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Management happens
advantage or get you out of trouble. The soft things, which we
cannot see and measure, are the ones that you have to carefully
nurture and manage.
Deciding stuff – that’s the easy bit
This reliance on numbers and analysis also points at two
different views of what top managers do, or perhaps two aspects
of their daily jobs:
1 Decision-makers (investment decisions, acquisitions, which
markets to enter, and so forth)
2 People who have to build and manage a rm.
Of course, the two overlap, but they are also different.
Some time ago, my friend and colleague at the London Business
School, Phanish Puranam, and I ran a short (unpublished)
survey with 111 top managers, all alumni from our School’s
senior executive program. We gave them a list of 35 strategic
management topics, asking them to rate each of them on a
seven-point scale, ranging from unimportant to very important
for corporate leaders in today’s business environment.
The three things that these senior executives said were the most
important issues in their view and experience were:
1 Attract and retain talent
2 Decide on the company’s next avenues of growth
3 Align the organization towards one common goal.
Some further (statistical) analysis showed us that the most
important issue, “attract and retain talent”, pertained to things
such as putting together an effective top management team, and
managing top management succession. Many business leaders
see their main task as recruiting and developing other leaders,
and it seems our senior executives were no exception.
The second one – “decide on the company’s next avenues of
growth” – reminded me of a survey a famous global consulting
Business Exposed16
rm used to run. It ran an annual survey asking CEOs, “What
keeps you awake at night?” It was one of these PR endeavors
aimed at getting some free publicity in the business press,
bolstering their image as a source of management knowledge and
wisdom. However, this survey was not a great success, and they
stopped running it, simply because every year the same thing
came out on top (which made it rather boring and hardly ideal to
get the business press excited . . .) and that was: “The rm’s next
avenue of growth”. Our survey conrmed this result.
The third one – “align the organization towards one common
goal” – pertained to something that tends to make non-senior
executives (including business school professors) smirk: creating
a mission and vision statement. These vision thingies inevitably
seem to lead to some generic yet draconian expressions (e.g., “to
be the pre-eminent” something) that could only be generated
by a de-generated consultant brain. Moreover, inevitably they
appear to be highly similar to the terminology on the wall of
the rm next door. Nevertheless, our senior executives do seem
to take them seriously. I guess they’re typical of top managers’
struggle to “align the organization towards one common goal”;
in their desperation they even turn to hammering a mission
or vision statement on the canteen’s wall. Guess it really is a
struggle.
What struck me about these three topics, however, is that
none of them are decisions. It seems – also from analyzing the
remainder of our survey – that top managers are unfazed by
strategic decisions, no matter how big and far-reaching they are.
But things they can’t “decree” – like having an effective team,
organic growth, or a common vision – are what keep them awake.
Indeed, you can’t just declare, “I decide that next year our
organic growth will be 30 percent.” Instead, you will have to
build and nurture an organization that fosters innovation and
motivates people and other stakeholders to achieve autonomous
growth. You can’t just decide to have it, like you decide to pursue
a particular acquisition, enter a new foreign market, or diversify
into a new line of business. Similarly, you can’t just decide to
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