bad ideas, brilliant execution


: I suggest a superior way to proceed. Drawing a line between strategy and execution almost guarantees failure. [4] And a professional team would likely figure that out and tell you. Maybe, to pick a trivial example, Europeans dont want to buy your compliance software because its weak on supporting European regulations [4]. Brilliant Execution. If you watch the lineup, youll see some people actually let others go ahead of them and wait for a specific teller to be available. Be the first to review Bad Ideas Brilliant Execution T-Shirt by Roadkill. They want to come in, do their deposits or transfers, and get out again painlessly. You don't have to be serious about your actions. Brilliant as always. Its because they want to optimize the chance of something working and, when it doesnt, they want to be able to say, we spent $5M and proved that was a bad idea, as opposed to, we spent $5M and were not sure whether it didnt work because it was a bad idea or it was just poorly executed. [3], If Sartre said, hell is other people, Id say, hell is not knowing why you failed.. No. To best enable individual decisions, choice makers upstream should set the general context for those downstream. Your recently viewed items and featured recommendations, Select the department you want to search in. She attempts to achieve faithful execution rather than basing her actions on choices about what would be best for the customer within the broad bounds of the strategy of the corporation. For me, this was Ingres, my first job out of college. In this case, an upstream theory that divides a company into choosers and choiceless doers turns empowerment into a sham. Nope. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Thats why execution matters. He needed every employee, from chambermaid to valet to desk clerk to hotel manager, to make the choices necessary to create a comfortable, welcoming support system for guests. Most managers are so used to believing that strategy and execution are distinct from one another that they are blind to whether the strategy-execution approach makes any sense. That said (sorry this is getting long), I had two trumping arguments for why I picked what I did that you can (and I did) see some success in Box 4 (hell, we went public, for many the definition of success) and if I labeled it failure then Id be enabling people to argue that were obvious not failing, ergo we cant be in Box 4. Finally, the thing I like best about your argument (which I think is to label Box 4 failure) is that it lets the whole bottom row be failure which I do think is the result of bad execution. This quadrant is: In business, while we all may have strong opinions about whats going to work and what isnt, if we have even a trace of humility we must admit that we dont know. It certainly is an odd definition of brilliance. And by any competitive and objective measure, even in your personal example, you failed. Others seized the opportunity and took the winnings that were up for grabs. But are any of those answers the real, big reason why I care so much about execution? Hence, the superior has to signal that his choice is truly open to reconsideration and review. For those customers, I make up these little files that keep me posted on all of their accounts. But Mary understood just as clearly that she was in no position to influence the decisions made at the top of her organization. If employees make sound choices and produce great results, senior management gets (and usually takes) credit for having put in place a great strategy. Its just something Ive tried, she explained. But its also quite important to know, when an idea fails, why. The pervasive metaphor that informs our understanding of this process is that of the human body. Is it more rational to respond by questioning the theory that the universe revolves around the Earth or to keep positing ever more complicated, convoluted, and improbable explanations for the discrepancy? The choice-cascade model has a positive-reinforcement loop inherent within it. Demand, expect, and drive great execution and you have one variable removed allowing you to have coherent explanations for when results dont match the hypothesis. Increasingly, you find that this theory doesnt predict the movement of the stars and planets very well. Finally, leadership tends to take too much responsibility for success by planning ever more-complex strategies and ever more-stringent implementation plans, while the middle- and lower-level managers see these efforts, feel helpless, and back off from taking responsibility. In fact, it does great damage to the corporation. Consider Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, one of the worlds leading high-end hotel chains. While I also considered labeling it partial failure, in the end I chose partial success. We brought great execution to a hostile environment [8] and had enough success to confuse people by the numbers we resembled many destined-for-greatness companies, but those who looked beyond the numbers knew we were not [9]. Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. So Sharp set out a simple, easy-to-understand context within which his employees could make informed choices. But this view of strategy and execution relies on a false metaphor in which senior management is a choosing brain while those in the rest of the company are choiceless arms and legs that merely carry out the brains bidding. This can be made more credible if the leader makes it clear to subordinates that the results from their downstream decisions affect not only themselves but also the upstream decisions on which their choices were predicated (see the sidebar A Cascade of Better Choices). I love disruption, startups, and Silicon Valley and have had the pleasure of working in varied capacities with companies including Bluecore, FloQast, GainSight, Hex, MongoDB, Pigment, Recorded Future, and Tableau. In this model, employees are encouraged to make thoughtful choices within the context of the decisions made above them. You havent learned a thing, but youve wasted $1M, damaged your brand, and most importantly, lost a year. [11] Critical thinkers may be wondering if Ive rationalized the company into Box 1 because (as a non-founder CEO) I was responsible for the execution and not the idea. The CEO and his team formulate a customer strategy. The whole Silicon Valley model is about isolating and removing risk from the equation. After viewing product detail pages, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in. Did Ingres succeed? Frontline employees find the resulting choices inexplicable and unconvincing, because the data comes from outside the organization. During my six years there we grew the company from $0 to $80M in revenues, so I have trouble labeling that box as I initially did failure [7]. In terms of wealth generation, the RDBMS was the second best idea of the 20th century [12]. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. Only then will the rank-and-file employees of organizations be free of the scourge of buy-in sessions. Its a vicious circle. Unable to add item to List. He has done it, he says, by paying as much attention to employee complaints as guest complaints, by upgrading employee facilities whenever we upgraded a hotel, by disallowing class distinctions in cafeterias and parking lots, by pushing responsibility down and encouraging self-discipline, by setting performance high and holding people accountable, and most of all adhering to our credo: generating trust.. She decides that the company will win in the retail banking business through superior customer service. I think this is a perfect dovetail / complementary piece for Mark Leslies classic, Sales Learning Curve. The employees feel even more disconnected from the company and more convinced, as Dilbert would say, that they are working for idiots. All that said, all that considered, I actually feel better about the choice I made so thanks for making me think again about it. Lets begin by exploring the consequences of the prevailing view of strategy. But you knew that already, too. From there, yet more choices follow throughout the organization. , Publication date Employees dont like the buy-in approach because it creates an artificial distinction between strategy and execution. This isnt really empowerment but rather those at the top trying to get workers to buy in to their ideas. The brain (top management) thinks and chooses, and the body (the organization) does what the brain tells it to do. The employee follows hard-and-fast rules, seeing only black and white because that is what she has been told to see. A better metaphor for strategy is a white-water river, in which choices cascade from its source in the mountains (the corporation) to its mouth (the rest of the organization). Mary seemed to treat each of her customers in one of these three distinct ways. On the flip side, a key point of the post was to ask the question: if youre half-succeeding are you in Box 1 or Box 4 and I think its really, really important to know and the argument is that if youve not done things on the cheap but instead hired top-quality people and there is no team dysfunction that you can then assume execution is good and ergo if its not working then you are in Box 1. Senior managers who focus solely on winning buy-in from those below them dont tend to ask themselves, How would I like it if I were on the receiving end? If they did, theyd probably realize that it seemed detestable. Contact Dave. The notion that strategy and execution are connected isnt new. Hire 3 in each country to make sure the outcome isnt dependent on any one bad hire. You are listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition. By using our services, you agree to our use of cookies. So if you ever thought that a Minion-shaped grill or a cockroach cappuccino sounds like a great idea, this post is just for you. Most hotel chains treated their workers as choiceless doers who were told precisely what to do, when to do it, and howwhile watching them like a hawk. So there is no Partial Success to be had. Because if you bring good execution to a bad idea [10], smart people can often figure it out, and you can drive some success. That, because XQuery never took off (and was arguably a case of infantcide by the megavendors) was a bad idea, and the one that put us in Box 1. Its one of several points discussed in this deck. But I have to respectfully disagree with labeling Box 4 Partial Success. A better metaphor is that of a white-water river, where choices cascade from the top to the bottom. The team who took over the company was definitionally better in the minds of our top-tier VCs who brought them in and who are presumably skilled at evaluating such things. Thats why boards want startups to pay high salaries and lure experienced talent with lucrative stock options. Please try again. The results have been remarkable. Because we can be pretty sure its not the people or the support ratios or the sales model or execution in general. This only became obvious to me when I ran a personal experience through your model. And Sharp has walked the talk, treating his employees as he would want to be treated, as he wanted his guests to be treated. : In the US, at perhaps smaller companies but in your same target market. We grew a business, in an environment as hostile as a sea-floor vent, to $80M and solved plenty of hard problems for plenty of happy customers in the process. 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During that period Relational Software changed its name to match that of its product: Oracle. One clue is obvious: division. Freiburger and Finnegan have taken their little Youtube show to cult status. Access more than 40 courses trusted by Fortune 500 companies. The employees are players in a lose-lose game: little credit if their team wins, lots of blame if their team loses. Previously, I was SVP/GM of the $500M Service Cloud business at Salesforce; CEO of NoSQL database provider MarkLogic, which we grew from zero to $80M over 6 years; and CMO at Business Objects for nearly a decade as we grew from $30M to over $1B in revenues. I just people are reluctant to say failure and ergo will euphemize it to partial success or such and they KNOW the difference between real and partial success what I want to get them thinking about is: why? For me, this was MarkLogic, an XML database system [6]. The first of these is formulation; the second is implementation.. If we think about it, we must accept that the only strategy that can legitimately be called brilliant is one whose results are exemplary. The EVP of branch operations might ask, What service capabilities must we develop to deliver consistently superior customer service? If the answer includes ease of interaction for the customer at the branch, the branch manager might ask, What does that mean for the hiring and training of CSRs and the scheduling of their shifts? And the rep on a given desk has to ask, What does all that mean for this customer, right here, right now?. Read instantly on your browser with Kindle Cloud Reader. Hire a few other staff like in functions like customer success, support, and services to support the team. They do what all gear heads dream of doing and they fail spectacularly half the timeBecause Roadkill. Lets take European expansion as an example. Yes, even though that doesnt matter nearly as much as it once did. With some, she was polite, efficient, and professional. And frankly, I continued, other tellers and customers could benefit from your approach. [7] Though a VC might easily do so. Im just trying to do my job as best I can. So I would say that box alone deserves the label Failure. The two sellers both quit and the solutions consultant is trying to support the few customers they sold. As those in charge formulate their strategy, they work with change management consultants to determine how they can generate the buy-in they need. Those upstream must guide and inform those downstream, not leave them to make decisions blindly. When workers are made to feel empowered, the whole organization wins. Everyone from the top of the organization all the way down to the very bottom makes choices under constraints and uncertainty. Thats why I labeled it partial success.. You should have controlled for that. [1] As it took me way too long to realize, you need to focus on getting what matters right. This constrains her choices, and turns her into a bureaucrat. For the cascade to flow properly, a choice maker upstream can set the context for those downstream by doing four things: explaining what the choice is and why its been made, clearly identifying the next downstream choice, offering help with making choices as needed, and committing to revisit and adjust the choice based on feedback. Some friends wonder why, as someone who considers himself a strategist, I care so much about execution.