NOTE from Phil: What follows is a guest post from Nilofer Merchant, author of The New How. I thought you’d enjoy this insightful article.
It’s been more than a year since we stood at the precipice of economic meltdown and my alarm bells are ringing because we haven’t really changed how we do business. The cliff is still there, and if we don’t find better ways to drive meaningful value, many more of us will be going over the edge next time. Possibly in the double-dip scenario many economists are talking about today.
After the first anniversary of the fall of Lehman Brothers, big acquisitions are back. Cisco bought Tandberg to beef up their video collaboration push. Intel bought Wind River to go into the embedded space. And Adobe bought Omniture to monetize and measure content. But most mergers miss their predicted goals.
So why do companies keep doing them to grow?
I am convinced that every company has untapped capacity for growth and success within its own four walls. But we are so busy playing a game I call ‘Corporate Dodgeball’ that we fail to drive great unifying ideas and success through our organizations.
We need to stop – Actually, I mean to say: YOU need to stop.
Unless we change the HOW of what got us into trouble, we won’t just end up back at the cliff edge again, we’ll dive straight over it. It’s time to figure out what and HOW we need to change.
THE MISTAKE WE’RE MAKING
We act like victims of the economy, but in many ways we are doing this to ourselves. We play corporate dodgeball instead of galvanizing our groups to own success. We are looking external to our companies when by the very way we work to set direction and innovate, we are limiting our company growth and success.
YOU’VE PLAYED IT TOO
Have you ever stared at a crack in the ceiling rather than taking on some issue you knew about? Perhaps you told yourself “everyone already knows,” or ”they won’t listen” if you raised an issue? Have you ever tucked away relevant data, or sugar coated issues, as information got messaged up the chain of command?
We duck the inherent tensions in business. We avoid conflict and aim for group harmony. Do the issues go away? No. And when they bubble back up? Yep, more dodgeball. That leaves a gap in the organization. If it doesn’t get fixed, revenues fall, and whose paycheck suffers? Yours. Mine. Everyone’s. Corporate dodgeball doesn’t build better products or invent the future. It creates mediocrity and prevents companies from achieving their goals.
STOP. STOP NOW.
So we leave our potential on the table, and don’t do our best to win in the marketplace. We may get lucky once in a while, but we don’t have the ability to win markets repeatedly.
Now Imagine if…. Everyone in an organization owned the company direction and we were all aligned to make success happen. You would stop wasting time, money, incredible opportunities and move forward effectively.
HOW TO DO IT
1. Change the Norm of “I tell, You Do” to “We think, each do”
Company success is not someone else’s responsibility. It is ours. So we each need to know what matters and why.
We must share – in detail – why decisions are made so that everyone knows how to make their part work with it. If you don’t know, ask. Your responsibility is to know where, how and WHY you fit in to any project. We need to know enough to see if things don’t exactly tie out. When we know the nuances of decisions, we can adjust our aim, as needed, while staying aligned with our broader crew. We tune our work to the bigger goal and succeed. Which is the point of business, isn’t it?
2. Stop Playing Corporate Dodgeball and deal with issues upfront.
We MUST iron out interdependencies and risks between silos, projects, and features. Don’t run from a discussion with different points of view; it is a necessary part of the process of creating something new. By addressing tensions, we (a) discover viable options, and (b) gain shared clarity of what matters and why.
Dealing with issues is a “pay me now or pay me later” situation. The tension is in there; learn to deal with it early cuz it’s cheaper than failures down the road.
3. No longer task, insist on ‘take’.
We need to move from a “Here’s your Task” to a “Do you Take” approach. Do you take responsibility, take ownership, and take accountability? It’s vital that people sign up willingly to what they will do, and are not coerced. This avoids the “no one told me, I never agreed to this” dialog that happens when people don’t buy into their tasks.
We must each go from being a voiceless individual contributor without responsibility, to become a co-creator of the future. Co-creators advocate, champion, and lobby for the best ideas to help the company win. Being co-creators doesn’t mean I do your job, or you do mine. Instead, we watch each other’s backs as we design our future of success, but then each of us owns the part we own.
It’s not about title, it’s about attitude. Get one that works.
REINVENTION FROM THE INSIDE-OUT IS POSSIBLE.
I work with some great companies in Silicon Valley. Businesses that win consistently hold the characteristics I’ve named. So when I see the business community struggling with dodgeball-as-usual, I want to shake them up, to make them address our new reality. I’ve written a manifesto on this topic of the new rules of business.
The future will not be created. The future will be co-created— by all of us, and if we don’t change the way we’re playing this game of business, we deserve what we get. How we play the game matters. Dodgeball doesn’t work. We need a New How for how business sets direction and creates better business outcomes.
About the author: Nilofer Merchant, CEO, strategist and author, is a leading authority on creating business strategy to achieve success. She has honed her unique, collaborative approach to solving tough problems while working with and for companies like Adobe, Apple, Nokia, Symantec, HP and others. She is the author of the book, The New How: Creating Business Solutions through Collaborative Strategy (O’Reilly). It is available on wherever books are sold.
Flickr photo credit to: http://www.flickr.com/photos/danielslaughter/3416051533/
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