Thirteeners

by Daniel F Prosser

  Just the prospect of giving something up can be so threatening that our response is to grip what we have more tightly. Economist Joseph Schumpeter has been credited with popularizing the economic theory of creative destruction. New products and services make the old obsolete. We no longer produce typewriters, Polaroid cameras, or Kodak film, nor do we have employee-paid employment agencies. The newspaper, publishing, travel, and music industries look nothing like they did five to ten years ago.

  To transform anything, we must be open to giving something up.

  Everyone knows the strategy of making money in the stock market: Buy low, sell high. However, for most of us that strategy is almost impossible to execute because our emotions get in the way. We are programmed to avoid loss. The pain we feel when our investments decline exceeds the amount of pleasure we get from their increase. We measure the loss by looking back to a time when we had more, and we measure the gain by looking back to when we had less. But we are less likely to sell our winners because we just can’t bring ourselves to imagine that the future will be different. The concept is too abstract.

  Your default view may be to look backward, but I will help you look to the future. Companies that fail to execute their strategies are looking the wrong way and gripping what they know too tightly, even as they plan for that so-called future.

  Outlaw your own opinions first, and embrace dialogue. Remembering and spitting out facts is no substitute for thinking, and this shows up in the way we communicate. Look at the conversations going on in any meeting. They’re not dialogue. They mostly consist of two things: opinions and assessments. Opinions are prepackaged ways of seeing the world, while assessments are determinations of whether an opinion fits into what the group or individuals believe to be true. This kind of communication is almost always about being right, and it guarantees you won’t be the one running your company—your ego will.

  However, real dialogue demonstrates the art of listening. If you’re not listening, you won’t be available when breakthrough ideas from your team arise. If you’re not listening, you’ll miss the opportunity for something great to emerge from this process. Dialogue is not just an exchange of viewpoints but a probing for clarity and an effort to align everyone by seeking and listening for opportunities to be found in alternative viewpoints. It means asking what is missing or how the situation could be made different. Real dialogue is a conversation that seeks to validate and understand more than one perspective, including those that are not yours.

  In a true dialogue, all viewpoints are valid because they make sense to the people who express them. When dialogue stops, all that’s available to you is a parallel monologue—people talking, very little listening going on, and no one connecting.

  To create an executable strategy, you can’t have people who are shut down, not listened to, and not validated for their contributions. Seeking clarification and clarity for your strategy can only occur in a safe environment, and that’s not created if you’re trying to win arguments or to be right. Your debate and your desire for others to accept your viewpoint simply leads to a parallel monologue that undermines and sabotages all the work you’ve done up to that point.

  Strive to think critically and imagine creatively. For most of us, schooling just tested our mnemonic ability—how well we remembered things. Academic intelligence is too often seen as the ability to choose from a preset menu of acceptable ideas and to then respond fast. As a result, we become conditioned to want prepackaged solutions to our perceived problems. We behave as if life is a multiple-choice test and all we have to do is find the right piece of information, slot it into place, and move on. But this is not thinking. This is the result of a past given to learning by rote.

  Imaginative thinking is an experience. It requires the courage not to simply parrot back what you’ve read or heard somewhere else, or to rely on your past experiences, but to work with another person’s ideas. That irritating self-talk that won’t shut up at 3 a.m. is not thinking. Recycled thoughts can only get us so far. Ask yourself: “Who’s thinking this?” and then get yourself out of the equation. Remember it’s not about you.

  Thinking can usefully be divided into two types: creative imagination and critical thinking. Creative imagination is open and playful and uncovers possibilities that can be put into practice and can create value, while critical thinking is alert, logical, and rigorous. Creative imagination can help us see a new way out of power struggles. Critical thinking can help us see when someone is trying to pull the wool over our eyes. It asks questions in an effort to find out whether the object of our thinking is or isn’t useful.

  Businesses today need to look beyond themselves and incorporate ideas from other disciplines into their planning. We need to stretch our thinking and widen our view, but we don’t want to do that at the expense of self-reflection. Sure, perspective is everything, but a company infected with negative viral memes will be limited to the perspectives of only those memes. Thinking will be discouraged.

  Dump patriarchy. Patriarchy might make you think of a dour-faced man with a long white beard sitting on a mountaintop. However, it’s a style of management that applies equally to men and women, and it’s not pretty: There are those who rule and those who are ruled. Patriarchy creates a class divide: them and us/me.

  We like to live under the delusion that class in the workplace doesn’t exist, but it does. And it gets in the way of shared purpose. From the patriarchal perspective, strategic planning is status rich. That means if there are smart people who plan, there must be not-so-smart people who should just do what they are told. Yet, in a patriarchal workplace, leadership can take on cult-like status. Instead of employees wanting an environment where they can be of service and partner with others, they become obsessed with the desire for dominance. Leadership becomes the only thing to aspire to because only leaders can exercise power, discretion, and dominance over others. The patriarchal system worships the charismatic leader, whether he or she is effective or not.

  The idea that each employee has something of value to contribute is missing from a patriarchal system. Employees are never allowed to be their fully human selves; instead, a leader’s ego is inflated by marginalizing others. Patriarchy creates a meme-rich environment, and while there may be lip service paid to the fact that people are a company’s most important asset, in a meme-infected company, talk and action rarely meet. We may hear a leader calling employees, “my people,” but that implies ownership; the very language is dehumanizing. Employee potential isn’t allowed or even encouraged to surface, and that’s a major cause of strategy going awry.

  Patriarchal leadership identifies the problem of strategy execution as either flawed strategy or flawed people; that habit of looking elsewhere for solutions removes the need for self-reflection. At the extreme end of control lies a deep-seated refusal to change.

  Sacred cows won’t m-o-o-o-ve out of the way. If the rearview-mirror approach keeps a company looking backward, sacred cows are the things that stand in the road. Everyone can see them, yet no one is going to stick a neck out to call attention to them. The sacred cow is protected. Everyone knows what’s going on, but no one will say what it is out loud.

  Your sacred cow may be a pet project that confers status on you the leader but has little or no business value. It could show up as favoritism and entitlement, or it could be your behavior as CEO. Take the following example. See if you can recognize this behavior anywhere in your organization, and while you’re at it glance in the mirror.

  We’ll call the CEO Jane. She is a research scientist and medical doctor and has been to the finest universities in the United States. She comes from a prestigious family, has inexhaustible energy, and is hypercritical of anyone who does not live up to her exacting standards (which is pretty much everyone else). At meetings, she holds the floor, demonstrating her own brilliance. She never asks questions, doesn’t consciously create openings for others to contribute, and never invites them to do so. Her awareness starts an
d stops with herself. Her leadership style demands unquestioning devotion. Those who do challenge her are humiliated, demoted, or fired. She is surrounded by yes-people.

  Jane never admits to a mistake. In her mind, she is incapable of error. She takes every opportunity to assert her superiority by blaming others. In her view, everyone who works for her is incompetent. In fact, she cannot trust anyone to do his or her job. She meddles in the most mundane administrative details. Her personal assistants change frequently. Problems are met with blame and followed up with rules: “Jane’s Rules,” she calls them.

  However, the employees do try to get work done despite Jane’s meddling. They talk behind her back, and the word is that, for all her brilliance, Jane is a moron. So there are two strategies in her company that are pursued simultaneously: Do the work, and keep Jane from meddling. The rest of the staff colludes to support the dysfunctional system, but they can only do so much.

  Jane is the sacred cow, with a narcissist’s perspective of the future and a fear of the past. When you want others to authentically contribute, it’s best to check your ego at the door.

  Open closed doors. Does your company listen to itself? How freely does information flow? Is there a secretive need-to-know policy, or is most information freely shared? Are only the values of top management considered?

  People in a company infected with the negative memes of the Execution Virus are disconnected to the extent that they have no realistic perspective on the business results of their actions or inactions. In a rigid company, flexibility is seen as a weakness. Silos of knowledge never become connected to each other. Even the idea of interdependence is shunned, resulting in disconnected employees who act like cogs in a machine.

  Accept that business is all about calculated risks—not heroism. It is better to have enough ideas and for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.

  —Edward de Bono

  Action risks failure, but one thing is certain: Without risk, there is no reward.

  Entrepreneurs view risk slightly differently than most other people, and there are variations among the three main types of entrepreneurs. Solo-preneurs run one-person businesses, and their principal motivation for work is freedom and lifestyle; for that reason they have a tolerance for risk. Serial entrepreneurs are mostly interested in starting companies and selling them in the future. A main focus for this group is to attract venture capital. The venture capitalists recognize the size of the risk and knows that only one out of ten of their investments will be the big one that makes the risk worth it.

  Then there are the sustainers, businesspeople who start a company or invest (or raise) the capital to buy a company and build it to last. They are in it for the long haul. The three types of entrepreneurs have different concerns and are motivated by different things, but they all must deal with risk.

  Solo-preneurs and sustainers can easily fall prey to the meme of the heroic entrepreneur—a cultural icon that perpetuates a false, risk-loving stereotype. Yes, the entrepreneur must take risks, but these must be calculated risks. The hard work of thinking must precede action. There should be questions: Is the risk necessary or discretionary? What are the possible rewards? What is the likely cost? What are the likely consequences? What is the cost of doing nothing?

  On the other side of the coin is the company that refuses to expose itself to risk and therefore cannot take advantage of opportunities. However, always remember that there is no decision that is risk-free. Even making no decision has its risks.

  Reject all of the more-better-faster memes. More! Better! Faster! is just another way the past would like to have a say in who you are and what you will do. It’s easy to fall into more-better-faster thinking when you’re looking for a way out of your current dilemma. Don’t fall for these siren calls of strategy and execution. They have the potential to sink you.

  “Giving back involves a certain amount of giving up”

  — Colin Powell

  This chapter includes excerpts from David C. Prosser, Peel Your Own Onion: How to Manage Your Life Like a Successful Small Business and Become Happier and More Productive.1

  You’re set to align all your team members with your goal for transforming your company. Next you need to create the rules for the game, so that your work together leads to the execution of your strategy. I’ve pirated several of these rules from another guy named Prosser (aka my father, David C. Prosser) so I named them after him. Here they are:

  Prosser’s 11 Nonnegotiable Rules of Planning for Strategy and Execution

  * * *

  1. For planning to be relevant to your business, you must—before any work is done—uncover the hidden and limiting Execution Virus meme that is sabotaging your workplace and invent a new meme that will become the Empowerment Virus. Then you can proceed.

  When I review an organization’s existing strategic plan (or what the leaders might call their business plan), I often wonder what underlying conversation created this particular approach and what conversation might be going on to undermine it and perhaps prevent its execution. Before any meaningful planning can commence, it’s critical that you take whatever time is necessary to uncover and reveal the hidden Execution Virus meme—the background conversation that will ensure your strategy is not fully executed. You must uncover and acknowledge the hidden conversation and then invent a new meme that is the Empowerment Virus. This new context will be a new place to stand, a place from which to envision the future you are about to declare.

  This is Rule 1 because it is the most important rule and also because it is missing from almost all strategies today. Not following this rule will most likely ensure that you’re among the 87 percent of companies that will fail to fully execute their strategy this year—and possibly every year.

  2. You must do your own planning.

  * * *

  No one can do your planning for you. You can’t hand it off to a team, individual, or consultant. There are corporate strategists whose job is to help leadership see what the future might be like, but they are only info-mediaries—internal information providers. Corporate planning is effective only if the corporation’s top decision makers, and those who are going to be executing the resulting strategic plan, participate in generating the plan. That is because the top decision makers are the only ones who are going to have to execute it. The strategy-planning team needs to be made up of those who will promise to take action once the plan has been aligned on.

  3. You must have intimate knowledge of what you’re planning.

  * * *

  The only people who can plan for an organization are those who will have to execute the plan and who have an intimate knowledge of the organization. Yet there have been times when I’ve worked with an organization where a new top executive has been brought in and is at a complete loss when it comes to planning.

  That person may be extremely bright, but he lacks the information to plan effectively for his new environment. Usually, an executive has to be with a company for at least a year before he or she can meaningfully contribute to the planning process. Until then, the executive can’t be more than a casual observer of the nitty-gritty of the process.

  An obvious example occurs in the federal government. Every two years, new congressional representatives are elected, and every four or eight years, a new president can install new cabinet department heads. These periodic changes help make government extremely inefficient. These people are simply not competent to be effective planners since they don’t have an intimate knowledge of the agency they head.

  Then again, there are new employees who can bring a new perspective or new paradigm to the planning process and open the eyes of the principal planners to possibilities that insiders have been unable to see. But at all times, you should include those who will be accountable for promising to act and for taking action on the strategy that you align with. If you create unreasonable expectations of employees who haven’t had a hand in planning what they are e
xpected to execute, you will be disappointed when they fail to take ownership of the outcome. Not everyone can be in on the primary planning, but part of the process is making certain that everyone is in the conversation for the possibility you have created. You do that by sharing the results of planning and by giving all employees the opportunity to say how, in their role, they are going to show up in the fulfillment of the outcome.

  4. You must have a clear understanding of the business you’re in.

  * * *

  The opportunity to plan for the future is also an opportunity to clarify the business you’re in. For years, I saw myself in the software business. After all, what we sold our clients was software. But that’s what we sold—not what they were buying from us. They were buying information that solved their companies’ deep-seated issue of not having the knowledge to respond immediately to shifts in their marketplace.

  Our software gathered information from disparate information sources within our clients’ extended network of business outlets, and it then presented that information faster than our clients had ever seen. Before they installed our systems, they had to rely on profit-and-loss statements that became available fifteen days after the close of each month’s business. By that time, they could be as much as forty-five days into a hitherto unseen problem that had started at the beginning of the month before. None of these clients cared a whit that it was our software that was doing the heavy lifting. What they wanted was to see what happened every day in their portfolio of outlets so they could respond immediately to the problems our software showed them. They were buying a daily feed of information from us.