A Recipe for Strategic Vision

Luc de Brabandere is a vice president and director in the Paris office of The Boston Consulting Group. Earlier this year he published a book entitled, The Forgotten Half of Change, a short version of which appears as an article on the BCG website. That forgotten half, de Brabandere says, is the creativity half -- as opposed to the innovation half. Innovation is about making new stuff. Creativity is about imagining the same stuff differently. The former changes reality, the latter perception. Perception can be a problem if it makes you do things that get in your own way, and not do things that would make you more successful.

"Being creative isn't easy. It requires more than a quick course in 'thinking,' because our minds insist on seeing the world as it was."

--Luc de Brabandere

People can act in new ways, when forced, but the new behavior won't stick unless people see the logic in it for themselves. It's not good enough just to demand new behavior, you have to create (first in your own head, then in others') a vision of reality that "rationalizes" a new successful behavior. The irony is that the vision itself results from a subconscious, i.e., non-rational, process.

Perception is reality is a cliché, among marketing types. But this says perception and reality are different -- albeit tied at the hip. Each half has its own rules although you have to be good at both to be successful at either. One really important corrollary of all this is that organizations don't get a choice about which to excel at: being a builder of perceptions or innovations.

Which Type of CMO Are You?

“Our managers believed that good products sell themselves, that marketing was nothing more than selling, and that selling was only needed when you had a me-too or weak product.”

Great quote, huh? It's the Samsung's CMO describing that company's situation prior to its amazing transformation into a brand leader from what it previously had been -- a supplier of commodity electronics to OEMs. Of course the "old" Samsung believed marketing was just about selling me-too products. That's exactly what they were selling.

The Samsung case is recounted in the current issue of Strategy+Business (Booz Allen Hamilton's online magazine). It's the jumping off point in an article by Edward Landry, Andrew Tipping, and Brodie Dixon that invites marketers to profile themselves by taking a short test. The test places every marketing organization in the world into one of six categories: growth champion, senior conuselor, brand foreman, growth facilitator, best practices advisor, and service provider. The article tries very hard to make each one of these types sound equally virtuous -- the real "test" is whether your particular style matches the company that employs you.

Yeah, but I don't really believe it. I don't know about you, but I'd rather be a growth champion any day than a mere service provider. More to the point -- marketing, like public relations, is something that happens anyway whether you consciously work at it or not. Somebody will champion growth -- and somebody will provide service (just to pick on those two opposite ends of the BAH marketing spectrum). Besides, who says commodity OEM suppliers can't have growth champions? They'd better. If that's not the CMO then by default it will be someone else doing one of CMO's jobs. Granted, different personalities will gravitate naturally toward some marketing roles and not others. But if the CMO doesn't make sure all these bases are covered, who will?

What Apple, Vodaphone and Enterprise Have in Common

All three companies do a superb job of growing organically -- i.e., from operations rather than from acquisitions. And Bain Consulting thinks it knows their secret. In a nutshell, what they're good at is listening to customers.

How's a company with a communications problem supposed to know it has a communications problem?

The best example of non-listening is probably the gap between company and customer perceptions as to whether companies deliver a great customer experience. In a Bain survey, 80% of companies said they did, but only 8% of customers agreed.

That's probably why 90% of companies (according to Bain) fail to meet their own growth expectations. Companies who find it difficult to communicate with customers probably don't know it -- since they're not hearing what customers are saying. This goes along with another Bain finding — that most growth initiatives actually achieve the opposite effect by annoying customers.

Here's my big question: How's a company with a communications problem supposed to know it has a communications problem? Unless you are one of the one in 10 companies experiencing high organic growth, the safe bet is that you do have a problem communicating with customers. Acknowledging the problem is at least half the solution. Finding experts qualified to tell you what you should do is the easy part. What's hard is being willing to hear them.

For more on this topic, read "Closing the delivery gap: How to achieve true customer-led growth," by James Allen.

When's the Best Time to Fail?

Early. Cut your losses. Learn from your experiences. The sooner you get rid of bad strategies, the better your chances of finding good ones -- if only by the process of elimination. Getting used to the idea of failure can itself be a strategic advantage. The idea is not to pursue failure as a goal, but simply to realize that, statistically speaking, most strategies are bad -- or at least no better than average -- which is the same thing as failing when it comes to strategy. The point, after all, is to achieve strategic advantage -- so just being like everyone else is by definition really a failure.

In high tech "popular strategy" is an oxymoron.

This is one of the big lessons you learn reading a 2003 "classic" McKinsey article, "Hidden Flaws in Strategy," (registration required) by one of the firm's London directors, Charles Roxburgh. Mr. Roxburgh identifies seven flaws in the way people think about strategy -- and several, like "group think," "sunk cost effect," and "over confidence" all convey this general theme. And I think it's particularly relevant to high tech strategists since they are basically in the business of tryng out new things.

(Also see my May 2006 blog post about a related McKinsey article.)

Another insight: great high tech strategies are also by definition unique. Otherwise everyone would have already thought of them -- again, no advantage. So it's not just failure you have to get used to, it's also the fact that most people will view an effective strategy as unconventional -- and will probably resist it. People tend to buy the same strategy everyone else does, even though in high tech "popular strategy" is an oxymoron.

That strikes me as the core of the strategy communications challenge: to convince stakeholders why killing off most strategies early is a good idea and that an unpopular strategy might be worth a try.

Passive-Aggressive Customers

Booze Allen Hamilton is promoting a September HBR article about "The Passive-Aggressive Organization" overviewed in its latest Strategy+Business online magazne. The article, written by Gary Neilson, Bruce Pasternack, and Karen Van Nuys, discusses the reasons employees seem to go along with management directives but in reality undermine those directives they appear to enthusiastically support. They do this by delay or by coming up with perfectly reasonable excuses why something couldn't happen. Rather than acknowledge what's going, on upper management itself is often culpable, passively buying into whatever nonsense they're being handed. The reasons why employees do this bad behavior is because they've learned that's how they stay out of trouble, or because it's just easier, or because they have a private agenda that's more important. The article lists other reasons as well, and why senior managers share responsbility -- as well as what can be done to correct the situation.

I'd like to see an article on how to recognize and deal effectively with passive-aggressive behavior in other organizations.

In all my years as a freelance technology marketing writer, I would say that passive-aggressive behavior is probably the single biggest obstacle to getting work done for organizations. Projects that are enthusiastically supported in the kickoff meeting go nowhere. White papers and articles don't get reviewed. Interviews don't get set up. When you call the contact person, promises are made to "be more responsive next time" which never seems to happen. You get the picture.

The Booze Allen article addresses organizations from an internal perspective, but passive-aggressive behavior also has bad impacts on external players as well -- whether that's business partners, channel partners, suppliers, customers, consultants, contractors, or whomever. It takes time for the outsiders to figure out that the people inside either aren't in control, don't care, or are simply deceptive. That's time you're spending trying to figure out what's really going on and what you can do about it.

I'd like to see an article on how to recognize and deal effectively with passive-aggressive behavior in other organizations. As a start, the Booze Allen piece certainly provides some good insight into the problem.

Decoupling Value Chain Participation

The last two posts have been about whether or not it's a good idea to decouple innovation (or adoption of innovation) from its application. Adventis published an article that advocated decoupling innovation from futures management -- the latter better handled by "systems" than by the innovators themselves. McKinsey published an article on IT leadership saying that management-by-system doesn't work when it comes to deciding which path of innovation adoption IT itself should follow.

This discussion is really about drawing the line across the value chain and saying how much chain you should take responsibility for. Too much and your costs are too high; too little and you don't add enough value. I closed yesterday by saying that knowing where to draw that line might be part of being a leader -- whether you assess adoption risk on the supply side of technology or the demand side.

Another take on this issue is provided by Innosight, one of whose consultants (Scott Anthony) co-wrote an article with Clayton Christensen and Chris Musso titled "Maximizing the Returns on Research." It basically says that whre you draw the line (the "decoupling point") is where the incremental value add of chain integration is less than the incremental value add of further chain participation (my paraphrase). At some point, as technology matures, tieing together the various stages of value creation has less worth than the value actually produced at those stages. The sweet spot is knowing when that's about to happen. The article gives four key indicators of when that might be for you.

You can actually adopt this model to either the problem discussed by Adventis or McKinsey. It's all about knowing the risk/reward of sticking your neck out a little bit more -- and sometimes more is actually less risky. You don't automatically do something because you know how (the Adventis arguement). Neither should you automatically not do something just because it doesn't fit standard operating procedure (the McKinsey argument). But what's really useful is knowing that there might be a sweet spot in between and even where it might be.

IT Leadership by System

My last post (below) talks about whether you can bottle innovation. I commented on an article (by Adventis Consulting) that advocates decoupling the creative side of innovation from the risk-taking side. An organization's culture should encourage creative people to come with great ideas continuously -- but not necessarily let them decide when and how those ideas actually get funded. That's a process best left to a dispassionate "system" -- much like a hedge fund might rely on a program trading in the futures (options) market.

Okay, that makes sense -- like I said last week, I get how betting on "futures" is like betting on futures -- and that there are indeed systems that do exactly that and very well.

So this week I am reading an article on IT leadership in the McKinsey Quarterly (August, 2005, registration required) by Eric Monnoyer and Paul Willmott — and it raises an issue which is I think germane to this left brain/right brain discussion. Monnoyer and Willmott are basically saying that IT leadership is not something best done by committee or governance models. Management by system simply does not get people juiced; nor does it get people aligned with THE MISSION.

". . . leadership can achieve what governance systems by themselves cannot." -- McKinsey Report (August, 2005)

The Adventis article is aimed at technology suppliers; while the McKinsey article talks to technology users. But managers in both groups have the same job -- which is to weigh technology risks and get other people willing to take them. And clearly a system can't do that, no matter how theoretically elegant its design. Still, I think there's some value in keeping either side of the brain from taking over completely -- and in knowing when to give ground and on which side. Maybe that's what leaders are supposed to do.