1737
n
Making far-reaching decisions
that it was Pasteur who made these discoveries: he recognized
opportunities that presented themselves to him, but also had the
skill, knowledge, and ability to turn them into something useful.
That required many years of careful practice and training.
Moreover, and importantly, he wasn’t sitting in his kitchen
waiting for lucky events to fall into his scientic lap. He was
actively experimenting with lots of things. Most of them were
bogus; others not.
And that is what Intel did: running many experiments in the
margin. Most of them failed and wasted money. But in your
company, one sunny day, one of your experiments just might
result in your own “microprocessor” and, if so, believe me, you
won’t shed a tear about all the ones that failed.
Sometimes it is about knowing when not to decide
OK, one more story then . . . And then I promise to stop, really.
Some time ago I was interviewing Tony Cohen, CEO of Fremantle
Media; they own television production companies all over the
world. A program developed in one country (say, Pop Idol or The
Price is Right) may also have potential in another country. I asked
him, “How do you decide which program is right for which
country?” He said, “I don’t”.
“Why would I know any better than anyone else?” he continued.
“I don’t make these decisions.” But he does make sure a system
is set up that enables the organization to arrive at a good set of
decisions. For example, each year, he organizes what is called the
Fremantle Market. It is a one-day event in London, for which
Fremantle executives from all over the world y in. They present
to each other their new television programs, which they have
just had commissioned or developed pilots for.
I visited the event this year. Country executives really try to do
a good job convincing their counterparts to “buy” their new
television program, because Tony has made sure that if the new
production of a Fremantle program in the Netherlands gets
Business Exposed174
shown on television in the UK, the Dutch subsidiary receives a
good commission that goes straight into their P&L. Moreover,
the UK company is eager to obtain Fremantle’s best new
programs developed in other countries because if it manages to
sell them to television broadcasters in the UK, it also makes a
good prot.
Hence, Tony (or anyone else at Fremantle’s head ofce) does not
decide which program to invest in and promote as their next
international winner, but he sets up the organizational system
in order for local people to make their own decisions. This will
enable their next global hit to emerge, without knowing in
advance which program that will be. Sometimes he expected it;
sometimes it’s a program he never thought would see the light
of day.
But often that is not the role we expect CEOs to assume. We
expect them to make decisions quickly and without hesitation or
even breaking into a sweat.
This story has reminded me of Andy Grove, when he was CEO
at Intel. When Intel, in the 1980s, was in doubt about whether
to concentrate on DRAM memory chips or on microprocessors,
people (employees, analysts, shareholders, etc.) were banging on
his door, saying “Please Andy, make a decision; are we going for
DRAM or for microprocessors? Tell me what to do.” But Andy
said, “I don’t know yet. No, I am not going to make a decision;
let’s see how things play out.” Or, as he once confessed to
Stanford Professor Robert Burgelman: “You need to be able to
be ambiguous in some circumstances. You dance around it a bit,
until a wider and wider group in the company becomes clear
about it.”
And that’s what he did. He let individual middle managers make
up their minds about what they were going to concentrate on. He
gave the manager of their production plant a formula, in which
he had to input a bunch of data concerning the market, margins,
production efciency, etc. and said, “This formula will tell you
what to produce (because I don’t know).” And gradually more
and more middle managers started working on microprocessors
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