8. Unintended Consequences

A week later Alex got a very early morning visit from Matt Joachim, the head of human resources.

“Have a seat,” Alex said, waving him in. The two men caught up on a few personal matters before they got down to business.

“What’s up, Matt?” Alex finally prodded.

“Well, since our team meeting last week, I’ve been thinking a lot about alignment and doing some investigation on my own.”

“Great!” Alex encouraged.

“This has been right under my nose, but I’ll just tell it to you straight up. I’ve been wondering why we have so many medical products in the pipeline barely inching their way forward. What could be going on here? I’m no engineer, but I am a pretty good human resources guy.”

“You are,” Alex agreed.

“Well, I started interviewing our engineers, asking what they were doing day to day—how they were spending their time and allocating their efforts to products—and I found something rather remarkable and disturbing.”

“You have my attention,” Alex noted and he leaned forward.

“Each engineer,” Matt continued, pushing a graph across the table to Alex, “has been distributing time across an average of six or more products.”

Alex studied the graph and said, “I see,” when, in fact, he didn’t.

“Let me explain,” Matt went on. “In effect, the engineers were distributing themselves across multiple products because they weren’t sure what the real priorities were and in case any one of these projects failed, they’d still have job security. That’s our fault.” He looked up at Alex. “Our fault, meaning us—the senior management team. We weren’t aligned enough to make big bets on high-priority, breakthrough projects and then help them succeed.”

Alex understood and was stunned. “What next?” he said as much to himself as to Matt.

“I think we’re all ready to stop what’s not working—the projects that everyone knows don’t really have a chance of succeeding. Let’s align as a senior team and then align our best talent with our best breakthrough opportunities. We need to assure our engineering and scientific talent that if these newly focused, higher-priority opportunities do not succeed, they still have jobs.”

“Let’s get to work,” Alex said, “changing our project-prioritization process.”

“And,” said Matt, “our talent management approach.”

“Agreed. Let’s work together on this, Matt.”