Being a smart manager is different from being a smart intellectual. Brilliant professors rarely emerge as great managers. Conversely, many of the best entrepreneurs today are college dropouts. Bill Gates, Lawrence Ellison, Li Ka-shing, Mark Zuckerberg and Amancio Ortega have all made billions without the need for a degree. They are all among the top 20 richest people in the world.
Asking great managers what makes them great is an exercise in toadying and ingratiation that yields little more than platitudes and self-congratulation. I have tried it: it is not an exercise worth doing once, let alone repeating. For the most part, they will talk about things like experience and intuition. This is deeply unhelpful. You cannot teach intuition. Experience is a recipe for keeping junior managers junior until they have grown enough grey hairs to become part of the management club. I had to find out another way of discovering how managers thought, short of wiring them up to machines all day. So I did the next best thing: I decided to watch them work. Watching people work is invariably more congenial than actually doing the work.
Each person and each day is unique. Some people prefer face-to-face work rather than dealing through email; some days are totally consumed by a couple of big meetings; some people work longer and a few work less. But once we stripped away all these variances, we found these familiar patterns to a manager’s working day:
This is a pattern that is familiar to most managers. It has been compared to juggling while trying to run a marathon in a series of 100-metre sprints without dropping any of the balls. It is a world in which it is very easy to be busy but very difficult to make an impact. Activity is not a substitute for achievement. The challenge for managers today is to do less and achieve more.
At this point, pause to consider what you do not see in the normal management day:
Many MBA tools are notable by their absence from the daily lives of most managers: organisational and strategic theory go missing; financial and accounting tools remain functionally isolated within finance and accounting; marketing remains a mystery to most people in operations or IT.
The absence of these tools from most managers’ days does not make them irrelevant. They may be used sparingly, but at critical moments. Most organisations would not survive long if all their managers were conducting non-stop strategic reviews of the business. But a good strategic review once in five years by the CEO can transform the business.
By now my search for the art of management was becoming lost in the whirl of activity that is the standard management day. It looked like great managers did not need to be intellectually smart and did not need the standard intellectual and analytical tools that appear in books and courses. But it would be a brave person who accused Bill Gates and Richard Branson of being dumb. All the leaders and managers we interviewed were smart enough to get into positions of power and influence. They were smart, but not in the conventional way of schools. Management intelligence is different from academic intelligence.
We decided to dig deeper, thereby breaking the golden rule ‘When in a hole, stop digging’. We hoped we were not digging a hole. We hoped we were digging the foundations of understanding the management mindset. Eventually, we found these foundations – explored in the following sections of this chapter – all of which can be learned and acquired by any manager:
If we were being intellectually rigorous, not all of these skills might exist in a chapter on management IQ. But there is some method behind the randomness.
Outcome focus and achieving results (Starting at the end and Achieving results) are included in this chapter because they are at the heart of how effective managers think. This is driven by the need to drive results and achieve outcomes. This way of thinking is highly pragmatic, fast-paced and quite unlike anything you find normally in textbooks and academia. It is about achievement, not activity.
Making decisions, Solving problems and Strategic thinking are classic IQ skills. There is a huge difference between how textbooks say managers should think and how they really think. Textbooks look for the perfect answer. The perfect solution is the enemy of the practical solution. Searching for perfection leads to inaction. Practical solutions lead to what good managers want: action. For many managers, the real problem is not even finding the answer. The real challenge is finding out the question. The really good managers spend more time working out what the question is, before attempting to find the pragmatic answer.
Setting budgets, Managing budgets, Managing costs, Surviving spreadsheets and Knowing numbers could be called FQ – financial quotient. We expected to find that finance and accounting is 100 per cent IQ. We were 100 per cent wrong. In theory, financial management is a highly objective and intellectual exercise in which answers are either right or wrong: the numbers do or do not add up. For managers, the intellectual challenge is the minor part of the challenge. The major part of the challenge is not intellectual: it is political. Most financial discussions and negotiations are political discussions about money, power, resources, commitments and expectations. In many ways, financial management could belong better in the PQ (political quotient) chapter. Out of deference to financial theory, it is included in this, the IQ chapter.
In the sections that follow, we will pay our dues to theory. Theory is not useless – good theory creates a framework for structuring and understanding unstructured and complex issues. The main focus, however, is on the method of how managers develop and deploy these IQ skills in practice.
Managers have long been told ‘first things first’. This is tautological nonsense: it depends on what you define as ‘first’. In practice, managers do not start at the start. Effective managers start at the end.
For speed readers, let’s repeat the message: effective managers start at the end.
Working backwards from the desired outcome, rather than shambling forwards from today, is at the heart of how good managers think and work. This outcome focus is essential because it achieves the following:
Outcome focus is a relatively easy discipline to learn. It requires asking the same four questions time and time again:
Keep asking these four questions relentlessly and you will find the fog of confusion lifts from most situations, and you can drive a team to action.
Asking this question drives us into action and gives people a sense of clarity and purpose. It is also a way of taking control of a situation and gaining benefit from it. It is a way of avoiding becoming dependent on other people’s agendas, being purely reactive, or of slipping into analysis paralysis. Two examples will make the point.
A project was going horribly wrong: it threatened to go over time and budget. The team was having an inquest, which rapidly was turning into the normal blame game of ‘he said … she said … I said no, she said …’ Things were turning nasty. Then the team leader stopped the debate and asked: ‘OK, we have two weeks left on the project. The question is this: What can we do in the next two weeks to achieve a satisfactory outcome?’ Suddenly, the debate turned from defensive analysis into a positive discussion about what the team could do. The leader had focused the team on outcomes and action, not on problems and analysis.
Example two
The analyst had done a great job. She had compiled a mountain of data. The result was that her draft presentation was indigestible. Every piece of data was so good it was hard to see what to leave out. So her manager asked her to focus on what she wanted to achieve from the presentation. The desired outcome was very simple: agree to a new project. Suddenly, it was easy to focus on a short storyline that could persuade the decision-maker about the project. The discussion was no longer ‘What shall we leave out of the presentation?’ but ‘What is the minimum we need to include to make our case?’ About 90 per cent of the presentation disappeared into an appendix that was never read.
The analyst had learned that presentations and reports are not complete when there is nothing left to say or write: they are complete only when it is impossible to say or write any less. Brevity is much harder than length. Presentations and reports are like diamonds: they benefit greatly from good cutting.
Most managers are serving clients of some sort. Their client may be their boss, a colleague or an external partner. One way or the other, managers are supporting other people’s agendas. Understanding what the other person wants is a very simple way of clarifying what the desired outcome of any situation is. Achieving clarity on this question enables the manager to:
Look back at the two examples (above). In each case, the individuals concerned were able to understand what they needed to do by understanding what ‘the other person’ wanted:
There are plenty of people who make things complicated. While some people cannot see the wood for the trees, others cannot even see the trees for all the branches, twigs and leaves. Smart people can handle complexity. Really smart people, like the best managers, create simplicity. Simplicity is far harder to achieve than complexity and is essential, given the increasing time pressure on all managers.
Discovering the minimum number of steps requires asking a few more questions:
This question is about predicting risks, problems, unintended consequences and uncomfortable questions. If you can predict problems, you can pre-empt them. This is also the stage at which you may allow a little complexity to creep back into the course of action.
In theory, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, except in non-Euclidean geometry. In practice, the fastest route often is not a straight line. When you are sailing against the wind, the fastest route between two points is a zigzag. Sailing straight into the wind gets you nowhere. This is an experience most managers understand after they have tried to sail against the political winds in their organisation.
The easiest way to work out the consequences of most actions is to understand who the major stakeholders are and how they will react: each stakeholder has a different perspective and will have different criteria and needs. The finance department will worry about affordability and payback; marketing will look at competitive reactions; sales will worry about price and positioning; HR will look at the staffing implications. Once you have a map of who is interested in what, then you can plot a zigzag through all the constituencies to make sure each one is able to satisfy their required needs.
As a manager, you have to achieve results. Results are not always about delivering a profit: not everyone has P&L responsibility. You may be responsible for project outcomes, quality outcomes, costs, product design, development and delivery, and recruiting and training staff. There are endless possible results for which you may be responsible. Ultimately, you have to deliver results. For better or for worse, many organisations do not look too closely at how results are achieved, unless there is immoral or illegal activity involved. Conversely, if a manager fails to deliver results, the manager fails. Results are better than excuses.
There are, essentially, five ways in which you can achieve acceptable results:
This is an unpalatable truth in the era of work–life balance, which is shorthand for a wish to work less. This is also the 24/7 era, when we are attached permanently to various electronic tags that constrain us as much as a prisoner’s leg irons. There is no escape. Working harder, however, is not a lasting solution. Given the ambiguous nature of most managerial work, bosses do not know how much effort you are really putting in. If you achieve results, the assumption is that you can do more. So the reward for working harder is to get more work. You get less work only when you can no longer deliver or you complain loudly enough. Hard work is necessary, but it is not enough.
This is the desired outcome of results obsession: we find ways of doing things betterfastercheaper. Betterfastercheaper is the essence of capitalism. If you deliver betterfastercheaper, the ideal result is promotion. The more immediate consequence normally is the same as working harder: an increased workload rather than decreased working time. Like working harder, working smarter is necessary but not enough.
Beating a soft target is easier than beating a tough target. Many managers realise that it is better to negotiate hard for one month securing a soft target than it is to work hard for 11 months trying to beat a tough target. Even CEOs do this: watch the frequency with which a new CEO discovers a black hole in the organisation’s finances that requires write-offs and adjustments to the corporate goals. Fixing the baseline does not enhance the prospects of your business, but it does enhance the prospects of your career.
There is an annual ritual in most organisations called ‘meet year-end budget’. Experienced managers know that this is coming, and they know that, even if they are doing well, they are likely to be asked to deliver a little more in the last two months to make up for shortfalls elsewhere. This is where you need to be creative. If you are doing well, hide spare budget for the inevitable year-end rainy day. If you are behind, use a combination of real actions on costs and whatever accounting smokescreens and mirrors can come to your support. This may appear cynical, but it is part of the reality of management survival.
The first four approaches all depend on you doing things. But your job is to make things happen through other people. This leads to your fifth managerial option: manage for results.
Results focus has some unintended consequences. In the public sector, targets obsession leads to awkward outcomes. Here are some instances:
The private sector is not much better.
Managers make things happen through other people. There is a huge difference between doing (working harder and smarter yourself) versus managing (enabling other people to work harder and smarter). Managers who try to do it all themselves are not really managing and, in the long run, are condemned to fail. Management is a team sport.
As a manager, you have to make the crucial leap from ‘how?’ to ‘who?’ As a team member, when you are assigned a task you may think ‘How do I do this?’ As a manager, your reaction should be ‘Who can do this or help me do it?’ No matter how creative you are in answering the ‘how’ question, there is a limit to what you can achieve. As soon as you start asking ‘who’, you are not constrained by the limits of your personal time, effort and insight. You start to unleash the efforts of the team and your colleagues.
You can manage for results only if you focus on the essence of management: making things happen through other people. You need to have the right people tackling the right challenges the right way. The focus of this book is on how you can make things happen through other people.
Good managers are often referred to as being decisive. ‘Being decisive’ is one of those vague management terms like ‘professional’, ‘effective’ or ‘charismatic’ that is very difficult to pin down. No one can teach it and it is assumed that either you have it or you do not. We found that decisive managers typically show four specific behaviours:
The behaviours described above are hallmarks of a decisive manager, at least on minor matters such as sorting out late deliveries, staffing problems and budget arguments. But these useful instincts often desert managers when they are faced with a major decision. As the scale of the problem escalates, the number of people involved in it grows and the rational and political risks increase. Suddenly, managers become very risk-averse. The manager’s nightmare is to be held accountable for a decision that went wrong. To avoid this fate, managers seek refuge behind formal processes, exhaustive analysis and widespread consultation to optimise the decision and, more importantly, diffuse responsibility. Even if the decision turns out to be wrong, everyone has been so involved in the process that they will find it difficult to pin the blame on one person. What should be a rational process (make a decision) becomes a political process (avoid blame for a potentially damaging solution).
The larger the decision, the more risk-averse managers become.
In general, the pay-off from making a risky and correct decision is quite low. Your success may be derailed by other factors or claimed by other people and, probably, it will have a minimal impact on your overall pay and promotion prospects. But the consequences of making a risky but incorrect decision are huge: colleagues will make sure that the blame is pinned on you, and your reputation will suffer.
You are offered the chance to win £10,000 on a toss of a coin (a 50/50 chance, in theory). How much would you pay to play this game?
Most people will offer much less than £5,000, which should be the mean average pay-out from the game, if it is played enough times. Fear of loss outweighs the prospect of gain. Of course, make the game for 10 pence, and most people will play happily for 5 pence: risk aversion increases with the scale of the possible loss.
Analysis is safe, action is risky. But analysis often throws up more challenges and more problems, which require more analysis. Slowly, the problem-solving exercise takes on a life of its own. No one can see through the thicket of challenges and problems that the analysis is throwing up. Paralysis through analysis becomes an unwelcome reality.
Faced with small problems, shortcuts seem acceptable. But bigger problems deserve better solutions, and the biggest problems deserve perfect solutions. The perfect solution must also be the least risky solution. Except that, in the messy world of management, there is no perfect solution. Any solution tends to be a trade-off between two unacceptable alternatives. No good solution exists on paper: good solutions exist only in reality.
It is far better to be wrong collectively than it is to be wrong individually. No one wants to run the risk of being asked to don the corporate equivalent of the dunce’s cap. In some organisations, it is better to be wrong collectively than right individually: being right against the grain is seen to be disruptive to the team. Whistle blowers normally are vilified, not praised. The search for collective responsibility is natural risk avoidance.
Collective responsibility requires consensus, which rarely represents the best solution. The consensus solution represents the least unacceptable solution to each constituency: it is a political fix. The purpose of involving other people should not be to achieve a consensus; it should be to gain insight. Ultimately, one person needs to own both the problem and the solution. You should use other people to gain insight and to drive action, not to hide behind in case things go wrong later.
Responsibility for large problems, and their solutions, is often shared among several departments. This can lead to an unseemly game of pass the blame: no one really wants to be associated with causing the problem. Analysis of the problem becomes bogged down in an autopsy about what went wrong, rather than what the solution should be.
There are many decision-making and problem-solving tools available to managers and these are covered later in the chapter. In practice, managers rarely use such formal tools. Instead, there are three questions they ask themselves, which normally yield a practical answer:
Pattern recognition is what managers often refer to as intuition or experience. Unlike intuition, however, pattern recognition can be learned. Pattern recognition is simply a matter of observing what works and what does not work in different situations. If you recognise a familiar pattern, you will be able to predict what actions will work or fail. You will appear to have intuitive business sense.
Advertising is a curious world where the creativity of advertisers has to meet the disciplines of the marketplace. Good advertising can transform a brand whereas poor advertising can kill it. Either way, it costs a fortune to make and to air. The challenge for clients, who pay the advertising agencies, is to know whether their spending is going to work.
Procter & Gamble (P&G), one of the world’s largest advertisers, does not rely on intuition. It has built up huge experience and has learned patterns of success and failure. Young brand managers have to acquire this intuition, or pattern recognition, fast. Inside the major offices of P&G there is a dark room where the secrets of advertising intuition are learned. On appointment, the first thing a brand manager will do is to go into this room and acquire the knowledge. They will do this by reviewing tapes of all the advertising the brand has aired in the past 65 years. Watching 65 years of Daz advertising is like watching a social history of Britain. And for each piece of advertising, there are key statistics to show how well it fared.
After a few hours of watching such advertising, even the rawest marketing manager acquires an uncanny ability to look at 30 seconds of advertising and to predict how well it scored and performed. This is intuition acquisition at speed. It cuts through theory and shows what works in practice.
Pattern recognition comes into play when the manager realises that they are going to be responsible for making a decision. If it is a familiar pattern, it is normally an easy decision (see the box above for a typical example).
You can observe and learn from everyday situations to build up your knowledge of what does and does not work in your own organisation. You may not have the luxury of reviewing 65 years of people managing conflicts, negotiating, influencing people or problem-solving, but good observation builds our skills, helps your pattern recognition and lets you appear to have excellent business sense and intuition.
Pattern recognition can be acquired and learned in a range of decision-making conditions:
Managing people, including bosses, is largely about pattern recognition. You have to learn quickly what turns people on and off in terms of working style, risk appetite, people versus task focus, process versus outcome focus and more. No pattern is the right pattern: from the manager’s perspective, the point is to learn what works with different people.
If a decision fits into a familiar pattern, then most managers have the confidence to make it. The P&G brand manager will approve the development of a new campaign based on judgement, without recourse to expensive and time-consuming market research. You can normally decide by recognising a pattern.
Decision-making is as much about politics as it is about reason. You need solutions that lead to action: the perfect solution that is not acted upon is useless. Decisions lead to action only if people support them. This means that you have to ask ‘who?’ as much as ‘what?’.
There are essentially four possibilities here, each with a different outcome, in terms of decision making:
This is decision-making that is free of any problem-solving skills. The key skills are understanding the agendas of bosses, colleagues and your team, and framing the decision to support those agendas. For this reason, many decisions emerge gradually over time. A consensus slowly builds, small actions are taken, which favour one choice over another, and, gradually, a preferred course of action emerges. This fits with the apparently chaotic schedule of many managers: lots of small interactions over the day help them understand one another’s agendas, sell an agenda, gather information and migrate slowly towards a series of decisions.
Management is a team sport. You cannot be expected to know all the answers, but you will be expected to find all the answers. That means working with your colleagues on solutions.
For more complex decisions, you may not know the answer. But many different individuals in finance, marketing, operations, IT, sales and HR will hold part of the answer. They each hold one piece of the jigsaw and your job is to put the pieces together. This is both an intellectual process (discovering the best answer) and a political process (building a coalition in support of the emerging answer). This can take time. It may require several iterations before you can find a consensus, the solution that aligns all the different agendas.
In Japan, this consensus-based decision-making is called nemawashi. The idea is to build agreement to the decision before the decision-making meeting. Carry out the initial conversations in private. This is critical. As soon as anyone has taken a position in public, they will feel the need to defend it at all costs, rather than lose face by changing their position. In private, you can have much more open and flexible conversations: real issues can be discussed, agendas can be aligned and commitment can be built. The more you listen, the more you will understand the politics of the decision and the views of different stakeholders. You will gain more insight into the nature of the decision: you will understand better what the real challenge is, what the different options are and the consequences of each option. The more you listen, the more likely it is that a consensus will emerge around one preferred solution.
The final decision-making meeting still has relevance, but it is not about making a decision. It is about confirming in public to all the stakeholders that there really is consensus and agreement. It builds confidence and legitimises the consensus you have secured already in private.
Problem-solving sometimes is thought to be the preserve of people who are brains on sticks. In reality, brains on sticks are precisely the wrong sort of people for solving most management problems. Clever people search fruitlessly for the non-existent perfect solution so they achieve nothing. A workable solution is preferable to the perfect solution because it leads to action. The perfect solution is the enemy of the practical solution.
The principles that lie behind effective problem-solving are:
Smart managers think they know all the answers. Really smart managers know the right questions. The best answer to the wrong question is useless. The purpose of this section is to help you identify the right problem, ask the right questions and arrive at a practical solution.
All students are given strict briefing before sitting any exam: ‘Make sure you answer the question.’ This is remarkably obvious advice, which is ignored remarkably often – with catastrophic consequences. The same advice needs to be given to all managers: ‘Make sure you answer the question.’ At least with school exams, the question is clear. In business, no one hands out an exam paper. You are expected to know what the exam question is without being told.
At junior levels of management, the exam questions are often pretty clear. They tend to be expressed as simple performance goals: sell more product, trade more profitably, bill more personal time. As managers continue their careers, clarity reduces and ambiguity increases. The goal may be clear (make your profit target) but the means to the end are not. It pays to fight the right battles the right way to achieve the overall goal. You have to know which the right battles are.
This was my big break. I got to present to the CEO. I gave what I thought was a brilliant presentation. At the end of it, the CEO coughed quietly and seemed to confirm my judgement of my own talents.
‘That was a very impressive presentation,’ he said. ‘I only have one question …’
I was ready for any question. I had 200 back-up pages of detailed analysis. This was my chance to shine.
‘What, precisely, was the problem you were solving?’ he asked.
That was the one question I was not ready for. I quickly vanished into a puff of my own vanity and confusion.
No one would think of trying to cure chicken pox by using spot remover. But such confusion over symptoms and causes happens regularly in business. Many cost-cutting programmes fall into this trap. The CEO looks strong and effective announcing some target job cuts or cost savings. In highly macho form the message was conveyed to the CEO’s management team as: ‘Give me 20 per cent cost reduction and 20 per cent head count in 12 months, or you will be part of the 20 per cent. No excuses.’ Over 15 per cent was delivered and some top executives were fired. It took years for the business to recover from the mindless cost cutting of marketing (loss of market position and revenues), of R&D (loss of new product flow) and of talent (loss of morale).
Cost problems are always a symptom of something else. They can be as follows:
The business goes in dramatically different directions if you choose to focus on increasing revenues, changing the product and customer mix or improving processes and working practices. Simple head count reduction will not achieve any of these positive outcomes.
On a smaller scale, many HR practices deal with symptoms, not causes. Performance-based appraisal and promotion systems sound highly dynamic. But they focus on symptoms (how well did the person do?) versus causes. Understanding the causes of good or poor performance is at least as important as measuring the outcome:
The skills-based approach to appraisal results in a better appraisal discussion. The good/bad performance appraisal can be confrontational and not very actionable. Many managers shy away from giving bad news, which helps no one.
Anyone can spot a symptom of a problem. It does not take a genius to see that profits are not high enough. The mark of a good manager is one who can go beyond symptoms and unearth the root causes of the problem. There are no easy shortcuts available. But there is one simple principle – keep on asking one question: ‘Why?’
Management is never short of problems and challenges. There are not enough hours in the day to solve them all. So you have to be selective. Three simple questions help identify which problems are worth addressing:
Most managers solve most problems intuitively. Rarely will you need to sit down and do a formal problem analysis. But it helps to have a few tools and techniques at hand. Used well, formal decision-making tools are a framework to encourage discussion and thinking with your colleagues. Used poorly, they are a prison that a facilitator with a franchised theory traps you in as you are forced through their process.
Decision-making tools should be an aid to thinking, not a substitute for thinking. The most common and popular tools are:
No single way is the best way. They all have value in different contexts. The key is to pick the right approach for the right context.
Typical assumptions for each approach are:
To a hammer, everything is a nail. Don’t hammer every problem. Your job is to pick the right tool for the right problem. You do not need to be an expert at each of these tools. Make sure you pick the one that meets your needs, and then either get a facilitator to help you with the process, or look up the details on the web.
If you listen to business school professors, strategy is so sophisticated and complicated that only they can really understand it. To prove their point, they come up with all sorts of clever concepts, such as value innovation, strategic intent, core competences and co-creation. These are supported by matrices, grids and charts that give the appearance of analytical rigour.
Do not be deceived. Most strategic concepts are:
Most corporate strategy is formulated the same way as most corporate budgets: last year’s budget and strategy is the best predictor of next year’s budget and strategy. Both will change, incrementally. But few companies actually change strategy significantly. The exceptions are famous, but exceptional. WPP, the world’s largest advertising conglomerate, was formed out of a shell company that made shopping trolleys. Nokia, once the world’s largest maker of mobile phones, had its origins in rubber (largest shoe factory in Europe), plastics (floor coverings) and forestry products.
Because most businesses do not change strategy fundamentally, the demand for deep strategic thinking from managers is not high. Nevertheless, it helps to understand strategic thinking. This means the following:
If you can do these four things, you are well prepared for the executive suite.
I started to doubt the use of the word strategy when the office manager started talking about strategic deployment of office space. I retired to the canteen to consider how I might strategically deploy my Brussels sprouts. As ever, the office manager was right and I was left to eat cold Brussels sprouts.
The office manager was answering the one strategic question that all managers have to be able to answer: ‘How can my actions and decisions support the goals of the organisation?’ At the risk of stating the obvious, this requires more than simply understanding the goals you have been set in your annual plan: it requires understanding the goals of the senior leadership team. Many managers fail this obvious test. They are so consumed with meeting their immediate goals that they forget to think about the broader context in which they are operating.
The office manager had a strategic challenge all of his own. As he walked round the office he could see lots of consultants working in individual glass fish bowls, which were meant to combine privacy with open communication. In practice, the walls stopped communication and the glass prevented privacy. The manager had heard the CEO talk about the need for teamwork, transparency and focus on clients. That meant working at the client site, not in cosy offices. The manager thought it through, and came up with a radically new design.
Out went all the mini-palaces that were also known as partners’ offices. Instead, they were invited to share a common partners’ room: they were being asked to walk the talk on teamwork. Quite a few partners exploded with indignant rage. They were the idle ones who would be most exposed in a common office. Next step were the consultants. Out went their goldfish bowls and their desks. In came rows of hot desks. There were not enough to go round, so consultants suddenly found it more congenial to work at the client site. In came lots of small meeting places so that teams could meet and work together.
The office manager had grasped the nature of strategy – he had understood the needs of the organisation and taken action to support them. He had no need to understand grand corporate strategy, or to talk the language of core competences. They were irrelevant. Managers do not need to be great strategists to think and act strategically: they need to understand the real needs of the organisation and to support those needs in their areas.
A simple test for strategic activity is this: will these actions get noticed at executive committee level? If they are relevant at that level, you are probably acting on matters that have strategic relevance. If not, you may still be making a useful but less visible contribution.
The best strategic thinking is very simple: clever people make things complicated, while really clever people make things simple.
Many of the most successful organisations have very simple strategies:
Although they are very simple strategies, they are competitively devastating. Let us look at each in more detail to see why:
Now consider how much these strategies have changed over the past 20 years. Each organisation essentially has the same strategic formula as 20 years ago. Great strategies rarely change.
If you ever apply to join a strategy consulting firm, you will get a chance to play the strategy game, also known as the case method interview. It is worth practising this game as it gives insight into the prospects of your employer and enables you to hold your own in discussions with senior executives.
The ostensible purpose of the game is to find an answer to some imponderable business question, such as: ‘Should MegaBucks expand its product range from photography to other imaging products like copiers?’ The real purpose of the game is to show that you can think in a structured and strategic manner, and the actual answer is unimportant. Cynics might say that it is the essence of strategy consulting: show you are smart and do not worry too much about the answer.
To succeed, you do not need to know the right answer. You need to know the right questions. An effective strategy discussion will look at the issue from a series of different angles:
As you go through the game, you should keep in mind a checklist of questions and perspectives you need to cover:
Keep asking these questions until you find convincing answers. Quite often, you will find that just one critical insight develops out of all the questions. In the exotic world of wet cement supply, the economics of distribution favour the creation of a series of local monopolies. It takes some questioning to get to that simple outcome. Asking the set questions will help you quickly identify why Microsoft is highly profitable, whereas airlines are, at best, cyclical in terms of profitability.
It helps to know the language of strategy. Strategy is spoken in two very different languages: the classical and the post-modern.
Classical strategy is a world of cause and effect. It is a search for the business equivalent of Newton’s laws: ‘If x happens, then y is the result.’ It is strategy in the true tradition of the Enlightenment: finding universal rules to apply to all situations. The godfathers of this world are Michael Porter (Five Forces analysis) and the Boston Consulting Group (responsible for matrix mania). The good news is that these formulae shed light and provide some insight into complex situations.
The bad news about formulaic strategy is that it is extremely dangerous. If everyone uses the same tools and the same analyses, they come up with the same answers. This leads to the lemming syndrome: ‘10,000 lemmings cannot be wrong, so I will jump off a cliff as well …’ The dotcom bomb was a classic lemming moment.
UK telecommunications all did the same analysis and bid £22.4 billion for 3G licences, and it is unlikely that they will ever get that money back. When many of the world’s banks decided to chase profits by lending to the sub-prime markets, creating complex derivatives and increasing their capital leverage, they were possibly smart individual decisions. Collectively, they built a house of cards that fell down and led to a global recession. Following the herd can be very dangerous.
This is the language of a group of professors who all learned their trade from C K Prahalad (core competence, strategic intent). His acolytes include Gary Hamel, Chan Kim (value innovation) and Venkat Ramaswamy (co-creation). They are rebels against classical orthodoxy. For them, strategy is a process of discovery in which you create the future, rather than react to the present by analysing the past. This is a process-driven view of strategy much more than an analytical view of strategy. It does not pretend to have all the answers: it challenges organisations to discover and create answers for themselves.
The good news about this approach is that it leads to much more creative outcomes and engages the organisation more deeply. The bad news is that often it is not practical. It seeks radical strategic change, but most large organisations either do not need radical redirection, or are not capable of achieving it.
On balance, the classical approach to strategy suits established firms best. New entrants and start-ups use the post-modern approach, but are too small to realise that they are doing so.
Financial numeracy is a core skill for all managers. Unfortunately, financial skills are shrouded in unnecessary mystery. The high priests of accounting and finance cloak their art in terminology and techniques that are designed to scare off most managers. They are like medieval craft guilds who jealously protected their trade from all outsiders. Some areas of finance and accounting are genuinely complicated. Understanding regulatory capital requirements for banks internationally is not the sort of area the average manager needs or wants to understand. It is now clear that not even bankers or their regulators understood this either. But the core financial and accounting skills should be core skills for all managers.
These skills are not purely intellectual skills. Most financial management skills are deeply political, because they involve allocation of resources, setting targets, expectations and priorities. Inevitably, this goes to the heart of competitive strategy: how you compete against other departments and managers to secure the right resources, expectations and targets. Formal financial tools are simply your weapons of choice in these political and competitive battles. Only the most naive managers accept financial management as an objective, logical and rational exercise in which right and wrong answers can be discovered intellectually. The right financial solution is the one that best helps you to achieve your optimum goals.
The core financial skills you require are explored in the following sections:
These are your main financial and political battlegrounds. Within each of these battlegrounds there are accepted weapons, or analytical tools, you can use to achieve your goals. The nature of these weapons differs slightly by organisation. In any event, it is worth learning how to use these weapons to best advantage. Most traditional financial textbooks focus on finding the right answer and the right number. Do not use numbers in an intellectual pursuit of the ideal answer. Use numbers the same way lawyers use facts: selectively to support your case, not to illuminate the truth.
A budget is a contract between two levels of management: ‘We agree to achieve the following in return for this much money.’ As with all contracts, this is not a rational and objective exercise. It is a negotiation between the supplier of services (the less senior manager) and the buyer with the money (the more senior manager). Unlike most negotiations, both the buyer and the seller in budget negotiations have roughly similar levels of information. They know each other’s tactics and they know each other’s styles. So the negotiation can become very intense.
Most budget negotiations have two major elements: anchoring and adjustments.
The best predictor of next year’s budget is this year’s budget. This year’s budget is the anchor around which next year’s budget will be negotiated. In many organisations, this is so well established that managers will fight hard to spend this year’s budget fully and to not over-achieve budget this year: underspending or over-achieving simply leads to the budget anchor being reset. Next year’s budget becomes much harder to achieve if you do too well this year (see ‘The coffee break anchor’ below). Such budget-setting clearly is dysfunctional as it discourages performance improvement.
To effect real change, the anchor needs to be reset at a very different point from today. Anchoring needs to be achieved as early as possible, so that the debate is framed the right way. If the debate is framed around ‘How far do we increase or decrease last year’s budget?’, only minor change will emerge. If the debate is anchored around ‘Can we double our volume with just a 70 per cent increase in budget?’, you have a radically different discussion. Anchoring determines the level of ambition for the organisation.
Anchoring needs to take place as part of the strategic planning process, which should, in larger organisations, precede the annual budget cycle.
The best way to anchor a budget discussion is not by submitting a detailed strategic analysis to show why you should be targeting a doubling of sales volume. The best way is to talk very informally and very early on with the most senior people possible, before the strategic planning process even starts.
Group CEO: ‘Things look good this year …’
Business Unit Head (BUH): ‘Next year could be even better. On current trends, 35 per cent growth is not impossible, if we have the resources to support it.’
CEO: ‘35 per cent? I thought we were on trend for nearer 10 per cent?’
BUH: ‘35 per cent assumes we invest in the new product stream that is coming on line …’
CEO: ‘Sounds good, but cash flow will be a challenge …’
BUH: ‘We’ll look into it …’
Next year’s budget discussion has just been anchored at 35 per cent growth, and serious investment, with the need to look hard at cash flow. Neither side has promised anything, yet. If this conversation had not happened, and instead the CEO had listened to the highly cautious CFO, the budget discussion could have been anchored around 10 per cent volume growth and a static budget.
Adjustments take the form of the question: ‘What will be different next year from this year?’ This is where there is intense negotiation on the detail. Adjustments look at incremental differences from this year: anchoring looks at step-change differences from this year. Typical incremental differences will include:
These discussions can be like trench warfare. Staff functions tend to have the advantage because they have the support and power of senior management on whose behalf they are acting. They are also working 100 per cent on budget discussions, while you have to manage a business as well.
Consequently, many managers give up too easily. This is a mistake. It is better to have one tough month negotiating an easy budget than to have one tough year delivering a budget that was set too high.
This debate is reversed from senior management’s perspective. They know that there will be widespread game playing in the budget negotiations, with each budget holder having well-rehearsed arguments as to why the outlook is uniquely grim for the future and why delivering any sort of profit will be nearly impossible. There are two defences against this for senior managers:
Each year follows a predictable budget cycle. The year starts full of hope. Then there is a gradual squeeze. High-performing units suddenly have their goals raised even higher to make up for the shortfall in the weaker units. Weaker units start to get more help than they care for: being behind budget is an uncomfortable experience. This cycle shapes the way managers need to manage their budget.
Know your numbers in advance of the official data. The purpose of this is to show that you are in control of the operation, and to take early corrective action if things are going off course. By the time you receive the report saying that your budget has crashed, it is too late. Accounting data looks backwards: you cannot drive the business forward by looking backwards. Most departments should be able to predict what will be happening three months in advance: sales will have a sales pipeline just as HR will have a recruiting pipeline. Significant challenges caused by competitor activity, customers running into payment problems or major projects over-running should be visible to a manager who is in control. Use this sort of information to create your own early-warning radar system.
Prepare for a rainy day. Two simple principles help here:
Manage communications well. Follow three principles here:
Prioritise your spending. Phase spending carefully. There is a delicate balance to be achieved here. The reserving principle requires delaying expenditure. But the knowledge that budgets will become tighter later in the year requires bringing some spending forward. The spending to bring forward is a mixture of two elements:
All of these disciplines assume that you have accurate financial data. Perhaps the fastest way to lose credibility with an executive team is to produce unreliable data. If management cannot trust your data, they cannot trust you. It pays to have a good accountant on your team who can provide the information and the cover you need.
Aged 18, I managed to find ten weeks’ work at the Inland Revenue (now HMRC). We were the perfect match: it was the employer of last resort and I was the employee of last resort.
The work itself was an education in futility. I had to alter, by hand, the tax codings of 10,000 taxpayers. This meant adding three numbers together to create a fourth number. The inefficiency was staggering:
In week eight, my manager was in a great flap. He wanted me to do something, anything, to look busy. An inspector was coming and if she saw that I had already finished the ten-week task, she might conclude that ten weeks was too long. As a result, the manager’s budget would be cut for the next year. So I looked busy, the manager kept his budget and I was given a pint of beer after work. Everyone was happy, except the long-suffering taxpayer. Nothing new there, then.
I was starting to suspect that business and budgets were not all about efficiency and rationality. Politics and power seemed to be involved. But I assured myself that this was just the Inland Revenue. What else could you expect of a monopoly enforced by government? Surely other businesses and budgets would be far more rational and efficient with no hint of politics, wouldn’t they?
Managing costs is at the heart of the management task. Inevitably, your budget will be squeezed. Input costs always go up: customers rarely volunteer price rises, staff rarely volunteer salary cuts, suppliers always want more and the tax inspector is always happy to steal another penny or two. On the other hand, there is the relentless logic of senior management and of the marketplace that demands betterfastercheaper. Do not just cut costs, but do things better as well. People no longer accept a cost–quality trade-off. They want both.
This pressure builds up like clockwork towards the financial year-end. The year starts full of hope. As it progresses, achieving targets becomes ever more challenging. One product or region hits a big problem, so the pain gets shared around the organisation. Every other region and product has their goals raised to make up for the shortfall in the Japanese widgets market, the safety recall in Europe or the litigation in the United States.
By year-end, management inevitably are looking at key ratios for the annual report. So expect the following demands:
You know that this squeeze is coming, so prepare for it. Preparation comes in the form of a five-fold defensive strategy, outlined below. The purpose of cost-cutting when it is part of the budget cycle is to do the minimum required to deliver the arbitrary demands of senior management and to avoid doing any substantive damage to the business itself. Short-term, budget-driven cost cuts are fundamentally different from the planned productivity improvements that you should seek anyway.
In recessions, cost-cutting often is about survival, not productivity. The results can be ugly. The smartest firms use recessions to remove organisational tat and managerial low-flyers. Being smart is not a luxury all firms have in recessions.
Productivity is about real cost improvements; cost cuts driven by the annual budget cycle (as opposed to the panic of recession) involve considerable game playing by all levels of management. The five levels of defence against the budget-driven cost-cutting demands are:
You have three major tools to play with here. Each one of them is designed to avoid making any serious cost cuts that would harm the business.
This game has to be played the right way. There are two common mistakes made when taking part:
If you can, use the new target as an opportunity to negotiate. This is a way of making management understand that cutting costs has consequences, and it needs to deal with them. Cost cuts cannot be imagined out of thin air. There are two things you can try to ask for:
Your success in renegotiating requires persistence, eloquence, political support and some luck. But, if you do not ask the question, you do not get the answer.
Once the game playing is over, you may have to deliver some real cost cuts. This soft squeeze goes through four levels of pain:
An early sign of the soft squeeze is the coffee machine: it goes from being free to being paid for. The money saved is irrelevant to the corporate budget. The purpose of such acts is symbolic. They are meant to raise staff cost-consciousness, but more often they simply lower staff morale.
This is where the pain really starts. The last ditch of defence is voluntary redundancy, which can be achieved in two ways:
The final alternative is to make involuntary redundancies. This is clearly an organisation in some crisis. There is no kind way of firing people. As with executions, there are less cruel ways: doing it quickly is better than spinning out the agony for the victims. Let the unlucky people go with as much of their dignity intact as possible, and with as much hope for the future as possible. But the big trap is to focus too much on them. This sounds cruel, but you are going to have to live and work with the survivors, not the leavers. It makes sense to invest as much time as possible in helping the survivors see that there is still hope, there is still a future and that they can be part of it.
None of the cost-cutting efforts described above actually improve the underlying performance of the business. Knee-jerk cost cuts look impressive and help the CEO get a bigger bonus. But they do not help the business.
In practice, real change comes from two different angles:
One version of strategic change much loved by CEOs is financial engineering: using the balance sheet to buy and sell businesses. In good times buy, in recessions sell. When CEOs play the corporate equivalent of Monopoly, shareholders lose and bankers win. Bankers get fees on the way up and on the way down – for advising on purchases and sales, and financing debt. Shareholders lose by paying for over-priced assets in the boom and for selling at fire-sale prices in the bust.
The problem with all the real changes is that all your competitors are doing more or less the same with roughly as much skill and talent as you. Each year you run harder and harder simply to stay still compared to the competition. At least no one pretends that management is easy.
The need to make continual cost and productivity improvements is real. Even the most successful organisations cannot stand still. But the more successful an organisation is, the less managers will feel the need to make painful decisions. Inevitably, therefore, they will find ways of showing that they are making great improvements while, in reality, they are achieving nothing. This sort of cost-cutting delivers red dollars: they look great but have no value compared to green dollars. There are two basic ways of delivering red dollars:
Game playing like this is a sure sign of a fat and bloated organisation. Knowing how the games are played can help you spot and control them, or to play them, as conditions require.
Head office calmly announced it was increasing its budget from an already outrageous $94 million to $134 million. That was $40 million of potential bonus money that it was stealing. When questioned on the number, it threw down a challenge: ‘If anyone thinks they can reduce this very tough budget to less than $100 million, they are welcome to try.’ Head office managers smirked, knowing that no one is dumb enough to make enemies of the whole of head office.
Well, more or less no one is that dumb. Unfortunately for them and for me, I was in the room. I volunteered for career suicide. The challenge was to find $35 million of apparent savings without creating mortal enemies of every powerful panjandrum in the business. Follow the red dollar dance:
The exercise officially saved $35 million. In practice, it achieved zero cost savings for the business. But it did save my career, so it was a very worthwhile exercise.
In the days before spreadsheets, there was a naive assumption that good maths equalled good thinking and poor maths equalled poor thinking.
In the spreadsheet era, we do not have to worry about poor maths so much, unless someone is using elaborate equations and macros. Understanding spreadsheets is about good thinking, not good maths. It pays to understand how the spreadsheet was created. The person producing the spreadsheet deploys two basic tactics:
The rules for the spreadsheet survival game are very simple, and are completely different if you are writing the spreadsheet or are reading it.
The rules for the spreadsheet writer are as follows:
For the spreadsheet reader, the rules are largely reversed:
Only now is it worth actually looking at the spreadsheet.
Numbers make many people feel nervous. With a degree in history, numbers certainly made me feel nervous. I was not even much good at historical dates. The critical breakthrough came in discovering that management numbers are not about maths: they are about thinking and persuasion. Even historians can manage that, on a good day. In contrast, not all mathematicians feel confident about business thinking and persuasion. The numbers game is an equal-opportunity challenge for all disciplines: it is equally tough for everyone.
There are four major variations of the numbers game:
This is how to look smart whenever presented with a complex spreadsheet or proposal. Do not worry about the maths. Look at the largest figures and then test the assumptions behind them. This has been covered fully in spreadsheet survival above. Typical assumptions to test involve:
The way to succeed at this game is to create your own checklist of assumptions before you even see the spreadsheet or proposal. Do not get caught up in the Byzantine internal logic of the proposal in front of you. If you make sure your own thinking and assumptions are clear, it becomes easy to test other people’s thinking and assumptions.
Averages are profoundly misleading. The average human is 51 per cent female and has fewer than two legs (some people have lost legs). Useless. Average customer satisfaction is 3.2 on a 5-point scale. Utterly useless. Of far more use to a manager are the extremes and the segments. Here are some examples:
When faced with an average, always look for the extreme scores behind the average, and the major segments around the average: that is where the real insight will come from.
The car was full of a new toilet soap that we were going to launch nationally. It had an overpowering fragrance, which made everyone in the car sneeze. After four hours of driving and sneezing, we hated it as much as the consumers in our market research. And we were its managers. We wondered how a toilet soap that scored so low in research could go national. The answer was that, in the test market, it had done very well. This made the riddle even more confusing.
The market research was based on all consumers, most of whom hated it, even if they were not sneezing at it. But about 15 per cent of the population thought it was brilliant, the best toilet soap they had ever tried. Given that no toilet soap had more than 10 per cent of the market, this was extremely good news. Following the market research, we put the soap into test market and the 15 per cent of diehards duly bought the soap in vast quantity and at great expense.
The average reaction to our product was irrelevant. We had a profitable hit on our hands, based on one segment of the market. Now all we had to do was to sneeze our way to the national sales conference …
Beating baselines is a classic intellectual and political challenge for managers. Setting a baseline ought to be a rational and objective exercise. It is not. It is a political exercise that fundamentally affects perceptions of performance. Naive managers ignore this and accept given baselines: experienced managers understand that the right performance baseline makes beating the baseline much easier than accepting a challenging baseline.
The two key variations of this game are:
A baseline is, perhaps, the most deceptive and dangerous assumption in business. It is deceptive because it seems so natural and reasonable, and it is dangerous because it is often wrong. Spot what is wrong in these two cases.
The fallacy in both cases is to assume that the baseline is stable over time. The starting point of the current budget or market position is never stable over time. In business, all such baselines are on a continual downwards trend. Competitors wreck our plans by improving their efficiency and cutting costs as well. Competitors will match our efforts in both case one and case two: we will make the cost savings as promised, but there will be no increase in profit or market share as long as the competition does as well as we do. We are running hard to stay still.
Even without the effect of competition, organisations still face a declining baseline. Every organisation slowly slides towards chaos: experienced staff leave and new staff come in who need training; suppliers mess up; customer demands change; technology makes our current ways of working redundant; machines and systems break down; events happen. Against this background, huge effort is required simply to keep things in a steady state. The consequences of this are significant:
The false baseline is used by managers at all levels, and in particular by CEOs. It is the natural, political response to the problem of the declining baseline. The purpose of the false baseline is to set the starting point so low that anything you do has to be an improvement on where you are today.
When you inherit a job, you may well find that the person who preceded you has left a picture of a great job brilliantly done, which is why they were promoted. They will have shown that they had put in place all the plans required to transform the business. If you allow that propaganda to flourish, you are finished. If you succeed, it will be because of the plans that the previous incumbent put in place. If you do less than brilliantly, it will be because you messed up. You do not want to inherit a baseline set impossibly high.
The alternative is to show, as fast as possible, that the job or department you inherited is on the brink of collapse. Everything is a disaster, which only a superhero can possibly turn around, but luckily you have arrived in the nick of time. If things now proceed modestly well, you will have done a great job in averting disaster.
The same modest performance can be seen as a disaster or as a triumph, depending on how the baseline was set.
The validation game is about people and politics as much as it is about numbers. Venture capitalists, bankers and senior managers do not simply look at the numbers being presented to them. They look at the people behind the numbers. A solid proposal from a team with high credibility is more convincing than an exciting proposal from a weak team.
Effective managers understand this and will use it to their advantage. Validation is required from two sources. First, get the sheriff and his deputies on board. You can find them in marketing, HR, IT, finance and accounting. They will all want their say. Let them have it, in private. Let them nitpick in private. As soon as anyone takes a public position, they find it very hard to change. Their position is public if they state it in a meeting where more than two people are present. The important thing is to get them on your side, in private. Once you have the sheriff on board, approach the mayor. The mayor is the local power broker. Whereas the sheriff and deputies are interested in the detail of their individual areas, the mayor is interested in the bigger picture: how your numbers fit with all the other priorities and numbers in town.
Once you have lined up the sheriff, deputies and mayor to support you, you can really go to town and have fun. The other cowboys will not even get a look-in.
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