Challenging Conventional Processes and Offering an Alternative Methodology

by Michael Pearce, Partner

Forward looking executives must routinely search for and consider the need for new management models. As Gary Hamel so accurately predicts in his book, The Future of Management your company will be challenged to change in a way for which it has no precedent.” He argues that our traditional, decades long way of making decisions, constructing an organization and approaches to employee relations will likely fail in their attempts to forestall restructuring and painful missteps.

The very organizational structure of many companies, perhaps even most companies, is based on historical models. The hierarchical model employed across a great many organizations was largely copied in the beginning of the industrial era of the 19th century from the great Prussian and Roman armies. It was largely designed to assure quality replication and reliability in the manufacturing process while the organization scaled its capacity and simultaneously increased efficiency. It emphasized the importance of labor and capital. In today’s world where globalization, the need for nimble adaptiveness, collaboration and wealth creation by talented “associates” rules, it may actually work at cross purposes and become an impediment to potential success.

The ability to innovate is the predictor of success for many companies today as they bring new products and services to the market. This means creativity needs to be applied to our organization structure and staffing.

The opportunity is both substantial and threatening. The impact of globalization, dramatic technical advancement, declining predictability from historic modeling practices, and the increasing lack of loyalty, both to and from the organization, all seem to mandate that only radical new approaches to recruiting, managing and organizing talent will provide companies with a sustainable and durable competitive advantage. Nearly every organization can boast of their “solution”, all can point to their commitment to quality with their 6th sigma, TQM, or Zero Defect implementations and all believe they have a competitive price. The fundamental difference will be their representatives. It’s not appropriate to refer to them as employees today, for too many tasks are rightly out-sourced, done by contract employees and other non-traditional engagements. But it is the people that make the difference in every organization. Many companies boast that their most precious asset is the people – but few realize just how critically true that statement is.

Today nearly 75% of all of the people who ever reached 70 years old are alive and leading vibrant lives. In 2005, Dustin, Florida had 14 drivers over 100 years old, with valid driver’s licenses! Yet may Human Relations departments still try of find ways to legally avoid interviewing, let alone hiring anybody in their mid-fifties or older.

This needed change won’t be easy. Innovation never is. And it won’t be without cost or risk. As historic models are challenged, even debunked, they will need to be replaced with flexible, innovative approaches that require balance and respect for the impact of change. Machiavelli had some interesting comments on the inability, even unwillingness, to embrace change which, unfortunately, is as appropriate for today’s culture as it was in his time.

In the past we talked about defined benefits and ways to foster loyalty and longevity. Today we describe defined contributions that are portable. The question for all hiring executives must be how to mobilize and monetize every employee’s commitment each and every day they are engaged with the organization. If loyalty and longevity are not to be rewarded, as they were in the past but largely are no longer, than we must create new approaches that will keep the work place a highly engaging and personally rewarding place to work. This simply cannot be done effectively using 19th century management models.

This new market and the new ways employees must be treated can be either be daunting or it can be viewed as a unique opportunity. We must react to a set of circumstances that simply didn’t exist just a short time ago, including the globalization of the market place, the impact of the internet and the sheer amount of data that is available to everyone all the time. Even the smallest and newest enterprise can effectively compete from their very first day in the international market place.
These new dimensions to business are phenomena’s that the executive ranks of most companies are struggling with today, and therein lays the opportunity. As Gary Ames, retired President of MediaOne International commented, “I never have hired for a season, but internationally, as we talk about it today, I realize they were all seasonal.” Most CEO’s and their executive management have yet to come to terms with the change that will be mandated in how companies organize, lead, allocate resources, plan, hire and motivate. This new reality will change the work of managing. Technological innovation has already forced organizational and management innovation. This is just another iteration in the long history of successful commerce. The difference is that we are on the leading edge, and we’ll have far less time to assimilate the needed changes before the competition will cause us to lose permanently. In the past we’ve worked to create organizations that encouraged people to serve the organization’s needs. We must now learn to build organizations that merit the gifts of creativity, passion, initiative and enthusiasm people will bring with them. These attributes cannot be commanded, as they are invoked out of a sense of desire. As Dr. Phil Nudelman, the retired Chairman of Group Health, one of the largest HMO’s in the country commented: “In the past we earned profits in order to deliver needed services. Now we deliver services in order to make profit. It’s a much different model.”

We are likely in the beginning phases of organizational design that will yield unforeseeable results. It will be critical for organizations to eliminate those barriers that stifle innovation. An example is the proliferation of tools that coordinate human effort, and those that support collaboration among those located anywhere. These tools in and of themselves will radically change the work of management and supervision. The young adults entering the work place have replaced the word “career” with word “authentic.” Their fundamental operating philosophy is that they should be judged upon the merits of their productive work, rather then on the basis of title, or credentials. Accountability will more likely come and come more quickly from a team member than a supervisor. In this emerging age of “stint-based” positions young workers continue to consistently report that a “lack of meaningful work” and “no sense of contribution” as the top two reasons for leaving a job earlier than they had planned or hoped.

Our traditional approach is not effective in directing the efforts of those involved in thought-intensive work, as so much of work is today. Self-directed people need to be able to make the subjective judgments that their own special knowledge prepares them to be proficient at making. These are the people who will create wealth. The ability to support collaboration as a fundamental hallmark of the organization, creating an environment that works as well horizontally as it does vertically, will enable self-directed professionals to work with their peers effectively, efficiently and continually.

While talented people are at a premium, they are available. Attracting talent is not the biggest challenge. The biggest issue before most companies is how to profit from the talented people they recruit. The ability to combine talent, technology and organizational design to create much higher profit per employee is the fundamental challenge. Highly talented people really don’t require, nor are they willing to accept overly hierarchical models. Increasingly, the directed behavior part of management will be relegated to embedded systems. The concept that this generation of skilled, educated self-directed thinkers will require a privileged class of overseers, bureaucrats and administrators is an example of how today’s organizations have created barriers and impediments that work at cross purposes.

The real challenge is to recognize that today’s worker is directed by their peers as much as by direct supervisors. Companies must create a system wherein their people can make the decisions their role calls for them to make within an infrastructure that makes it easy for them to do so. And easy for their management to have visibility and confidence in those decisions. The outline already exists in a number of companies. Decision making is peer-based, the tools necessary are widely distributed throughout the organization, management may be remote as often as not, perhaps even in a foreign location, and power will be earned from competence rather than position. The idea that strategy and direction are rightly concentrated in a very few people at the top is one of those enigmas that presents a barrier to change. Change in this kind of organization is bound up in those few senior executives’ willingness to embrace and adopt the change. Richard Florida, in his book, The Rise of the Creative Class argues that some of the most difficult organizational battles will be fought between the forces of creativity and the forces of traditional management.

The opportunity lays in a company’s ability to take control of their own destiny and consciously innovate. Much of the inspiration may very well come from looking outside the world of traditional organizational management. The truly scarce resources in nearly every company today are discretionary spending, talent and the ability to focus. It has often been said that today’s problems cannot be solved using yesterday’s methods. We may well have reached the point in the development of management that we will not for long effectively compete continuing to employ traditional methods and approaches.

Let’s consider a practical example, that of recruiting, hiring and integrating a VP of Sales. We admit to ourselves that we may be hiring for only a few short years, but we admit that even if we get just that we’ll be the better for having hired this particular talent. Research indicates that the VP of Sales role in most organizations has a life of less than two years. So, we know we are hiring for a season, but we continue to interview for a career. We talk about career progression and longevity with prior companies, and all of those metrics that really have little bearing on the capacity to succeed with a new company. The idea, the elephant in the room we all see but resist coming to terms with, is that both the prospective employee and the employer are thinking of the hire from a seasonal perspective. The employee isn’t committing to a career, nor is the company expecting him to, as evidenced by all of the other policies they have in put in place, especially those that effect benefits, which was the traditional way of locking employees to the company and ensuring longevity.

Sales leadership often requires a span of skills that very few possess. On one hand, creating a structure and process that can assure optimum performance all the time, predictably and consistently, requires a person well versed in the science of sales management. This includes the metrics, dashboards, CRM implementation, reporting, pipeline definition that can yield both accurate reporting, and provide a catalyst for performance. Once that system is in place and proven, the challenge migrates from one of transformation to one of transactions. It calls for a much different kind of personality, one who is empathetic, a coach, a mentor and tactician versus a strategic thinker. Very few excel at both ends of this wide spectrum. Some hire for competence based on historical experience and soon lose confidence when their expectations aren’t reached. Then the revolving door of trying to identify someone who can deliver the expected revenue results continues. An effort that is an unproductive diversion, and causes more lack of focus. Those highly skilled in one aspect will rarely be highly skilled in the other. The organization that will lead the way for accelerated performance may well be the one that can come fully to terms with the idea that there are seasons when certain skills and styles are necessary, and begin to recruit and hire against that criteria, forsaking the unrealistic notion of a career hire. Those in the organization that fail to see the wisdom of hiring for a season are likely those that need control and access, yesterday’s hierarchical model, and one destined for failure when competing against organizations who have embraced a new model.

Those recruiting “interim” hires at the senior level, hiring for a specific set of skills for a defined period of time, may well be the first to realize the enormous opportunity that lies within embracing a new model, that of yielding the best results from the best people for a specific task or period of time. They will likely be the leaders we study when we look to those companies who have created the most wealth, routinely turn in the highest productivity per employee, and are the most sought after companies for whom to work “for a season.”

Reference Materials:

Patrick Lencioni, The Three Signs of a Miserable Job, Wiley, 2007
Howard Stevens, Achieve Sales Excellence, Platinum Press, 2007
Joanna Barsh, Innovative Management; A conversation with Gary Hamel and Lowell Bryan, 2007
Glen Heimstra, Turning the Future into Revenue, Wiley, 2006
Nicholas Aretakis, No More Ramen: The 20-Something’s Real World Survival Guide, Next Stage Press, 2007

My husband has a saying that gets a person’s attention. When someone gets extremely upset, he’s prone to say that “they cried like a little girl.” I see marketing brilliance in his comment. Before you ship it – can you make the market cry like a little girl?

Who is She?
The market – that entity into which you launch your best ideas, your hard earned money, your hopes and dreams. Sometimes she responds with eager greed – think My Space or Amazon or eBay. Most of the time – she’s one picky eater. You work hard, make it great and spend months trying to get her to even take a bite. She nibbles on the corners and two years later she rejects it all together.

Status Quo Marketing
How many marketing efforts involve:

1. The task of turning the features into benefit statements
2. Creating programs within each function of marketing to have a “comprehensive marketing mix”
3. Launching the product into the atmosphere and getting immediate market acceptance followed by increasing revenue streams.

What? That didn’t happen? Well, quite honestly, if huge market acceptance happened with every product and service every time, wouldn’t marketing people be the first to ensure the ROI analysis was done? “What? ROI? Oh – sorry – no time. We had to move on to the next product.”

Key to marketing — it’s how loud we can make the market cry. The market (people) have oh, about 10,000,000 unmet needs. About 500,000 of these needs they aren’t aware of - yet. It’s up to marketing people to see the future and get the people to tap into their yet “unmet needs bank” and make a huge withdrawal. Create the vacuum so strong they can’t remember how the world got along without your upcoming who-zee-what’s-it.

Marketing: whipping the market into a frenzy. Not 3 features, 3 benefits. Not programs or initiatives. Marketing is about the market – making it cry like a little girl.

Every CEO I know can be described with one or more of these labels:

• Orchestra conductor
• Magician
• Chemist
• General
• Chef
• Chess master
• Pied piper
• Puppet master

Try it. Think of the CEOs you know (perhaps yourself even). Pin the label on the CEO. It’s fun. While personalities and leadership techniques vary, CEOs all have one thing in common—they manage resources to drive results. More specifically, the CEO blends and directs the talent, infrastructure and finances at his/her fingertips. When he gets the combination right success usually is the outcome.

However, if it was easy to get the right combination every company would be widely successful. More often than not, the limitations of the talent, infrastructure, finances, or time (our number one enemy), muck up the works and restrict success.

Interim management should be the CEO’s best friend and secret weapon (or favorite ingredient if you prefer the chef label more than the general label). By relying on interim managers in the marketing function, the CEO can apply exactly the right marketing skills and experience to an imitative for exactly the right amount of time—all while working with variable budget dollars rather than fixed budget dollars.

This ability to augment the CEOs arsenal with the right talent at the right time can be a major competitive advantage in that it enables business agility.

• The company can jump on market opportunities or react to competitive moves swiftly and adeptly. It takes far less time to locate and retain an interim manager than to recruit a full-time senior manager (even if there is headcount in the budget).
• Existing teams aren’t whip-sawed from one initiative to another. A high degree of focus can be maintained on existing business, while teams enhanced with interim marketing talent chase new opportunities.
• The initiative’s requirements can be matched to an interim’s domain and process expertise; very few compromises necessary. The CEO can select the optimum weapon for the job.

As a CEO do you see yourself selecting weapons, moving chessmen, orchestrating a team, or creating a world-class stew? Whatever metaphor you select, consider that interim management for the marketing function stands ready to help drive business and revenue growth.

Read more posts about interim management by Charles Besondy

Allow me to share a bit of introspection. In my long career as a marketer I’ve worked for eight companies as an employee, but I’ve provided services to over 55 different companies as a consultant or interim manager. Nearly all my employers and clients were in different industry segments or product categories.

So, when I see bios of executives who have for 25 years worked for three companies all in the same industry I’m astonished at their dedication to one industry. I can’t help but wonder if they didn’t get really bored though.

As you can imagine this introspective glance at my career got me to thinking (once again) about the relative value of domain expertise versus process expertise for an interim manager.

I can see the value of having experience within an industry sector or product category if one is attempting to work for another company in the same field. Really, I can. However, I think domain expertise is overrated. I believe more companies when hiring a permanent or interim executive in marketing should put more weight on the leader’s process skills and relationship skills.

One of the biggest values an IM in marketing can bring to the organization is objectivity. If the person doesn’t have in-depth industry experience they will question everything and ensure that customer data and market trends are significant factors in strategic and tactical marketing decisions. This objectivity and current market insight is absolutely critical to off-set the tendency for companies to drink their own Kool-Aid to the point of extreme myopia.

A person who has been in the industry for a time is likely to believe they know it all and be eager to show the client that they do. They will also be very tempted to rely on “what worked for them at ABC Company.” In both cases objective, market-centric thinking can take a back seat when someone wants to showboat. Professional marketers won’t do this. No matter how experienced they are in a category they’ll insist on the latest customer data, competitive analysis, and market trends to help steer their decisions.

If you’re considering interim management to fill a gap in the ranks, to shore up skill levels temporarily, or to add one-time bandwidth look first at the individuals who have a track record of applying proven processes and marketing instincts to their assignments. It’s hard to go wrong with that type of experience.

Read more posts about interim management by Charles Besondy

It is not unusual for a company to seek an interim executive for a temporary role as CEO, CFO, COO, CIO, or even CMO. Awarness of this option seems to be wide spread. But, why is the idea sound for C-level position but less so at VP or Director levels where the real work tends to get done?

The concept, benenefits and philosophy of an interim manager is just as strong for mid-management as it is for upper management. Yet, most people I’ve talked to in the past three months just don’t think of interim managment as an option for Director-level or VP-level positions. Don’t read this wrong. The people I’ve talked to admitted that interim management makes sense at mid-management level, it’s just they hadn’t ever considered it before I mentioned the idea to them. Perhaps this is just a U.S. thing. I suspect that interim managment in Europe is more evenly accepted up and down the management food chain.

Read more posts about interim management by Charles Besondy