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Strategic Planning Analogy #363: Star Players

THE STORY
Once upon a time, there was a basketball team which was doing very poorly. The owner of the team started yelling at the coach about how disgusted he was with the team losing all the time.

The coach responded, “The problem is the poor talent on this basketball team. We don’t have any athletic stars on this team. If you can go out and get us some star athletic talent, I can make this basketball team a winner.”

So the owner went out to hire some star athletes. A week or two later, the owner announced that he had just hired some great athletic superstars for the basketball team. These superstar athletes were among the best in their field. It took a whole lot of money to sign them to the team—more than anyone else on the team was making—but the owner was hoping that their superior skills would bring him a winner.

Yet the basketball team continued to lose. In fact, the team was worse than it was before adding the star athletic talent. Why? These star athletes were among the best jockeys the horse racing world had ever seen. Unfortunately, a jockey’s key attributes include being short and light weight—not exactly what you want on a basketball team.

THE ANALOGY
Although the story is made up, it contains a lot of truth. When times are bad, there is a tendency to want to get some superstars on your team. It happens in sports all the time. The idea is that if we can just get one or two star players on the team, we can move from being a loser to being a winner. It’s seen as the quickest way to make a big improvement.

That’s why the top players in a sport make so much money. They are seen as the difference between being a loser and being a winner. And that is worth a lot.

This phenomenon is not just limited to sports. Businesses do this all the time as well. When a business is continuously producing poor results, there is pressure on the board of directors to do something quickly. To common perception is that the quickest path to moving a company from being a loser to being a winner is the same as for a sports team—just hire some star talent.

As a result, businesses pay a fortune to hire one or two superstar leaders from outside the company. They put a business superstar (who’s been on the covers of all the business magazines) into the CEO chair. Unfortunately, the track record for bringing in outside superstars in business is not very successful. James Heskett, a professor at the Harvard Business School, was recently musing on the internet about the research showing how the superstar philosophy often does not usually work in the business world. The results are underwhelming.

Why is that so often the case? I think it is like what happened in the story. You can bring in superstars, but if they are not fit for the task at hand, all that super-ability is wasted. Those may have been the best jockeys in the world—absolute superstars in their field. But their talent is useless for playing basketball. There was not a good fit between the jockey star’s ability and the basketball team’s need.

It also works the other way. A basketball superstar would be a lousy jockey. The outstanding abilities of a leading basketball player are ill-suited to riding a racehorse.

Ignore the fit and you can end up paying too much to get something worthless at getting what you need done.

THE PRINCIPLE
The principle here is simple. Don’t hire jockeys to play basketball (or vice versa). Even the best jockeys will do poorly at basketball, because it goes against their strengths. It is the wrong fit.

I believe the hiring of outside business superstars rarely works because almost by definition it will be a poor fit. Let me explain why.

The Needs of the Business Looking For a Star
Usually, the businesses with the greatest motivation to hire a superstar are like the basketball team in the story—chronic losers. After all, there is little motivation to go outside and spend a fortune on a business superstar if your business is already highly successful. No, it is the companies with lots of problems who have the greatest temptation to go after a superstar.

Although there can be lots of reasons why a company is consistently posting poor results, it usually boils down to two key issues:

1) A Poor Position in the Marketplace. This blog has talked about the importance of positioning probably more than any other topic over the years (for the best one, look here). It is virtually impossible to win in the marketplace unless you have a winning position. You need a reason why a significant number of customers would naturally prefer you over the competition to solve a particular problem. Without a strong position, the only way to get business is by “bribing” customers with below-cost price cuts and outlandish deals. And that is not a path to being a winner.

2) Poor Resources. If you lack in resources, it is hard to win. Those resources could be a lack of knowledge, competency, infrastructure, IT capabilities, money, modern automation, manufacturing capacity, supply chain connections, or a host of other such tools. Just as you cannot build a great house without great construction tools, you cannot build a great business without the needed business tools.

Therefore, it is probably the case that the biggest need of the business looking for a superstar is a new position and/or better resources.

The Abilities of the Typical Superstar
So if that is what the company needs, what does the typical superstar offer? Well, first, we need to understand that business superstars tend to come from highly successful companies. After all, the logic goes like this: how could this person be a business superstar if his or her business is doing poorly? Almost by definition, a superstar must come from a place with consistent success.

This means that the company where the superstar is from probably already has a good position and good resources. So what sets the superstar above the rest? Usually, they are the people who excel in getting the most out of that position and those resources. In other words, they tend to be super-operators. They can leverage those core elements better than others. They can make production more efficient, selling more powerful, and make the most out of the knowledge, data and capabilities inherent in the business.

The Lack of Fit
So here is the problem. The company needs a new position and a complete overhaul of its resources. The business superstar typically knows how to leverage positions and resources, but is clueless into how to create them in a place that doesn’t have them.

This is like hiring jockeys to play basketball. The fit is all wrong. The business superstar’s brilliance is worthless to the weak company, because there is nothing for him to leverage with his leveraging skills.

Jockeys know what to do if there is already a fast horse in existence. But if there is no fast horse, the jockey doesn’t know how to win. Similarly, a business executive skilled at improving a strong business doesn’t know what to do if there is not already strength to the current business.

I had a boss who put it something like this: “We keep hiring all these great people to turn around the business, but instead of their strengths transferring to the business, the weak business transfers to the people.”

Or to quote Warren Buffett, “When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.”

In other words, when the skill-set of the star does not meet the needs of the business, the star will no longer look like a star. It’s not that they suddenly lost all their skills. They just have skills that are useless for the task at hand. Therefore, if you feel a burning need to turn around a weak company, make sure there is a good fit. Look for the rare star who is great at transformation (moving from weak to strong) rather than the more common star who is great at operation (getting more out of something already good).

SUMMARY
A company which is producing consistently poor results requires a different type of leader than the company that has been consistently strong. Therefore, it is very risky to take someone who has done well in a successful company and put them in a poor company. It is likely that the skill-set of the superstar at the strong company is a poor fit for the different needs at the weak company. Instead, if you are a weak company, look for people who are good at transformation, not good at operating in a place already transformed.

FINAL THOUGHTS
Operating a strategy well is a far different skill than creating a great strategy. Make sure you know which is the priority need before you fill the leadership position.

Strategic Planning Analogy #362: Driving Force

THE STORY
Awhile back, a friend of mine took a job running a division of a large retail company. Not very long later, I heard he had decided to quit that job and retire early. I asked him why he quit running that business so quickly. He said he quit because the company he went to work with was very corrupt. It seemed to him like almost all the executives were taking bribes under the table.

Not only was he personally against corruption (and was uncomfortable in that environment), he felt it was ruining the company. Decisions were made based on where the bribes were coming from, rather than what was best for the business. In addition, the corrupt culture was so pervasive that my friend knew it would take a significant amount of time and energy to eliminate it from the company. And he didn’t think he would get the support necessary to do such a difficult task. Therefore, he decided to retire.

Not very long after that conversation, I came across a new book which tried to explain why the company my friend just left was having severe financial troubles. The book listed a small handful of mistakes the company had made and made suggestions as to how your company could avoid making those same mistakes.

I decided to call the author of that book. I told her that I thought a lot of the financial problems at that company were due to the corruption and bad decisions made based on the bribery of the executives. I wanted to know why that wasn’t a focus of her book.

The author sort of stammered and stuttered after hearing my question. She got rather vague and evasive in her answer. Reading between the lines, I got the impression that what she wanted to say, but was ashamed to admit, was:

1) She knew about the corruption.

2) She knew that, as an author, she would have been putting herself into harm’s way if she accused management of rampant corruption in a book. Without an airtight case, and lots of concrete evidence, she could be sued and have her life ruined.

3) She knew that publishers could sell more copies of a book announcing “a handful of tricks for avoiding failure” than a book that merely says “don’t be corrupt.”

So she took the safe route and side-stepped the topic of corruption.

I started thinking that her approach wasn’t all that different than that retail company. She wrote content which would put the most money in her pocket rather than writing the truth. The company executives did what would put the most bribe money in their pocket than do what was truly the best for the company and its customers. As a result, both the customers of that retailer and the purchasers of that book got less than they deserved.

THE ANALOGY
Just like that book was supposed to be a guide as to how to avoid failure, strategies are supposed to be a guide—pointing the way to avoid failure and create long-term success. Unfortunately, that book was a poor guide, because it focused on saying what the author thought people wanted to hear, rather than the truth which they needed to hear.

In the same way, if your strategy remains in the lofty world of platitudes and fancy phrases, and avoids the messy reality in front of it, it will be a worthless strategy. Strategies only work well if they match the context of the company which has to implement it. If the company is corrupt (like the one my friend left) or incompetent (like the company portrayed in Dilbert), then you have a bad context for almost any strategy. Unless you address these messy issues, the written strategy is fairly worthless. It will fail under the weight of corruption or incompetence.

THE PRINCIPLE
The principle here is that one’s real strategy is the sum of what one does rather than the sum of what one says. If you have a toxic culture due to tolerance of bad activity (such as corruption, incompetence, excessively selfish greed, or abuse), then that becomes your strategy.

In these cases, all those pretty little words in the planning document are a waste of time, because they are not what is driving the behavior. Instead, the behavior is being driven by the toxic culture. Whatever you tolerate, that is what you will get. If you tolerate bad behavior (in any form), then your company will become infested with bad behavior.

Toxic cultures tend to promote selfish behaviors which ignore the best interests of the company’s key stakeholders. Rather than doing what is best for the customers, or the shareholders, or for the business, employees in toxic cultures merely look out for themselves (at the expense of everyone else). This creates sub-optimal behavior for the business—a strategy for failure.

Even if the company in the story had not made the mistakes in that book, I am sure they still would have been a failure, because of that corruption. You cannot win in the marketplace if you ignore the marketplace in your decision making. Bribe-driven decisions rarely lead to the best choice for customers.

Most businesses tend to operate in highly competitive spaces. If you are not providing excellence at a value, then you will lose business to others who are.

Toxic culture makes it hard to create excellence, because all of that ignorance, corruption or abusive behavior gets in the way of creating greatness. Toxic culture also makes it difficult to create value, because all of that personal greed sucks excessive money into the pockets of employees, robbing the company of the ability to pass on savings to the customer.

A lot has been written about the success of Wal-Mart. As in any success, there are a lot of factors at play. However, one factor which I think often gets under-emphasized is Wal-Mart’s intolerance of toxic behavior. Wal-Mart tends to take an extreme approach to ensure that its buying staff is not corrupted by bribes. Buyers (and vendors) know that their job (or relationship) with Wal-Mart is in jeopardy if the buyer is caught taking as little as a free cup of coffee from a vendor. Both the buyer and the vendor will be punished. This zero-tolerance approach makes it extremely difficult for toxic behavior to creep in and over-ride the core strategy.

Back around 2006, Wal-Mart fired Julie Roehm, its new Chief Marketing Officer, because there was an appearance of toxic behavior between Roehm and the advertising agency. There was the appearance of Roehm accepting financial benefits (like fancy dinners) from the ad agency. There was also the appearance of potential sexual misconduct between Roehm and one of her subordinates.

At some point, I suspect Wal-Mart almost didn’t care what the extent of the toxic behavior was. Wal-Mart wanted to send a message that even the appearance of potentially toxic behavior was not to be tolerated. Wal-Mart was very loud and very public about why they let Roehm go. Based on this, and many other examples, the word gets out that toxic behavior is not tolerated. Instead, one is to focus on getting the Wal-Mart strategic agenda accomplished.

So, if toxic culture can ruin a company like the one in my story and zero tolerance of toxic behavior can help create one of the largest and most successful companies on the planet, then it appears that this is an important area for strategic concern. So how can you help keep toxic behavior from becoming a ruinous strategy?

1) Watch the Tone From the Top
Everybody below in an organization is watching the people at the top. If they see the people at the top getting away with toxic behavior, then they will see toxic behavior as tolerable and acceptable for everyone else. “Do as I say, not as I do” won’t cut it. The people at the top need to set the example. In fact, they need to set a higher standard for themselves so as not to even give the appearance of tolerating toxic behavior.

Actions speak louder than words. Strategy words lose out to bad behavior every time. Make sure your leaders are modeling the right behavior.

2) Watch out for How Your React When Your Star Players Behave Badly
What do you do when your highest performers behave badly? Do you tolerate their toxic behavior as a tradeoff for getting their high performance? In the long run, it is usually better to get rid of even star performers with toxic behavior, because the negative impact on the whole organization of that tolerance is worse than the added benefit of their slightly higher output.

3) Watch out for How You Set Rewards
People need to be rewarded for doing the things which are in the best long term interests of the company and its strategy. Otherwise, there is the temptation to use toxic behavior in order to maximize near-term bonus. There are lots of ways to hit a short-term sales or earnings target. Many of those ways can involve toxic behavior. If your bonus only focuses on the achieving the “what” rather than the “how” it was achieved, you may be rewarding toxic behavior without even knowing it.

SUMMARY
Your strategy is the sum of what you do, rather than the sum of what you say. If your company tolerates toxic behavior like corruption, abuse, incompetency and excessive selfishness, then that becomes your real strategy. And when employees are only trying to optimize their own selfish gain at the expense of everyone else, you have a losing strategy. Fight to keep toxic behavior from getting a toehold in your organization. Fight to keep the focus on living the strategy instead.

FINAL THOUGHTS
The irony is that if you try to make the money the easy way, via bribes, your gains may be cut short. Either you lose your job or the company you work for goes away because the bribery culture leads to destruction. However, if the toxic behavior is avoided, the company prospers, and you can share in that prosperity for a long time. I suspect that more employees got wealthy on Wal-Mart bonuses and stock options than employees who got wealthy taking bribes at the failing retailer mentioned in my story.

Strategic Planning Analogy #361: Cash Out

THE STORY
A friend of mine always had trouble buying gifts for his father. His father didn’t seem to appreciate gifts unless they were practical. And his father liked to take care of his practical issues on his own, not leaving any room for gifts.

After years of frustrated gift giving, my friend finally gave up. As a result, for one Christmas he just gave his father a card with a check in it. As it turned out, the gift he got from his father that year also was a card with a check in it. And the size of the checks were close to the same amount.

Now my friend was doubly frustrated. It seemed so futile to just trade checks for basically the same amount of money. It was almost like not giving or getting a gift at all, since they both ended up in essentially the same place as they started. It was as if nothing had happened.

THE ANALOGY
Gift giving should be an exciting time, for both the giver and the receiver. But if all you are doing is trading money, a lot of the fun and excitement goes away. Nothing special happened. No great emotional memories.

As obvious as this might be in gift-giving, it is apparently less obvious in the business world. After all, when it comes time to rewarding employees, it usually comes down to just writing a check.

Money is nice and all, but it doesn’t usually lead to long-term emotional satisfaction. I was told one time that the impact of a pay raise on the emotional commitment of an employee tends to last for only about two paychecks. After that, it is just money and the higher paycheck is merely the new normal…nothing special anymore. Like with my friend and his father, the transaction seems cold and lacking in any lasting meaning.

Successful strategic initiatives tend to require a strong, highly committed workforce. And if you want strong, highly motivated employees, you need to give them a reason to bond with the company at a deep, emotional level. And after a certain point, money may be one of your least powerful tools to build this bond. A more inspiring gift is needed.

THE PRINCIPLE
The principle here is that the best long-term motivator is rarely just cold, emotionless cash. To get the deepest level of commitment, you need gifts that touch the employees in a more meaningful way.

What the Corporate Executive Board Found
I was reminded of this when reading a recent article from Fortune magazine. The article was talking about what it takes to keep your high potential employees motivated to stay at your company and work hard at making it a success. This is an important issue, because a recent survey indicated that about 27% of high potential employee plan to leave the company they are working for within the year. This desire to defect continues to rise every year.

It is hard enough to achieve strategic success when you have committed employees. But when over a quarter of your high potential employees are focused on getting out the company, the likelihood of long-term strategic success goes down considerably.

As a result, this article looked at what it takes to get deep engagement and commitment from those high potential employees. The article reported on a survey of 20,000 high potential employees by the Corporate Executive Board. This survey asked these high potential employees what drove their commitment. They found that money was a very poor motivator. It was way down the list.

Instead, the best motivators included “a mix of recognition and challenges that stretch them without completely stressing them out.” In fact, the top motivator was “feeling connected to corporate strategy.”

These are things that really aren’t based primarily on money. They are more personal. Just as a personal gift at Christmas is more inspiring than just a check in a card, a personally enriching job which connects the employee to the strategy is superior for motivation over just giving the employee a check. Sure, it’s harder to develop these personalized programs than to write a check (just as it is more difficult to come up with a personal Christmas gift), the results are worth it.

Win-Win Solution
The good news is that this survey provides a great win-win solution for both the company and its high potential employees. The win-win idea is to get more involvement by high potential employees in the strategic planning process. If you expand the strategic process to include more people in more ways, there are two benefits.

First, as the survey indicated, employees become more committed to the company and its strategy when they are involved in the strategy process. By getting greater involvement up front, the strategy moves from being just words on a paper to being ideas owned by the employee. By being involved in the process, the employee takes ownership in the plan.

To the high potential employee, it is no longer just A plan…it is now MY plan. It is easier to be committed to something you helped to build. The high potential employee already has a vested interest in making strategic execution a success, because of the emotional commitment already developed in being a part of the plan’s creation. It is harder for them to leave the company, because they have more at stake in the success. And why would you want to leave a place that values your opinions so much that they want you to have a key role in developing the strategy?

Second, the company ends up with a better strategic plan. High potential employees have more at stake in the long-term, because they have not yet made it to the top. They can only have a great long-term future if the company has a great long-term future. Therefore, they are the most motivated to creating a great long-term plan.

By contrast, the senior executives have already made it to the top. They tend to be older and closer to retirement. They may be less motivated to create a great long-term plan, because the investment in the future could detract from near-term profits. By the time the long-term plan comes to fruition, they may already be retired (and not get credit for their part in the plan). After all, the remaining tenure of the average senior executives tends to be shorter than the length of the average long-range plan.

Hence, there is the risk that preoccupation by senior executives with cashing in their careers soon will keep them from optimizing the long-term. Their motivation in the long-term may be less than with the high potential employees. Therefore, if only senior executives are making the strategic plans, you may be sub-optimizing your long-term plan.

Hence, by elevating strategic planning to a broader level and by getting more input and involvement by high potential employees, both the company and the high potential employees are better off.

SUMMARY
Great long term strategies need strong commitment by the high potential employees. The best way to get this is by giving them a large role in the development of the long range plan. Not only will this make them more committed to the company, but the company will most likely end up with a better plan.

FINAL THOUGHTS
I remember one time watching two senior executives from different companies trying to impress each other as to who was the best. They started by comparing who made the most money. However, both of them made so much money that it became a meaningless measure. After a certain point, the money failed to make a difference. Therefore, they had to look for other measures. You should look for other measures in your business as well.

Strategic Planning Analogy #360: Interesting Neighbors

THE STORY
On time, I was shopping with a friend in London. I was bored with what one of the shopkeepers was showing my friend, so I stepped out of the small shop to look around at what was happening on the street.

I looked up and made an astonishing discovery. It is common in England, when someone famous has lived somewhere, for there to be a sign on the side of the building telling who the famous person was who lived there. Well, there, across the street from this shop were two of these signs next door to each other.

At 23 Brook Street was a sign saying that the electric guitar legend Jimi Hendix had lived there back in 1968-69. Next door, at 25 Brook Street, was a sign saying that classical composer George Frideric Handel had lived there back in the mid 1700s.

Although separated by time, I found it fascinating that Hendrix and Handel had been together in location. It made me ponder what it might have been like if two had been there at the same time and had been neighbors.

Just think of the music that the two of them could have written together. Hendrix’s raw energy combined with Handel’s sense of angelic majesty—WOW—that would have really been something. The jam sessions with Hendrix on guitar and Handel on keyboards would have been superb. (At least that’s how it plays in my mind.)

After all, back in the 1970s, the band Curved Air combined the sounds of contemporary rock with a heavy influence from the classical music by Vivaldi. I thought that worked out quite well.

THE ANALOGY
It is interesting to contemplate the combination of a leading musician/composer from the 1960s with a leading musician/composer of the 18th century. The times were very different and the approaches to music were very different. Yet both Hendrix and Handel created great music and I think a combination of the two would have been great as well (even better than Curved Air, who I highly recommend).

After Jimi Hendrix died, people found copies of recordings of Handel’s music in Hendrix’s home on 23 Brook Street, so maybe there was more of a connection than one would originally think.

The point here is that unconventional combinations have the potential to create wonderful things. This not only applies to music, but also to strategy.

Staking out a new position does not mean that ALL of strategic components have to be brand new and original. No, you can take a lot of old and established ideas and still stake out new territory provided you combine them in new ways.

In modern language, this concept is referred to as “mash-ups,” where you invent something new in digital entertainment by mashing together already-made entertainment from a diverse variety of sources. Just as a Hendrix-Handel mash-up could sound wildly original, even though all the influences are borrowed from the past, your strategy could be original even though it is based on older influences.

THE PRINCIPLE
The principle here is that you don’t always have to look forward into the fuzzy, uncertain future to find innovation. Sometimes great innovation can come by borrowing from solid successes in the past. By recombining solid strategic components from the past in new ways, one can possibly get the best of both worlds—radical new strategies without the risk of going into totally uncharted territory.

Years ago, I recall that the Kool-Aid beverage powder brand asked a university marketing program to come up with a strategy to boost sales. It got me to thinking what I would have done if I had been in that marketing program.

Kool-Aid as Seasoning?
My thought was to come up with a radical new strategic positioning, but anchored in a solid past. Instead of the current Kool-Aid position as a children’s beverage, why not position Kool-Aid as the kitchen seasoning that will make food more appealing to children? For example, would children be more likely drink their healthy milk if it was flavored with Kool-Aid? How about as a flavor enhancer to get children to eat their oatmeal? And how excited would the children be if their birthday cake was seasoned with their favorite Kool-Aid flavor (and how proud would their parents be when the other children at the birthday party think they are the coolest parents in the neighborhood for making Kool-Aid Cake)?

We all know what seasonings are. People have been cooking with powders kept on their kitchen shelves for generations. They can easily relate to the idea. So the concept is rooted in the past.

However, at the same time, general spices and seasonings specifically geared to children’s taste preferences is fairly innovative. So with this approach, one could take advantage of the familiar yet still create an innovative new strategic position.

Combining Kool-Aid with cooking flavors would be like combining Hendrix and Handel. You end up with a new category without having to really reinvent anything. It’s still the same old Kool-Aid recipe—no new inventions here—just a new way of looking at the old.

And hopefully, this would cause parents to buy extra Kool-Aid—the usual amount for normal use, and extra KoolAid for use as a flavor seasoning. Oh, and they would buy even more, just to have on hand for unknown future seasoning needs. After all, you always keep extra flour and sugar around; now add KoolAid to that list.

Kool-Aid as Dye?
One of the key ingredients of Kool-Aid is food dye. What if you repositioned KoolAid as a funky way to get fun colors into your life. There are many rebellious young people who have used Kool-Aid to dye their hair into wild colors. Perhaps this could be expanded into other color enhancing projects?

One could make simple watercolors that parents could give their children to use, knowing that it would be safe. I’m sure that a lot of other innovative dye approaches could be thought of.

The principle would be the same: to create an innovation without having to create a new product. Just combine the old product (KoolAid) with old practices and end up with a new strategy.

Where to Put the Energy
So, when looking for innovative new strategies, it is not always necessary to put a lot of effort behind scientists in an R&D laboratory. New innovation does not necessarily need new products with new patents. Sometimes, all you need to do is put a new twist on an old product by pairing it up with a new way of using the product.

Subway boosted sales when it got people to think about its sandwiches as not just food, but as a diet aid to lose weight. They didn’t really change their product. They didn’t invent anything new. It was the same old sandwiches. However, because Jared Fogle lost so much weight eating Subway sandwiches, it got others to try to do the same. Combining two old concepts (eating sandwiches and losing weight) was a winner.

So instead of putting all the effort and reliance for success in the hands of the R&D lab, consider just taking what you have and recombining it with other things to create something new.

Think of Legos. Those little bricks stay the same, but put them in the hands of creative people and you can build all sorts of different things. You don’t need to reinvent the Lego bricks. You just have to think outside the box and be more creative with what you have.

SUMMARY
Just because a strategy is new does not mean all the components need to be new. Sometimes you can create a great new position by taking what you already have and just combining it with other pieces in a new way. Rather than putting all your hope in an R&D lab, get a little creative with what is already in front of you.

FINAL THOUGHTS
The success rate of getting great innovation out of the lab can be quite low. Many pharmaceutical companies are shrinking their R&D budgets because the return on investment is so low. Why not try a different approach by re-applying the stuff that is already right in front of you?