transformation | CorporateIntel

Those distant from decisions often have many opinions to offer.

Sports journalists tell team managers what they should have done in yesterday’s game and what trades are worth making for the second half of the season.

Political pundits tell elected incumbents how to vote on legislation if they want to be reelected and opposing candidates what to include in their platforms.

Business columnists tell CEOs what companies to buy, what assets to unload, where to cut costs, and how to allocate dividends.

It’s all noise to those who are supposed to be listening.

If you sit in the seat, you listen to customers, team members, mentors, data, research, and the instincts that develop as a result of all these factors over a lifetime. You don’t look to those who sit on the sidelines and fire in potshots.

Until you own the outcome, until you have felt the weight of what could result as the effect of your decision, you are largely consuming air when you tell us what we should do. We may be unsure, but you don’t know.

“Carry the bag” is a term most senior leaders understand. It dates back to the days of door-to-door salespeople who carried their wares in satchels, literally bearing the weight of the product to be sold from one household pitch to another. Today we think of it as maintaining a sales quota, but despite the fancy titles top business people may hold, when you’re in charge, if you don’t deliver the sales required to achieve agreed goals, everything else in a company quickly becomes a lot less critical.

The scope of sales responsibility in a company transcends the actual exchange of dollars for goods and services. You could be selling a new strategy to an ownership group or board. You could be selling your vision for change to public or private investors. You could be selling a new initiative to employees whose buy-in and expertise are critical to transforming an idea into action.

In every instance of competent management, whoever owns the responsibility for transformation takes the matter seriously, understanding that ideas often are a dime a dozen and execution matters more than lofty commentary. Actions have consequences. Outcomes are unpredictable and even fleeting, but regardless of win or lose, whoever owns the decision to take action owns accountability for its effect.

A company can grow, shrink, be reinvented, or become obsolete based on sometimes unpredicted and cascading ripple effects of chess moves made real. If you’ve ever carried one of these bags, you know the difference between opinions argued in a bar and making a hard call you can never completely predict.

When I read a columnist’s assessment of a complex situation and see their confident, succinct remarks on what a CEO should do at any moment in time, I wonder what audience they are targeting. Are their words just filling space on deadline, at best a form of toss-away entertainment? Are they setting a beat to reference in a subsequent story when a company doesn’t heed their wisdom to say, “I told you so?” Do they think their opinions will rally shareholders to align with their insights and lobby a company under their influence?

They know top management isn’t their audience. Top management thinks differently about opinions. If a critic is wildly wrong about something strategic, no one cares. If top management is wrong about something strategic, a lot of people care.

I often see former bosses of mine and accomplished colleagues receive such advice in publications of global note and otherwise. They don’t need this kind of advice. They are way ahead of you. They are getting advice they trust — and still carrying the bag in ways their public critics could seldom imagine.

I read a number of newspapers and newsletters on a daily business. I am always looking for insights. When a great journalist reports researched news credibly and objectively, then puts it in some form of relative or historical context, I am grateful. It helps me form opinions about tangential matters I can test in all kinds of ways.

It’s also immensely helpful when a disciplined reporter exposes lies, scams, market manipulation, and other illegal activity — all tentpoles of investigative journalism. When John Carreyrou shined a bright light on Theranos in the Wall Street Journal, he provided a public service. Eyes on hidden crime are noble, particularly the bravest voices who endure their own criticism until proven accurate.

When instead a lazier writer suggests the headline, “The list of X things this troubled CEO must do now,” I turn the page. If I could, I would hand that individual a bag and tell them to come back when their sales quota was met. I’m sure they would reject that notion as unrealistic and irrelevant, not their job. That would make my point.

There are many ways to be humbled, nothing quite so much as an unanticipated outcome. When you don’t get what you thought you would, you’re still left holding the bag — until you’re not. That’s the difference between an offered opinion and a real decision. One fades away and is forgotten instantly. The other is reality.

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Photo: Pexels

In his absurdist play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, playwright Tom Stoppard invents any number of ways for the courtiers to pass the time while Hamlet comes and goes:

Rosencrantz: Do you want to play questions?
Guildenstern: How do you play that?
Rosencrantz: You have to ask a question.
Guildenstern: Statement. One – Love.
Rosencrantz: Cheating.
Guildenstern: How?
Rosencrantz: I haven’t started yet.
Guildenstern: Statement. Two – Love.
Rosencrantz: Are you counting that?
Guildenstern: What?
Rosencrantz: Are you counting that?
Guildenstern: Foul. No repetition. Three – Love and game.
Rosencrantz: I’m not going to play if you’re going to be like that.

Our modest heroes Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not involved in serious inquiry. They are burning minutes off the clock. Their fate has already been cast, and although they don’t know that, they are reasonably certain there is not much else they can contribute because they are but secondary players in Hamlet’s drama, even in a new play named after them. Good questions, bad questions, neither really matter, and statements result in a lost point.

Is there a business corollary here? I think so.

When anyone is asked what appears to be a Big Question, it is often a good idea to decipher if the question is real, or if the person asking it is just passing time. When top management in a company asks for “real change,” is the voice authentic, or simply read from a prepared script for the sake of appearances? It is never easy to tell, tone only gets you so far. Knowing the difference may determine whether your full commitment is warranted and can actually make a difference when applied.

Questioning the status quo is the stuff of innovation, the catalyst to progress. A good question can be provocative, inspirational, challenging, a thought starter — but for a question to have the potential to cause impact, it has to be sincere, honest, clearly well-intentioned. Not enough questions are like that. Many only serve to feign engagement. You’ve been in that meeting, right? Me, too.

Some questions become legend. A colleague of mine who worked for a Fortune 100 corporation recalled how shortly after the first dot bomb bubble the CEO turned to him in a strategic planning meeting and said: “eBay, why didn’t you think of that?” He wasn’t sure if it was a joke. It wasn’t. A few months later he was gone. It was his fault the company had missed the shift to digital. It had to be someone’s fault, right?

I still gasp when I think about that.

If the top people in your company are asking how they can have all the benefits of the New World without upsetting too much structured order from the Old World, start provisioning the bomb shelters. If your company is asking what are its core values and how its value propositions can become relevant to new generations of customers, transformation has begun.

Recently in response to my post Creativity and Courage, a friend called me to brainstorm how to more aggressively nudge his company into the 21st Century. He had been hired by that company’s CEO as a change agent, with plenty of vim and vigor to come in and make change happen. He had been asked the multi-billion dollar question: What do we have to do right now to reinvent our business before we are toast?

It had been almost a year since that curious question was posed. Lots of ideas had been floated. Many follow-up questions had been asked, most of them repeatedly. To date, no substantive change had occurred. Blame was starting to appear on the whiteboard where new ideas had been wiped clean to keep the peace — potentially good but uncomfortable answers to the hardest questions were emerging, yet the status quo had largely triumphed without consensus to advance. It was an anxious peace, which led my friend to believe the question he had been asked was more a checklist item than a true strategic mandate. Indeed, a perfunctory question is unlikely to elicit an eye-opening answer. Those charged with asking questions usually get what they want, one way or another.

The second example of questioning is the opposite of the eBay punchline. The first CEO was angry that no change had happened and needed someone to skewer. The second CEO said he wanted change, but not too much, there was no reason to upset people unnecessarily and disrupt workflow with festering speculation. Rumor mills can be ghastly impediments to productivity, particularly when they transmit substance.

Because questions are constructed of words, they can only get us so far. Your real gauge has to be the reaction to your proposed answers, actions of consequence and commitment of resources. If a request to bring change is heartfelt, a door has opened and you have the incredible opportunity to close it behind you. On the other side of that door is risk, and you have no choice but to take it. You can win or lose the whole ballpark, but at least you are in the game. If the request to bring change is just passing time, you really don’t need to answer it, better to avoid it entirely to buy yourself as much time as you can — Powerpoint can be helpful to tread water while your wheels spin. What you really need to do is find someone who asks more honest questions.

Playing at questions can be a pastime or serious business. When asking, do your best to understand the difference. When asked, be ready to know the difference.

Shall we play?