The Boss Problem

Many computer games are divided into levels.  The levels may represent different locations, or chapters in a story, or degrees of difficulty.

At the end of each level is a Boss, a giant enemy. Maybe he’s a Martian zombie mutant, for example.  All those little Martian zombie mutants you’ve been dodging and chasing and shooting through the game so far? They’re insignificant compared to the Boss.  He’s rough and tough and very difficult to kill.

And he’s the only thing standing between you and the next level. If you’re going to keep playing the game, you have to defeat the Boss.

Meet the Boss

What’s standing between your business and the next level of success?  A Boss Problem, that’s what.  All those little problems that have taken up so much of your time are ultimately neither here nor there.  The thing that’s really standing in your way is the Boss Problem.

Trouble is, very few businesses know what their Boss Problem is. I recently worked with a client, a global business.  One subsidiary wasn’t growing while its competitors were surging ahead.  My client explained the background: “we’re not growing fast enough” and the temptation was “we need to inject more people with more expertise”.  Both of those statements may be true.  But they aren’t the Boss Problem.  And my client was smart enough to recognise that and ask for help.

Boss Problems are scary, so it’s easier to hide from them, and pretend that just being busy is enough to get you through.  Here are some typical avoidance strategies:

Be vague. If a problem has a hundred possible responses, then it’s not a Boss.  For example, if you say “our problem is that we’re not growing fast enough” then the responses might be more advertising, or more sales people, or more innovation, or price rises, or price cuts, or better service, or nicer packaging…  Most of these will be little Martian zombie mutants.  The Boss may be among them – or it may not. Either way, you’ve successfully avoided looking into its eyes.

Push the problem down the organisation. For example, if you say “our problem is that we need more expertise”, you can leave the next level of management to answer the question “and what will we do with it”?  The organisation may need more expertise – perhaps in sales or R&D or marketing or production or distribution.  Or it may need the existing people to work together better. Or it may need better leadership – more decisiveness or more freedom or a change in culture. If you just devolve the problem to the next layer of management, then you haven’t had to face your Boss Problem – and by the same token, you’re no nearer a solution.

Make it insoluble. If it’s a problem which you can’t solve, then it’s not your Boss Problem.  For example, if you say “our problem is that our competitors are just too strong” then that implies you have no choice about what to do next. So you can dodge the hard work – and the blame.

By contrast, a true Boss Problem is specific. It’s something you can’t delegate. But it’s something you can start work on. A BP doesn’t just present the challenge clearly. It also contains the seeds of how to go about overcoming it. 

Here’s an example. I worked in the US for a mid-sized manufacturing business. They made replacement carbon brushes for large industrial DC motors. When a motor in a mill or a mineshaft fails for lack of a brush, customers will pay a large premium for a replacement. But there are no standard sizes, so the factory was set up to process thousands of small urgent orders.

There had been a spike in demand at the same time as they reconfigured the factory. The result was more expediting of orders for the customers who shouted loudest. In turn, that rapidly increased work-in-progress, without increasing throughput. Things got worse and worse as they described the problem as ‘bad timing’ or ‘poor customer service’ or ‘inefficiency in the factory’. There was more and more expediting. The factory was in chaos. The situation only got better when we realised that expediting was the wrong answer to the wrong problem. The Boss Problem was the whole of the order backlog. We set about reducing it by putting on weekend shifts during which expediting was banned. And we incentivised the workers by sharing the proceeds of all overdue orders with them.

When you do identify your Boss Problem, the answers begin to present themselves. But until you do, any plan or strategy is bound to fail.  It doesn’t matter how impressive your business plan is – mission, vision, values, goals, objectives, critical success factors, core competencies, scorecards, SWOTs and hockey sticks…  How can they possibly work if you can’t recognise the Boss Problem standing in the gateway?