ) It was one of their “4 Minute / Work Smart” articles. I normally am not too inclined to read these types of articles, but for some reason I did read this one. While it was ostensibly about why employees at Apple and Google are more productive, there was a passage in it that both resonated with me, as well as rang significant alarms. It captured what I have been feeling, and writing about regarding business and leadership in such a succinct way that I felt I had to address it. In her discussion regarding Organizational Drag, and the associated costs and losses to business due to processes, Vozza said:

“This often happens as a company grows, as the tendency is to put processes in place to replace judgment.”

Wow. I think she hit the nail on the head. Process is implemented to replace judgement. I do think there ought to be a qualifier in ahead of that last statement such as “Most processes, when over implemented…”. Many processes when implemented as guidelines do provide a needed and efficient methodology for accomplishing repetitive tasks. It is when they are over-expanded, applied and relied on for all facets of an organization that they cause drag and sap judgement.

A quick Googling of the word “judgement” provides the following definition:

“the ability to make considered decisions or come to sensible conclusions.”

Let’s tap the brakes here for a minute. Are we really saying that we want to replace people’s ability to make considered decisions, or to come to sensible conclusions with some sort of follow by rote process? Isn’t judgement one of the key attributes of business leadership and business stewardship? And not just judgement, but good judgement.

There are a lot of people who have said something along the lines of:

“Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.”

Will Rogers, the American humorist said it in the 1930s. Simon Bolivar, one of the great heroes of the South American Hispanic independence movements of the early 19th century, said it in the early 1800s. I think you get my point. A lot of people have talked about the need for, and how you get good judgement. We would all like to think we were just born with it, but that is usually not the case.

The primary method of gaining good judgement is to learn it through experience.

So, again let me get this straight. It seems that by implementing so many processes to avoid the potential costs associated with errors and bad judgement, businesses are both creating the incremental expense of organizational drag that Vozzie noted, as well as removing the opportunity for team members to practice and gain good judgement through the experience of learning.

I don’t know about you, but I came up through business hearing the mantra surrounding management’s desire that we take (reasonable) risks in our efforts to improve the business. This is in line with the risk and return economic model. This model would require the use of judgement to ascertain what the contributing factors to the risk were, and did the expected return justify the business decision in question. The process oriented model would remove these opportunities.

Process, when used as a guideline and milestone marker can be a powerful tool. It seems that whenever it goes beyond this and starts generating ever finer detailed steps, is when it starts to generate issues both in terms of organizational drag, and what I think is potentially the greater long term risk, the stunting of leadership growth.

The Fast Times article mentions the total cost lost to organizational drag associated with process at approximately three trillion dollars. That’s a three with twelve (count ‘em, twelve) zeroes behind it. This seems like a relatively expensive price to pay to avoid whatever the number of errors associated with bad judgement (the learning process) and the costs that they would generate. One would suspect that by just flipping a coin one would hope to be correct on average at least half the time.

By removing judgement in favor of process future leaders are no longer able to get the experience (and judgement) that they will need as they move into leadership positions. The process experience that individuals gain in its place may be useful in a more predictable or production line type organization (secondary type economy sector – producing finished goods, e.g. factories making toys, cars, food, and clothes), but as the economy continues its evolution further into a tertiary sector (offering intangible goods and services to customers) I would think that judgement, and in particular good judgement would not only be preferred, but a necessity.

I think one of the ways to deal with the “Process versus Leadership” issue may be to dial back the drive for process just a little bit. I think we have all heard the adage that if a little bit of something is good then a whole lot more of it should be better. I think we are all aware of the fallacy behind that type of thinking as well. But, it appears to be the creeping mind set of many companies as they grow in size and expand across different geographical and technological markets.

It is all too seductive to aspire to manage all sorts of diverse markets and technologies via standardized processes. If it worked once in one place it becomes a goal to make it work every time in every place. Once that process starts it appears to be a slippery slope of incrementing just one more step in each process to take into account each new business or market variation that must be dealt with. The desire for repetitive and interchangeable processes leads to both product and market biases that can result in multiple missed opportunities as well as the organizational drag that has already been noted.

I think leaders may need to start thinking of the drive for processes as points on a scale. On one end of the spectrum there is a fully structured, process oriented organization. This would be an organization where very little judgement is required, the function or market are stable and little variation is required.

Accounting comes to mind, but that might just be me.

On the other end of the spectrum would be a completely judgement based organization where each new opportunity is unique and would require its own new set of potential processes for implementation. I am sure there are other examples, but organizations that conduct search and rescue operations along the lines of the freeing of the trapped Chilean miners in 2010 might be a good example of such a unique organization.

Obviously, in reality most businesses lie somewhere between these endpoints. There will most likely be multiple organizations within the business that are distributed along the process – judgement scale. What concerns me is that as process continues to be implemented in greater detail and into new areas, business run the risk of both alienating their current leaders in that their judgement will no longer be desired, and hampering the development of their future leaders as the opportunities to gain judgment are replaced with the continually more complex process.

Businesses need to begin learning to resist the desire to replace judgement with process, and understand that there needs to be a balance between the two. Just as many organizations seem to have a built-in resistance to change, they also seem to have a built-in desire for predictability which process seems to satisfy.

However, nothing comes without a cost. The implementation of process can create a stable, repeatable, predictable organization, but its costs can be seen in the organization’s inability to quickly respond to changing conditions, the resulting costs associated with organizational drag, and reduction in the use and availability of good judgement.

Accountability, Achievement, Employees, Leadership, Organizations

Where are the Future Leaders Going to Come From?

It used to be that leaders in business emerged from the organization and moved to the forefront by having a better idea. Or having a compelling vision. Or solving a significant problem. Or dealing with a difficult situation. Or a combination of several of these traits. They moved to the front and led by changing things for the better. But that does not seem to be the case anymore. In these days of process driven organizations, it appears that leaders are selected according to their ability to follow or implement the existing process. It appears that the leaders of the future are not being recognized as the one who can do things the best or most innovative way, but rather the ones that are the best at doing things the current way.

In the past most leaders did not always follow a preset process. Sometimes it’s hard to follow a process when you are out front leading. Leaders would have a flash of insight, or belief in a new idea and risk doing something that was outside the then status quo to achieve it. They would recognize that whatever was currently being done was not going to generate a new result or get the organization to new ground. They were looking for a solution and didn’t mind defining a new way to get there. If they deemed it necessary, they would take a new path.

It was then up to those that would follow them, to try to emulate that success. Followers would then try to create a process to follow that would enable them to hopefully achieve the same result. They would follow in the leader’s footsteps, and hopefully codify each step so that everyone else would be able to understand and follow. They would try to minimize any of the potential risks that the leader had taken in order to succeed.

As the new process evolved, each step was assigned to a specific individual or team to complete. No one ended up owning the entire process, or even the final result. They owned steps. There would be hand-offs at each step. In time the process would become an ingrained smooth running feature of the organization.

This would be good, until such time as something changed. It could be anything, a customer preference, a competitor’s strategy or product, the market or economic environment, but the ripple effect within the process would be significant. Because now the process must change, and based on its codification, structure, and stakeholders, it is now being asked to change itself.

Under a process driven structure, only the current leader can have the end to end insight to change the process. Since each specific piece of the process is usually owned by a specific individual or group, any other type of change would require all the pieces of the process to come together to implement any change. And since the process was originally created to remove variation and risk from the organization, there will usually be a fair amount of self-induced risk avoiding resistance to change. Something that was put in place to reduce unwanted change must now somehow become a catalyst for its own change, and must continue to do so into the future.

Performance now is based on how well each individual or group performs their individual step in the process. This might not be the most conducive environment to developing leadership.

I think this might be what Henry Ford had in mind when he created the first automotive production line that was capable of producing Model T’s in any color…as long as it was black.

He was a leader in this area. It was great as long as he could dictate what the market wanted or would get. When others caught on and started to provide customers with options and variety, he too had to change and follow.

The point here is that those that were part of the production line process were not asked to get together and change the process. There was an acknowledged leader and owner, and he made the call. Now he got to do that because he owned the company and it was his name on the car, but I think you get my point.

Leaders see a big picture and have final responsibility. Today’s process driven organizational structures drive dis-aggregated pictures and responsibility for only specific steps in the acknowledged process that is supposed to generate the final result.

In essence, today’s organizations are not asking leaders, or future leaders to be focused on the overall car that is metaphorically being produced, but rather just the few pieces, screws and bolts that they are responsible for in the production process. They are responsible only to perform their specific work product.

It is possible that this organizational structure has also given rise to the requirement for a Quality group. There have been too many instances everyone was performing their assigned task in the process, and yet a low-quality car was being produced. Defects and recalls soon became almost the norm for the process.

A great deal has already been written about the millennial generation. Some of it even by me. There is no doubt that they have already joined the workforce in large numbers. It has been well documented that they are the products of the current social and political environments. Their effects in these realms are already being felt to significant levels.

While there is obviously variation across individuals within any group, “Mainstream media has drawn a picture of Millennials as lazy, narcissistic and entitled selfie-lovers.” (http://luckyattitude.co.uk/millennial-characteristics/# ). And while this may be interesting from a media point of view, there are a few other characteristics of millennials that this article provides which could open a few eyes and possibly answer a few leadership questions.

Millennials are also categorized here as “Impatient, Entrepreneurial, and technologically the most savvy generation to come along”. They are viewed as the children of the entrepreneurial generation and to date have been credited with creating twice as many new businesses worldwide as the baby boomers did.

So, what does that mean for the future of business leadership?

For me it means that businesses are going to have to walk a fine line, as well as possibly have to draw a new line when it comes to process and business leadership. The new generation may in fact feel entitled, but they are also well educated and impatient. If they cannot lead, or at least quickly change the process that has evolved there is a very good chance that they will leave and look for other opportunities, possibly their own start-up where they can utilize their own ideas.

Process oriented business structures have evolved to reduce business risks and variation. In doing this they also slow down the response time and ability of an organization to change and react to new conditions and markets. As the business organization continues to evolve, these somewhat change resistant process environments will be populated by more and more impatient millennials that will feel entitled to change things for the better as they see fit, and will be increasingly more frustrated with the systems built in resistance.

This change resistant, process oriented organizational structure, when coupled with impatience, risk receptivity and the willingness to go their own way for fulfillment of the millennials could in fact be the perfect storm for future leadership within business organizations. It is usually the best and the brightest that get frustrated first.

They want to believe in and be involved in a merit based system, not a seniority based one. They will want to change and move as opposed to evolve. They will not be as patient as previous generations because of their feeling of entitlement. In short they will be up against a business system that currently represents just about everything that they don’t want.

Both will have to change. Millennials will have to experience first hand how organizations work and change. As Randy Pausch said in The Last Lecture: “Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.” Just because they will feel entitled does mean the will be entitled. This could be an unpleasant lesson.

Organizations will have to change in that as the millennials become an ever greater proportion of their work-forces, they will have to take steps to retain their frustrated best and brightest. If they don’t they risk having to compete with those organizations that have solved the millennial-organizational conundrum, or even the millennial-led entrepreneurial start-up. Competition for the best resources will drive them this way.

Either way, it does not seem that the organizational structures and processes that have so successfully moved business forward to this point, will be sufficient to continue to move business forward from this point. It will be interesting to see not only where, but how the next generation of leaders comes about.

Accountability, Authority, Change Management, Empowerment, Process

Ownership

I think ownership is an interesting concept. Early North American Indians did not have the concept of “ownership” as we know it when it came to the land they inhabited. That concept of ownership was brought to the then new world by the colonists who had a centuries-old concept and tradition regarding ownership. In general, they conceived of land as personal property to be used for the realization of economic and material gains. This seems to be the definition of ownership that has been perpetuated both down through time as well as throughout business. The single possible exception to this ownership concept in business can best be seen when there is a performance problem. Then it appears that like the early North American Indians, no one owns any of the land on which everyone is standing.

There is an ancient Indian proverb that goes:

“Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.”

I like this one as it nicely defines the stewardship responsibility that was felt. They didn’t own it, but they were responsible for taking care of it. It is admittedly a somewhat different variation on the concept of ownership but it was an important one. They didn’t own a piece of the Earth, but they were responsible for it on the whole.

In business, these days it more and more seems that if you do not directly own it, then you are not responsible for it. And just as importantly, it seems that if you don’t own it, you are not responsible for taking care of it. It looks like the concept of stewardship has been lost as we have matrixed and processed business organizations over time.

As we continue to look to decompose what were judged as complex business actions into ever more granular, simpler, repeatable activities to create our processes, we “own” ever smaller pieces of the whole. We no longer have ownership, stewardship or even responsibility for an issue or activity, but rather just a continually smaller piece of it.

It appears that the concept of “if one person being responsible for solving a problem is good, then multiple people trying to solve the same problem must be better” is now being applied. This has given rise to the now popular concept in business of multiple owners for the resolution of business and performance issues. This in turn has given rise to what I like to refer to in the following axiom:

“If there are multiple owners for the resolution of an issue, there is in fact no owner for the resolution of the issue.”

While everyone will be involved in the process used to hopefully resolve the issue, each participant will be primarily focused (and measured) on their specific aspect of the solution, not the overall performance. No one person will have the higher-level view required to change, modify or even remove any of the defined steps in the process. The result of this sort of an issue resolution structure can usually be seen in the progress report meetings.

You can tell the overall ownership of the issue resolution is lost when there are no “difficult” questions being asked in the progress report meetings. Each group will report on their specific area of responsibility, and as is usually the case, they will try to put their best foot forward in their report. And since no one reporting group wants to incite similar difficult questions to be asked of them, no difficult questions will be asked. The net result is the presenting of several reports detailing the high points of any of the several aspects of the issue, while the actual primary overall issue remains largely unimproved or unresolved.

A few examples of the issue resolution detachment can be easily shown. In a time when business profitability is the overall issue, it is usually each sub-organization’s position to show how their costs are either at, or slightly under their proposed budget levels. If every group is under budget on costs, then why is profitability an issue? It is obvious that the overall profitability problem is not their responsibility since they are well within their cost objective guidelines.

There can obviously be several causes for this issue. Increased competition causing either reduced market share (volume) or reduced prices in order to maintain the current volume are a couple of simple reasons that come quickly to mind. While each group’s costs may be in line with their budget, something else is causing the margins to miss as a whole.

An immediate focus should obviously be to see what can be done to increase the top line to help alleviate the margin issue. However, there must also be an overall owner of the margin issue who would also have the responsibility to challenge the various cost budget oriented groups to reduce their costs as an alternative action to help bring margins back into line, just in case increasing sales turns out to be more difficult than expected. Someone has to have the responsibility to say that in reduced margin times like these, meeting your cost budget isn’t good enough. Someone has to own the overall issue and have the ability to adjust the discreet aspects of the process, such as reducing component group cost budgets, in order to achieve the margin objective.

Taking this example the next step further, when looking at the sales process, the business development team may be generating all sorts of customer contacts, however for some reason these contacts may not resolving into the required volume of sales. Are the right types of contacts being generated? Have customer product preferences shifted? Are the correct markets being addressed? The list can obviously go on.

This is not going to be a discourse on Greek Philosophy, asking the Plato-esque question: If every aspect of the problem-solving process is being correctly administered, why isn’t the issue being correctly resolved? I tend to try to be a little more pragmatic. I usually follow a couple of very simple rules in situations like this:

The first is: If what you are doing is not generating the results you want, then you had better do something different. As simple as this sounds, it is becoming increasingly difficult to implement in an increasingly process driven organization. Change imputes risk and almost everyone is risk averse. That is the reason for the rise of the process. It is supposed to reduce the risk of change and variation in business.

I think we have all been in situations where whatever the approach that was being used was not working, but the prevailing feeling was that it would work the next time, so it was best not to change it. Einstein made reference to the sanity of these types of decisions. It seems that sometimes the fear of change is greater than the fear of continued failure.

The second is: If you want a problem solved, make sure someone is identified as the owner of the problem, has the responsibility of solving the problem and has the ability and authority to make the changes necessary to solve the problem. Someone has to be responsible to make a decision as to what must be done. When there is a committee in charge, there is safety in numbers and anonymity when it comes to issue resolution.

Issue resolution is about leadership. If there is a business performance issue, that means that whatever is being done is not working and must be changed. Experience has shown that change does not occur spontaneously. It must be led; otherwise organizational momentum will mitigate any group change effort.

I don’t think leaders shy away from issue ownership. On the contrary I think leaders look at issues as opportunities to improve the business. It seems that the process driven organization may be slightly at odds with a leadership oriented organization in that it holds the process responsible for success and not the leader. Processes are at their best when variations are minimized.

Unfortunately, when organizational performance is lacking it is an operational variation or change that must be called for in order to generate the desired variation or change in performance. It is at that time that a leader is needed to own the issue, instead of a process.

Accountability, Achievement, Customers, Goals, Sales, Self Analysis

Products and Markets

Good sales people only need a couple of things to be very successful: the right products and the right markets. The corollary here is that even with these things, bad sales people will not be successful. That’s why they are referred to as bad sales people. The question then arises: How can you tell if you have bad sales people, or the wrong products, or are in the wrong market? This is a set of questions that senior management must always answer every time a sales target is missed.

I’ll deal with the sales person discussion first.

Sales people are invariably success and compensation driven. They are also usually in a leveraged compensation type of role. That means that the level of their total compensation is directly associated with the amount of sales that they generate. Sales people are essentially risking part of their compensation, and betting on themselves in that they will be able to not only achieve their sales goals but also exceed them in order to maximize their compensation. Think about that for a minute.

People in marketing don’t take this risk and have their total compensation directly linked to the number or the success of the parking programs and campaigns that they create. People in research and development don’t take this risk and have their compensation directly linked to the number of products, the time it takes to develop products or the customer or market applicability of the products they develop. Accountants don’t take this risk and have their compensation directly linked to the quantity of numbers they crunch or the time it takes them to crunch them.

They may be indirectly linked in the form of management reviews, ratings, and bonuses, but for the most there is not the quid pro quo defined “if you do this, we will pay you that” sort of compensation relationship that you find in sales.

What this usually means is that when viewed over reasonable time frames, sales people are either successful (achieving or exceeding their sales targets and getting paid lots of money, receiving both recognition and rewards as compensation) or they don’t get to be sales people for very long. They can’t afford to be bad sales people because they won’t make enough to survive. They usually either thrive, or don’t survive.

So despite what every investment prospectus may say to the contrary (past performance is no indication or guarantee of future success), if the sales people have been successful in the past, and they are still sales people, it is a pretty good indication that they can be expected to continue to be good sales people.

What is interesting is that despite this knowledge, most management will immediately examine and possibly blame the sales team should each new sales objective not be met. I think that this is because it is the easiest approach. After all, we all know that sales can’t really be that difficult, and that sales also comes with a two drink minimum for the cover charge.

What I’m going to briefly look at here, is what do you do when you have a proven sales force, but you aren’t achieving the market success that you are looking for. That means that you need to be looking at your products and your markets.

Let’s look at the next easiest factor to review, the market.

For this analysis I am going to pick something that we can all probably agree is a good product, that being energy efficiency. It can be an actual product that reduces energy consumption. It can be a service that results in reduced energy consumption. In this analysis it is a hypothetical product that has a definable value in the amount of energy consumption that it reduces.

So in what market would this energy efficiency product do well?

That market would not be, as one might erroneously think, the market where the most energy is consumed, and hence the greatest savings could be generated. If that were the case all products of this type would be very successful in North America and the US specifically since it is one of the biggest consumers of energy in the world. While there continues to be a growing interest in energy conservation, the success of energy conservation products in the US has not been commensurate with the energy consumption market opportunity. In fact, energy consumption has increased over the period of time, not decreased. This is due to the relatively low cost per unit of energy in the US.

The greatest market opportunity would more correctly be identified as the market where there is the highest cost per unit of energy consumption.

Going a little further with the market size versus unit cost example, the average cost of a kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity in the US is approximately $0.10. The cost of the same kWh of electricity in Brazil is approximately $0.165, or almost 65% more expensive. That means the value of the energy savings per dollar spent on the energy conservation product will be 65% greater in Brazil than it will be in the US.

There are approximately five times as many kWh per capita consumed in the US as there are in Brazil, making the US by far the bigger market opportunity, but the value per unit savings in Brazil make it the more attractive market (at least initially) for energy savings products. When it comes time to create a business case where money is being spent in order to reduce future expenditures (save money in the future), greater savings will always equate to a better business case.

In short, it will be more difficult (currently, from a financial business case point of view) to sell energy conservation products in the US than it will be to do so in Brazil. From this point of view, the better market would be Brazil.

At a very coarse and high level this is the type of market analysis that needs to occur for all types of products when preparing to enter markets, as well as when going back and analyzing why a market objective may not have been met. It answers the question is the market the right fit for the product. It also clearly points out that one size will not actually fit all.

In looking at the final scenario, we will assume that the again we have a competent sales force and in this case have identified a market that we wish to address. Again there will need to be almost the same product versus market analysis done in order to identify if there is a proper fit.

If we use the same energy conservation product example from above, we see that while the US is a massive energy consumer the relatively low cost per unit of energy versus the rest of the world makes it a relatively poor market for energy conservation products. In other words, energy conservation products do not do as well in the US because US energy consumers (both corporations and individuals) can afford to not conserve (as much) due to the low costs per unit of energy used.

This would mean that for a global energy conservation product to be successful in the US market it would have to attack the market from some direction other that specifically based on the value of the energy saved. It would have to take the more difficult road of trying to quantify the value other “soft” benefits associated with the product.

These types of soft benefits could include but not be limited to: Attractive designs (Apple is a master at this), incremental functionalities (can the energy conservation product do other things besides save energy – a smart phone analogy), social responsibility (casting the product in the “greater good” social category versus solely in a corporate fiduciary role), and corporate leadership (the business case may not be great now, but in the future when energy costs are expected to increase it will be, and then you will be ahead of the curve). I am sure there are many others.

As noted these are soft benefits in that it is difficult if not impossible to define their value. That is not to say they don’t have value. They do. It is just difficult to quantify. However, price is always readily definable. And it is always difficult to sell a product with a definable price, but not a commensurately definable value.

If you find sales people capable of selling a product with a definable price, but not a commensurately definable value, you should do all you can to keep them.

Management will invariably first look at the sales teams when sales objectives are not met. A significant reason for this is the difficulty in looking at, or worse, trying to change markets or products. I do think in most instances it is the specifics associated with the markets and the products that will need to be addressed when sales targets are missed, as opposed to replacing sales people.

I have found that most of the time issues arise with obtaining sales goals because of the desire to sell a specific product into the wrong market, or the desire to sell the wrong product into the desired market. If the product is not readily modifiable, other more receptive markets need to be identified. If the market is the target, then the product needs to be modifiable to meet the specific needs of that market.

The sales force is indeed important, but it has always been about products and markets.