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Management happens
Later, Andy Grove concurred that that is what happened, and
quite deliberately so: “You dance around it a bit, until a wider
and wider group in the company becomes clear about it. That’s
why continued argument is important. Intel is a very open
system. No one is ever told to shut up, but you are asked to come
up with better arguments.”
So, next time you nd yourself debating your company’s strategy
and future, realize you’re in a framing contest. What you will
need most are not ideas but powers of persuasion. And that
is what you will need the numbers, analysis, and PowerPoint
presentations for. Not to make up your mind (you probably
already have) but as a hammer, a mace, and a club; those are the
tools you require when you want to win a framing contest.
It looks like we don’t have a strategy . . .
But let me, at the end of this rst chapter, not leave you with
the impression that it is all bad. Actually, I am almost inclined
to suggest that especially successful and innovative business strat-
egies did not usually emerge through some rational, top-down
process. I have no formal proof of this, but it is certainly the
impression I have gained from studying many companies and
their strategies.
Whenever I interview people at a particular company regarding
their rm’s strategy – for instance, because I am writing a
business case about them – I try to make a point of nding out
not only exactly what their strategy is, and why it works, but
also where it came from. That is, how they came up with the
strategy in the rst place. And usually, I get a perfectly logical
and rational answer – at least at rst . . . However, often, when I
subsequently dig deeper into the organization, by interviewing
middle managers and engineers (who have been there for a
long time), by talking to the CEO again, by reading up on some
internal company documentation, and so on, it appears that the
(wonderful) strategy was not the result of rational analysis at all.
Instead, invariably, it seems, there was some lucky moment or
Business Exposed26
unexpected event that triggered the company to alter its course
and move in a new direction.
Hornby accidentally saw itself appear in the hobby market
(instead of the toy market) when it spent its cost savings from
outsourcing on adding detail and quality to its products; CNN
gured out it could become a global (instead of an American)
news company when Fidel Castro (picking up the American
satellite signal in Havana) told founder Ted Turner he watched
it all the time; Southwest invented low-cost airlines when
competition forced it to sell a plane but it decided to try and y
the same routes with three instead of four aircraft; and Bisque
founder Geoffrey Ward switched from being a plumber to selling
designer radiators when people kept knocking on his door asking
whether they could buy that funny-shaped radiator which he
had just removed for a client and placed in his workshop window
to make it look like a shop (to see off the civil servants who had
told him he was illegally located in a retail zone).
But why do people, in retrospect, always want to make it sound
like it was the result of some thorough analysis and innovative
thinking? Ego? Embarrassment? I guess that might play a role:
“rational thinking” sounds better than “ehm
. . . we stumbled upon it, I guess . . .” But,
I’ve also found that people I interviewed
who weren’t even there at the time of the
strategic switch – and therefore can’t take
any credit or blame for it – make it sound
logical. And that is, I guess, because in
retrospect, it all sounds so bloody obvious:
moving into the hobby market, becoming
global, not handing out food, newspapers, and hot towels on a
45-minute ight (but instead focusing on turning the darn thing
around on the tarmac in 20 minutes and ready to y again).
It just makes so much sense that it just had to be the result of
thorough analysis and thinking – surely?
But admitting, even if just to yourself, that the best strategies
often emerge when you least expect them to, could actually
‘‘
the best
strategies often
emerge when you
least expect them
to
’’
271
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Management happens
help you get lucky more often. Andy Grove, former CEO and
chairman of Intel, gured that one out when Intel moved its
microprocessors into computers after IBM (nally) convinced
Intel that they could be applied in their PCs and, yes, they
really wanted to buy them. After that, he said: “We say we have
a top-to-bottom strategy. But [we] don’t act top-to-bottom. You
can look at it positively or negatively. Positively, it looks like a
Darwinian process: we let the best ideas win; we match evolving
skills with evolving opportunities. Negatively, it looks like we
don’t have a strategy.”
And you want to make sure ideas reach you from everywhere:
suppliers, customers, competitors, bloody civil servants and, yes,
even Fidel Castro.
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