Business Exposed14
keys under a lamp-post. A guy leaves a bar in the middle of the
night. There, he sees a man on his hands and knees under a
lamp-post, clearly looking for something. He asks him, “What
are you looking for?” and the (slightly inebriated) man answers,
“The keys to my bicycle; I must have lost them.”
“I will help you look,” says the guy, and on his hands and knees
he starts to search too. After a good ten minutes have passed, still
not having found the keys, he turns to the inebriated cyclist and
says, “Are you sure you have lost them here? We’ve looked all
over and they’re nowhere to be found!”
“No,” says the man, pointing towards a dark spot to the side of
the road, “I lost them over there, but there it is so dark, I would
never be able to nd them.”
The moral of this story is that we often look for solutions where
there is light and we can see things, while the real cause of the
problem lies in an area which is much more difcult to fathom.
Managers are often inebriated cyclists. If a company or division
is in nancial trouble, it cuts costs, slashes headcount, disinvests,
sets stricter targets, and so on: the stuff that can be captured in
numbers (i.e., “where it is light”), while the real cause of the
problem will often be a lot more subtle, and lie in a tainted
reputation, low employee morale, or low service quality. And
looking hard where there’s light won’t make you discover the
key to solving your problems any quicker. On the other hand,
the hard stuff (which can be captured in numbers), such as
production capacity, headcount, etc., are exactly the things that
cannot give you much of a competitive advantage; they can
often be bought off the shelf, meaning that your competitor can
get it too. It’s usually the soft stuff, such as morale, reputation,
organizational culture, etc. (which we don’t spend much time
measuring, largely because these factors are difcult to observe
and capture in numbers) that can make all the difference, because
they can’t be bought, and take much time and effort to develop.
Hence, don’t be misled by the hard stuff, which you can measure;
of course you need it but it will seldom give you a competitive