Feb 28, 2022 | Leadership, Management, Strategy
History is littered with examples that convincingly make the case that a battle on two fronts can never be won.
Our business literature is similarly littered with examples of business failure brought on by the competing demands of too many markets calling on a common set of resources. The metaphor of war is routinely used in business literature, I have used it myself many times. Phrases like ‘the high ground’, ‘resource mobilisation and concentration’, ‘overwhelming force” and so on.
How odd then to find myself saying that success absolutely relies on being effective on two fronts at the same time.
Those fronts are not different enemies, or geographic locations, distribution channels, customer groups, or any of the other regularly used differentiators, but they can be all of them.
The two fronts are ‘attack’ and ‘defence’.
The disciplines used to assemble and deploy scarce resources to take advantage of opportunities, look for new products, and outflank the opposition whilst defending your home ground are common to all situations.
Resources are limited, opportunities to use them are not.
How many successful football teams have you seen that cannot both attack and defend? The really good ones swing from one to the other, and back again seamlessly, without a loss of position or momentum. Each player knowing their role in any given situation, understanding how that role contributes to the overall outcome of the play in progress, and ultimately to the score at the end of the game.
The best I have seen at this in recent times is the Melbourne Storm rugby league team. Irrespective of personnel on the field, every player knows his role in both attack and defence, and swings seamlessly between them in concert with every other player on the field.
It is the same in commercial life.
The imperative to grow also means that the home base, the source of the cash today, is effectively defended even as it evolves to deliver cash tomorrow.
I am constantly reminded of Charles Darwin’s observation that ‘it is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, it is the one most adaptable to change’
How good is your organisation in this tug of war operating on two fronts?
Jan 17, 2022 | Strategy
It is the beginning of an uncertain new year, following two chaotic ones. Many will have found that performance has been stunted, not just by the chaos of Covid, but by the lack of a capacity to co-ordinate and align activities across competing needs.
Often strategy is confused for a statement of a high-sounding mission or purpose, or the set of values under which they will operate. Sometimes, the strategy statement is as simple as the EBIT objective the MD set for the coming year.
All are necessary, none are strategy.
Your strategy statement should be your competitive game plan. It sets out in simple words three parameters:
- Your objective. This should never be a platitude, or something that can be applied to any business in your competitive sector. It must be the item against which all actions can be judged over an extended period. These are always best articulated using the SMART framework.
- The scope of activity. Your scope is a guide to which activities will be pursued, and more importantly, which will not. Defining what you will not do, removes much of the uncertainty about how objectives will be achieved.
- Competitive advantage. What is it that you do, or intent to do, that will deliver greater value to customers than they can find with your competitors. This is often the hardest of the three to articulate, and often becomes a statement of what you think you do well, or are setting out to do better. This is of no value in the absence of customers caring. A $50 watch tells the time as well as one that costs $50,000, so having a watch that tells accurate time is not a competitive advantage.
When your strategy statement achieves these three things, articulating the objective, scope, and your competitive advantage, in a short statement, you will have achieved more than most, and are off to a good start.
However, there remains the challenging task of implementation.
No matter how articulate, insightful, engaging and motivating your strategy statement, you will have achieved a score of 1 out of 10 on the strategic scorecard.
The other 9 points are reserved for implementation, the really, really, hard bit, the every- day work of leadership and management.
None of this is easy, is rarely done in a short time, and never without vigorous debate based on data, and the varying analyses of the implications from the data that can be made. It is also an iterative process, that improves with vigorous ‘pressure testing’ and ‘what if’ questions.
The question ‘How does this activity add to the achievement of the strategic objective‘ should always be asked during the course of normal activity. In the absence of a good answer that reflects the objectives of the strategy, the activity should not proceed.
Let me know when I can help you sort out this Gordian knot.
Jan 10, 2022 | Lean, Operations, Small business
While contracting as GM of a Federal body some time ago, I used to travel from Canberra to Sydney’s western suburbs on a regular basis.
I had the choice of driving which took a predictable three hours door to door, or catch a cab to Canberra airport, wait, catch the plane to Mascot, then a cab to my Sydney destination. That method took an unpredictable 2 and a half hours to 4 hours depending on all sorts of variables over which I had no control.
My car would happily sit on the speed limit all the way, a far slower speed than the alternative aeroplane.
Clearly, the top speed of one component of a journey will not determine the time for the whole journey, which is what really matters.
This applies to everything in life and business.
Find a way to remove the bottlenecks and the speed of your journey, whatever that is, will increase.
Dec 15, 2021 | Leadership, Management
What happens if you are on the receiving end of negative feedback during a debate, or an ‘executive heckle’ during a presentation?
How do you respond?
Our natural reaction is to push back, to defend your position, which creates friction and ‘heat’.
That is what happens when you respond to a negative proposition with ‘Yes but’. You are setting yourself apart from the questioner, defending an alternative position.
By contrast, had you responded to the heckler with ‘Yes and’: what you have just done is agree with the heckler, at least partially, and then been able to move onto the reasons why it is an ‘and’
This subtle but fundamentally important distinction was brought home to me years ago. I was in a running debate with the MD of a conglomerate to whom I reported as GM of a division at EBIT. I had taken over as the GM after 5 years as Marketing manager, running the logistics, and part of the sales in my spare time. It had been turned around from a disaster into a commercially aggressive, successful and profitable entity.
The MD’s latest ‘brain-fart’ at the time was to incorporate the division into the much larger core division of the company. The much larger division was monolithic, and relatively unprofitable, lacking the innovation, commercial skills, and ‘can do’ culture of our much less bureaucratic smaller division. The MD’s view was that an amalgamation would bring to the larger division the commercial hard edge of its smaller cousin, thus making the larger entity more responsive.
My view expressed strongly was that to amalgamate the smaller division into a larger division would kill the very culture that had been built which made the smaller division successful. There were better ways to address the problems of the larger division than risking smothering the culture of the smaller one.
It was a debate I lost, and resulted in me leaving a short time later, rather unceremoniously.
With the great benefit of hindsight, and from experience gained in the almost 30 years since, what I should have done instead of saying ‘yes but’, and having the argument, which I was certain to lose, was to say ‘yes and’ agreeing that the problems of the larger division were real and needed fixing. I could have then suggested creative and practical solutions to the problems. Instead, I unknowingly chose to lose the argument.
It still may not have worked, but the odds would have moved dramatically into my favour. However, at about 40 years old, and having been given the responsibility of running the business, almost my perfect job, I was too self-unaware and perhaps arrogant to acknowledge the inevitable failure of the path I unwittingly chose to argue the case.
Simple and subtle changes of words can have a profound impact on the response they bring.
Dec 3, 2021 | Leadership, Management
How often have you heard the question ‘tell me about your weaknesses‘ in an interview of some sort?
As a corporate bloke climbing the greasy pole I heard it a lot, and it has popped up from time to time in the last 25 years I have been consulting.
It always struck me as the question disinterested people would ask, when they ran out of sensible questions.
However, all is not lost.
A recruiter I know looking to fill an interim role called me, and we got caffeinated, during which he expanded his view that I was partly wrong.
A part of his process is to define the four crucial ‘Must haves’ for a role he is filling. Towards the end of an interview, he asks the candidate to rate themselves on the 4, best to worst.
It is a more sophisticated way of asking the dumb question, and engages the candidate in a conversation about their self-confessed strengths and weakness in the context of what is important to the role, after the interviewer has had the opportunity to make their own assessment. Any significant divergences can be further investigated.
If I was interviewing for a B2B sales manager, I might have the following 4 ‘must haves’ :
Coaching – How do you work with front line sales people to help them improve their performance?
Attention to detail – Are you a detail person, or a ‘big picture’ person?
Creativity – Are you someone who finds creative solutions to problems, or are you best communicating and working with an established process.
Growth – How good are you at finding new avenues to grow, by better leveraging the resources you have?
Recruiting for a senior financial manager, or CMO, would require a different four questions, but you get the picture.
I was not the right person for the job my recruiter friend had open, we both knew that, but I came away from the conversation with a great insight into a common question, one that I have sometimes had difficulty answering politely (I once responded with ‘you will have to hire me to find out’. Did not get that gig).
