I was once attending a negotiation training program. The instructor had placed a small mirror on each desk at the beginning of the program. He began by asking everyone to look at the person on the left, then at the person on the right, and then at the mirror. He then he made a big statement. He said that “two of the three people you just saw will not even be mediocre negotiators, not just after this show but for their entire lives.” That was a huge wake-up call. Isn’t that statement true for most things in life?
I once adapted the statement for use in one of my own programs. Only this time I used it because three out of three will never make a ‘great’ leader. However, that show was not about leadership, but about innovation.
Just play with me a bit. Keep this simple. Look around. Look at any three people. At least two of the three you looked at are guaranteed to be of little use in the next five years. They will be in the same position and in the same chair and doing the same job, either in your company or in another similar one. It is also guaranteed that at least two of these three have been doing this for the past five years as well.
Doesn’t that scare you? After all, if any of those three read this, they would be looking at YOU!
A promotion here and there, a carrot to keep you seated, that’s all!! You fell for the trap, you settled for mediocrity, I guess you wanted…
The question is why is it so? Why is this then? Why is this then?
WHY IS THIS THEN?
Why are we so cool with that?
There is no single answer, however for starters I will answer this through this article and many more in the coming weeks. Be aware.
The first answer is that organizations, in general, are designed to create this. Then they spend their entire lives and executive time and meeting time and strategy time on preservation.
Somewhere in your office, and probably near you, is your CEO. Somewhere around you is a CFO. Then lurking are the head of human resources and the head of sales, and there may be a couple of other department heads. There has to be, they’ve been with the company too long!!
Every once in a while they all go to a boardroom. Meet and discuss problems. Discussion decisions. Think of a common response in the name of collective decision making and Synergy. The group is a fair mix of representation from all departments. Be balanced. This balanced group makes decisions that impact their entire lives over a period of time and result in their being in the situation I described above!
That brings me to my first point: the first answer to WHY IS IT SO?
Your biggest enemy to think about, to innovate your life, individually or as a corporation, IS BALANCE.
If you balance things, then you unbalance thinking.
Think about it.
Let’s take an example here, many of you in any organization would be talking about numbers, growth, sales, now tell me which is better: a great sales person who has great relationship skills and very satisfied existing customers, but no innovation to find new ones. – or a salesperson with lousy relationship skills and so dissatisfied customers but extremely innovative to keep adding new ones – Which is better. It’s not possible to have both in one person (very very rare, I’ll demonstrate later), so what is the answer? You’ll probably say, actually, definitely, “balance”…
What is better – an organization that keeps the customer absolutely comfortable and without confusion – where the customer finds the products of use and of a certain predictability. Know that you can count on you for that particular requirement at any time. Or a company that is so innovative that it keeps the customer completely confused with new products, model changes, upgrades, which is better? Again your answer will be “equilibrium”
You see, for at least seven generations, from father to grandfather to your great grandfather, we have been taught balance. Balance is the enemy of progress and innovation. If you balanced him, you killed him, a part of him for sure.
I’ll just talk about how it ‘settles’ you in your life, but first a small thing in balance: my point of view on the two situations above.
At the very successful company I ran, we never saw a single day of negative cash flow or loss and never had to borrow a single penny, and in 2008, apparently the time of doom, we were charging the highest rate for day. ‘in the country – At this company we never cared about confusing the customer. So be it. Those of you who are customers will know that you have heard of all sorts of programs etc. and may have been confused as to what our core competition really is; You see, if we balanced it with careful communication and stuck to the core stuff, we never would have built the great programs we did, and it was as successful as we are. To go one step further, we never balance the way we run programs. It had to be extreme!!
As for sellers, my preference was always the innovative one. Even if he or she sucked at relationship building. If we could create products that were the best, if we could deliver them better than anyone else, the customer would be happy, confused happy but happy.
There is balance all around you – take a look – you got married and decided you needed a secure job to balance life – you got a job and decided you needed to settle down in life – either way, whatever meant the most to you, I did it. you destroyed excellence in that area by balancing it. I was reading the Pete Sampras book yesterday. He says that he never balanced anything. From the age of 7 to the age of 31, only tennis: he lived alone, he sacrificed the family for distraction, no serious relationship, nothing else, you can call it nonsense, it is also the highest level of excellence achieved. At the age of 32 he married, he realized that tennis stands in the way of achieving excellence there. In one night, still on top, winning a US Open, he quit.
I’m not saying you can only do one thing at a time, that’s not innovation, you do 140 as far as I’m concerned, even if you don’t balance them.
If you want to be head of sales, head of human resources, head of whatever, or CEO or CFO, then do it; don’t accept the balance by becoming part of some committee or board without meaning or added responsibility. Don’t balance it with creating more happiness at home or taking the family on vacation or buying a new car to show you’re doing it right or winning the adulation of a couple of subordinates or getting a call from a consultant giving massages. your ego lighting up on your market value or seeing your name in a newspaper or whatever (do all of these if you want but NOT TO balance the lack of achievement). The moment you balance it or streamline it or release it through some mechanism, you no longer pursue excellence (for yourself), you give up what Pete Sampras didn’t. Yes, there is a price to pay. So what, pay it off.
My precise assumption is that this article will have no impact on you and will continue to balance things out – you’re so into it, so blindsided, that you’ll miss the picture. BUT keep this in mind: you are where you are because you made your peace with it, so the next time you see a person 10 years younger, leaping forward and endangering your existence, don’t lie down, just do what best you know how to do Balance!!!
It’s not just you. They are our organizations. I wrote that they are designed for this. Obviously, if the majority of individuals are busy balancing, then collectively what will they create? A balanced organization! A joke! It doesn’t work: 75% of Fortune 500 companies are not on the list after 20 years. 84% of companies that balance things out and streamline markets through mergers and acquisitions delist in less than 10 years. That fast everything fails. The fall is inevitable. It is not just a mistake in decision making. It is a failure to think.
I’m not a fan of ‘small is beautiful’, but I am unequivocally convinced that ‘huge is ugly’. It does not mean that it does not create great organizations, but rather that it disintegrates them for agility, or otherwise, it collapses. Large organizations create centralization: they create committees and subcommittees, boards and bodies to make essential decisions; in the process, without knowing it (and even though they think otherwise), they have centralized almost everything with one or the other, killing innovation and creativity even halfway. -levels. Therefore, you will often find such large companies – Ford. GM, IBM or let’s say even our government organizations – loyal employees have been there for years and will find the innovative, sparkling and creative smart people they are constantly looking for, but these young people will keep leaving, they are frustrated by the lack of expression and innovation and creativity – are fed up with the lack of speed – However. Unfortunately, they too will eventually strike a balance!
There are very few large organizations that stand the test of time. Eventually they engineer themselves to failure. By that logic, any merger to create a larger, more synergistic organization WILL FAIL. Any attempt to balance, individual or organization, will eventually defeat the purpose.
Yesterday I read an interview with the president of Glodman Sachs. He was asked to name one, just one, merger that he believes has been successful in our entire corporate history. His response was that nothing spectacular comes to mind. Can you imagine this coming from a guy who makes a living out of mergers? You get 5% on the merge and another 5% when it doesn’t work for the spin-off.
Look around – Jet Airways buys Sahara to capture market share – defeated. King Fisher buys Air Deccan to consolidate the industry: he borrows money to survive. Indian Airlines-Air India, let’s not even go there. TATA buying Corus and Jaguar and whatever. If they merge to be one company, it’s guaranteed. Almost all the acquisitions of Google, Orkut or whatever, are all dead. Bharti’s merger with MTN to create a single, larger company is the beginning of a collapse. I bet we’ll see it 20 years from now. 20 years in the business world is not overnight, nor is it an eternity.
We constantly talk about entrepreneurship in our boardrooms!!! That’s just another name for innovation (being good enough to think on your feet and keep moving). BUT when creating centralizations of decision-making and committees and boards in large organizations or creating centralizations of thought processes in YOUR head (of being in control of ten things and balancing them all) – We Kill Innovation or entrepreneurship. We kill our own progress. We kill our own achievement. We kill excellence. By quintessential I just mean the level at which you could have succeeded. Like I said, this article is unlikely to have an impact on you. You’ll be doing your next balancing act minutes from now. You are so used to it. You will be killing again. I don’t know what, but I know one thing: the seat you’re sitting in will be yours for quite some time. It is nice, safe, comfortable and protected. it is well balanced!
yours,
Chetan Wallia