Business Exposed12
leads quite a few to fail, and slip into oblivion. Those CEOs we
never consider; it is the risk-takers that happen to come out on
top that we admire and aspire to. Yet, if we were able to see the
full picture, of all CEOs, innovation teams, and ghter planes, we
just might have reached a very different conclusion.
Numbers and strategy – do they mix?
There is a similar – and equally dangerous – bias in the world of
business towards numbers; we pay a lot of attention to the things
we can measure, calculate, and make “objective”.
In your rm, when you come up with an idea for a new product
line or service, or some other project that you think has great
potential and want your company to invest in, what does
management want to see? My guess is it’s “payback time”, a
“net present value” calculation, or some other number in a
business plan, right? And if you can’t produce the numbers, you
won’t get the dosh. But that’s also a bit of a problem; sometimes
the most promising projects with
long-term strategic implications
are exactly those that are impos-
sible to quantify.
Take Intel’s invention of the
microprocessor. In the early days,
when they were working on and
(quite heavily) investing in it, did
they have a business plan, a net
present value calculation and a payback time? Heck, no. They
didn’t even know what they were going to use them for – they
had no sense of a potential application (dreaming of sticking
them into handheld calculators and lamp-posts) till IBM showed
up and worked hard to convince them that putting the darn
things in their personal computers was the way to go.
Would microprocessors ever have seen the light of day in that
rm if Intel’s management had insisted on a “payback time”
calculation? Nope, we’d still be using an abacus if they had
‘‘
sometimes the most
promising projects with long-
term strategic implications
are exactly those that are
impossible to quantify
’’
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