Is everyone around you asleep?
You know the story of boiling the frog. Fill a pan with cold water, immerse your frog, and heat over a low flame. The hapless frog dozes through the gathering crisis and is eventually boiled alive.
Our little green friend’s death is not in vain, because he provides us with a handy metaphor. How many of us can boast of a similar immortality? (The journalist James Fallows, for instance, will only be remembered for complaining – for years and years and years – that the frog-boiling story is not borne out by science. So?)
Businesses regularly boil to death. (No, not literally, James.) Kodak, for example, didn’t just sit in the saucepan; they lit the match by inventing the first digital camera in the 1970s. They had 35 years to climb out of the pan, but they’ve just filed for bankruptcy.
So how can we wake people up to the seriousness of a problem or crisis? Humans don’t pay enough attention to crises because we are homeostatic. We have great faith that things will soon return to normal. We like the warm water, rather too much.
The obvious answer – to shout about the problem – doesn’t seem to work. It puts you head to head. People get depressed or frightened or disengaged. They hide their heads deeper in the sand. Or they desert what they see as the sinking ship. They don’t like your burning platform. (These are metaphors, James, metaphors.)
I suspect that a better way is to lead people to the problem rather than pushing the problem at them. What does that mean? Well, take the time to find out what’s important to the people around you. Then find a way to help them achieve what they want to achieve. Be on their side; be by their side. Then point to the problem and figure out the implications together – and come up with solutions together.
A company I was working with had suspected for years that technology was going to make their service redundant. They were reluctant to face up to the problem. The water was simmering and they were drifting off peacefully. The research director called me; together we worked on a wake-up event.
The first instinct was to scare the bejesus out of everyone. Mercifully we resisted the temptation; I suspect we would have destroyed any energy and so achieved nothing.
Instead we designed a workshop where we got the psychology right. First we explored what the company was achieving for its clients; then we debated the talents and motivations and enthusiasms of the people in the room; and then we faced up to the main issue. We had a series of high-impact presentations from the researcher, a client and a software developer. The mood was positive but determined and serious.
Finally we looked for new ways to perpetuate the company’s good work in a new era. The result was a new surge of ideas for enhancing their service beyond the ability of technology to compete.
A Jolly Hockey Stick
“Economists are pessimists: they’ve predicted eight of the last three depressions”
Barry Asmus
This explosive document was found in a bin in Westminster. Annotated by an unknown economist at the Office of Budget Responsibility, the scrawled notes blow the lid off the financial forecasts for UK plc.
Actually, that’s not true. Yes, it summarises the GDP forecasts from the UK’s Office for Budget Responsibility. However, I nicked the original from the Daily Telegraph website, and added my own jottings about what might have been going through the mind of the analysts who put it together.
Are my additions cynical? Absolutely! I’ve been through similar exercises myself and I know the pressures.
The numbers are a classic “hockey-stick”. They suggest that the UK will return to a ‘normal’ level of growth in a few years’ time. But can we believe it? The short-term forecasts have been dramatically wrong. Why on earth should we place any trust in the longer-term forecast?
Indeed, what if this – all the change we’ve been through over the last four years – is the new normal? Low growth – or no growth? Massive unpredictability? Huge capital swings? And the associated sense that there is nothing at the centre – no central economic and political expertise, authority or even influence over events – with all that that implies for our confidence in democracy?
This graph proves that forecasting is a mug’s game. And protesting that “circumstances have changed” just emphasises the point.
But planning is different. It’s still essential. It just has to happen more quickly and more frequently. Maybe the sort of dilemmas we face are more tactical and short-term, but when decisions are difficult, we’re more likely to reach better answers if we keep the big picture in mind, like our direction or our purpose or the many timeless business truths.
The overall vector of GDP looks dreadful right now. Remember, though, that it’s the average of hundreds and thousands of individual vectors. Who wants to be average?
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So, in the next few blog posts, I’m going to explore some of the things we can do to put more distance between us and the average. If we have any influence over our own future, there’s no reason to be satisfied with average performance. But we need to be clear about how we’re going to beat the average.
Here’s the first recommendation:
Get crystal clear about why you and/or your business are valuable.
We all know about elevator pitches, but one of the anecdotes about the late great Steve Jobs takes the concept further. It’s said that if you found yourself in a lift with him, you’d better have a compelling reason why you were working for Apple – or you wouldn’t be by the time you arrived at your floor. (And there are only four floors at their HQ, by the way.)
If your pitch doesn’t work, you’re fired. Concentrates the mind, doesn’t it?
An elevator pitch is a statement about why your services or products are valuable. It’s really hard to get right. You face two classic marketing challenges: ignoring your own perspective in favour of others’, and throwing away all your ideas except the single most crucial one.
The ideal starting point is “We help these people with this problem to reach this result.” Once you’re clear about that, then you can refine it to something a bit more elegant, like “melt away the misery of indigestion, fast.”
My own is “I help busy teams hammer out great business strategies”. This only took ten years to formulate (thanks Andy and thanks Jane). I can justify each word, and more importantly I can back it up with plenty of examples. Would I survive the journey with Steve? Hope so.
What would you say? You’ve lost the chance to say it to Steve, but lots of people – investors, bosses, employees, customers – will be demanding answers in 2012. Getting your response crystal clear will give you a big advantage – and real confidence.
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.
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| 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?
The next level
What does a business need, deep down inside? If you got a company to climb onto the sofa and lay bare its deepest fears, what would it say?
I’ll tell you why I’m asking. I met a boss the other day who said that he wanted to “take his business to the next level”. I asked him what he meant by it and he confessed, with a rueful grin, that he didn’t know.
“Taking it to the next level”. At first I thought, lots of people say that and they all mean different things. Then I thought, what if they really mean the same thing? What if there are only a few levels? And that’s when I thought about Maslow.
We all know about Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs… so what would a company’s hierarchy of needs look like?
Here’s my stab at a company’s psyche.
Five levels of need. The first couple are obvious.
At the most basic level, even to be born in the first place, a business needs opportunity – something to sell and someone to sell it to. So it needs some elementary entrepreneurship, negotiation skills and basic supply skills.
Then, to become accepted and to feel like it belongs, a business needs repeat customers. So it needs named products or services, a certain level of quality, a business model that promises profit and cashflow, and processes to manage the repetition.
Next the company seeks safety and security. It begins to regulate itself with plans and budgets and organisation charts. It runs the risk of turning inward and neglecting the customer and the changes in the marketplace. Companies which were previously successful can plateau at this level.
Once a company feels secure, it will yearn for the esteem of others. It will seek to define itself, and attract loyalty, through a brand. To do this well requires insight into customers and the ability to innovate.
Finally, at the very top level, a company longs to be all it can be – to actualise itself, to play out its destiny, to astonish the world.
But how? How does a company move to the very top level?
The conventional answer? It’s about having a vision or a mission or (better, in my view) a profound purpose.
It’s a great help – to know exactly why you’re in business, and to care about it passionately – but that by itself doesn’t seem to be enough.
My answer is that it’s about massively over-committing to a few big opportunities.
Amazon doesn’t produce the only e-reader. Google doesn’t have the only search engine. Apple doesn’t make the only music player, smart phone or tablet computer. Sky isn’t the only digital broadcaster. Pixar aren’t the only animation company.
But they have seen possibilities, seized opportunities, and set about doing things better and bolder than anyone else.
That is what it takes to become a company of destiny. Watching, waiting, then going in all guns blazing.
It demands all sorts of contradictory and irrational behaviour: flexibility and determination, a narrow focus and wide-open curiosity, muscle and style, ruthless sacrifice and boundless love.
How very human.
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Wherever your company happens to be, my Built for Growth programme is designed to help you move up to the next level. As a result of the programme, you’ll be able to outsmart your competitors and outperform them in the marketplace. Click here for details.