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Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed is arguably the most important book of the decade. Also the most depressing. It’s about the factors that caused five past societies to collapse (hence the title) and their application to modern societies, including our own. His account avoids both the facile (because people are stupid, rapacious, short-sighted, or insert your preferred character flaw here) and the one dimensional.

Try this: Monday and Wednesday read Collapse. Tuesday and Thursday read the best book you can find from the business press. On Friday you’ll recognize two undeniable facts. The first is the difference between real genius and the limited imitation that passes for it in the world of commerce.

The second is that, compared to actual science, management science is little more than unsupported hand-waving.

Diamond could explain the collapse of (for example) Anasazi society with considerable confidence because he had access to knowledge amassed over decades by dozens of patient, dedicated researchers in (to provide a partial list): archaeology, anthropology, physics (for radiocarbon dating), dendrochronology, ethology (for the analysis of packrat middens), and palynology.

When, in contrast, Jim Collins studied the success of his Good to Great companies and its absence in their rivals, the only information available to him beyond the interviews he and his team conducted was a few decades of stock prices and financial statements.

Why is that?

Palynology — one of the intellectual resources Diamond mined — isn’t what you might call a “money field.” Nobody becomes wealthy from the painstaking analysis of pollen samples in lakebed cores. At best, they make a modest living from their salaries as college professors, with research funding measured in tens of thousands of dollars, all spent to pay for travel, equipment, and the austere lifestyle “enjoyed” by graduate students.

The world of commerce generates so much more money that a single CEO like Bill McGuire, until recently of United Healthcare, could amass a fortune that exceeds the total annual spending in all of the aforementioned fields, even excluding what he got from backdated stock options.

We know much more about paleobotany than we do about what leads to business success. With so much more money at stake, can’t we do better than the Harvard Business Review?

Apparently not, and the reason isn’t difficult to figure out.

Imagine you’re a high-SAT sort of person who is fascinated by how the universe came to be. Your career choices are clear. You’ll become an astrophysicist, or a string theorist, or a quantum mechanic (the person you call when your quantum breaks down). It’s the only way to make a living while doing what you want to do with your life.

Now imagine you’re an equally bright individual who is fascinated by what it is that makes businesses successful. What’s your career? Management, of course, because if that’s your interest, you’re going to want to (a) put your ideas into practice; and (b) make money doing it.

That isn’t surprising. What’s somewhat more surprising is that the business world hasn’t invested more in business research, to make the pursuit of what is called “management science” but is really “management strongly held, thinly supported opinions” more attractive to the type of individual who could help sort out what works from what doesn’t.

I don’t know why this is. Neither does anyone else. My hypothesis is that nobody really wants to know.

If you were on a board of directors and business theory was as solid as quantum electrodynamics, you’d either have to understand and apply the knowledge, or else resign and not get paid for the dozen days of work each year that boards of directors generally work in exchange for their salaries.

If you were a CEO, the board would require you to have and apply this knowledge or your multi-million-dollar compensation package would go to someone who did and could.

If you were a venture capitalist, you wouldn’t invest in the acquisition of knowledge that might benefit the next generation of venture capitalists and the generation after that, but not you.

And if you’re any of the above, there’s a decent chance you have, shall we say, a healthy ego and strongly held opinions on the subject of what leads to business success. The absence of solid knowledge makes holding your strongly held opinions a lot safer.

Because if it existed, boards of directors, CEOs and venture capitalists would be held to the standards usually reserved for some who report to those who report to those who report to them:

People who learn and apply what scientists discover, like architects, engineers, and IT professionals.

Low-hanging fruit live somewhere between proofs of concept and important results in the business change hierarchy.

Your average proof of concept, far from proving the concept, does nothing more than prove a concept — a more simplistic one, applied to a problem much smaller in scale and complexity. Proofs of concept are usually little more than rigged tests.

Low-hanging fruit, unlike proofs of concept and like important results, provide real business benefit. They’re usually peared up with large-scale change efforts, and even if the big change never happens, you get to keep the business benefits they provide, kumquat may*.

They are, in a word, peachy.

Currant thinking is that the primary value of low-hanging fruit … quick wins … is to create momentum or get the company out of a jam. Achieving a small but real change helps everyone see that this time the change methodology works and change is going to happen, unlike all of those other, previous change efforts that died on the vine.

But success at small change says nothing about how well the same techniques will fare when applied to a big change, any more than aspirin’s success at alleviating a headache proves it can cure malaria.

When the subject is large-scale strategic change, employees are justifiably skeptical, usually considering the next big thing to be nothing more than this year’s passing fad. They’re probably watched more than one high-profile strategic change fail, with none brought to (ahem) fruition.

If you are preparing to lead a large scale business change, here’s something to consider before you spend too much time raisin everyone’s expectations: Maybe low-hanging fruit are the only fruit worth picking.

Software enhancements are IT’s low-hanging fruit. If there’s one certainty in IT, it’s that enhancements succeed. Large projects are where the risk lies.

That’s where Agile, Scrum, Conference Room Pilots and their iterative, incremental, adaptive relatives come into play. Boiled down to their cores, they turn large development efforts into a swarm of small enhancements. They are managed and coordinated for architectural consistency and focus on a common plan, but the coordination and focus are loose enough that the enhancement-like nature of the work is the dominant style.

So I was thinking: Since there’s no such thing as an IT project — it’s always about changing the business, or what’s the point? — maybe we should apply the same thinking to business change that Agile and its relatives bring to software development.

We need a methodology that turns large-scale strategic change into a basketful of low-hanging fruit.

What might such a methodology look like? The question is better than my answer, as you’re about to find out.

One place to start is the 3-1-3-4 formulation I introduced in “Secretive solutions,Keep the Joint Running, 9/3/2007.

3-1-3-4, you’ll recall, stands for 3-year vision, 1-year strategy, 3-month goals, 4-week plans. The 3-year vision and 1-year strategy provide consistency and focus. The 3-month goals and 4-week plan create the collection of quick wins.

It comes down to finishing one business enhancement effort and then asking, “What can we do next?”

For what we might as well start calling the “Agile Business Change” methodology (ABC — catchy, huh?) the 3-1-3-4 approach needs some enhancement:

The 3-year vision is still a shared vision, and there’s just one.

That isn’t true of the 1-year strategy. For ABC, each member of the executive committee must have one of these, and they have to make sense together.

Now come the 3-month plans. These fan out further, to middle management. Having so many 3-month plans is what will make the enterprise agile.

It’s also where chaos can ensue, because with so many concurrent change plans going on, the need for collaboration can easily lose out to the stiff competition for shared resources.

Like the IT department.

IT, in fact, has a role to play in preventing chaos, because most business change requires new information technology or changes to what’s already in production. If different requests are in logical conflict, IT is in an excellent position to spot the problem and coordinate a resolution.

The other mechanism for preventing chaos must be a corporate culture that encourages managers to ask themselves, about their plans: Who else will be affected by this?

And, after figuring out the answer, collaborating to make sure everything will come together in the end.

As I said, I don’t have a perfect answer to the challenge, just some glimmerings.

If someone reading this column has a better way of going about this and would be kind enough to share, I’d be grapeful.


*Borrowed from this verse, remembered from an old Mad magazine: You’re the apple of my eye/The plum of the day/And I’ll always love you/Kumquat may.

I keep reading about the dangers of big tech. As is so often the case when I read about the dangers of some social hazard or other, I get stuck on the dangers of questionable lexicography.

Like, for example, the poorly defined “big tech.”

The view from here is that, a tech company is a company that makes its money by selling technology. My logic: If a company simply makes its living using technology internally, every company of any size in the world would be classified as a tech company.

So here’s a list of what are popularly thought of as tech companies:

1. Amazon: A chunk of Amazon is, unquestioningly, a tech company. Maybe 5% of it. That’s AWS’s contribution to its revenue. From a where-does-its-money-come-from perspective, though, Amazon is more retailer, third-party-logistics provider, publisher, and ad agency than it is a tech company.

2. Apple: According to some metrics Apple is the world’s biggest of the big. Certainly, I won’t quibble that it’s pretty sizeable.

My question is whether it’s a tech company. No, let me take that back, because it shoves me into the trap I’m trying to avoid. Apple is, by revenue, about 80% tech company. The rest of it is, more or less, in the entertainment business.

Also, interestingly enough from internal IT’s perspective, Apple just isn’t that important. As a technology company, Apple mostly sells to consumers, which means for IT it matters as a platform for consumer-facing mobile apps and for BYOD use. And for consumer-facing mobile apps, much of its platform-ness is directed at app curation, which isn’t really a tech function at all.

3. Alphabet: This, Google’s parent company, is the poster child for bad categorization. Yes, it’s a cloud technology provider. That generates maybe a tenth of its total revenues. It’s mostly a media company that makes its money selling access to and information about its users to advertisers.

4. Microsoft: Yep. It’s a tech company.

5. Samsung: Okay, I’ll buy classifying Samsung as a tech company. Not a U.S.-based tech company, which complicates the public-policy we-have-to-reign-in-big-tech debate, but a tech company nonetheless.

Next?

6. Meta Platforms: This, the home of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, might look like a tech company, but it isn’t. It makes its living selling access to and information about users of these platforms to advertisers. That makes it a media company, just like your average daily newspaper, cable channel, and Google.

7. Cisco: Another tech company. It makes its money selling its tech. No quibbles or questions about it.

8. Oracle: Like Microsoft and Cisco it makes its money selling its technology to companies that need it.

9. Broadcom: Another tech provider.

10. SAP: And one more.

That’s enough, I think. What to me is most interesting about this breakdown, quick and dirty as it is, is that whenever you read about the need to “reign in big tech” (which discussions often also include other no-they-aren’t-tech-companies like Twitter and Uber), few of the companies that need reigning in are tech companies. For those that are supposed to need reigning in, the need is based on the non-tech-company parts of their business and how they do business.

No actual tech companies seem to need reigning in.

Bob’s last word: When the subject is persuasion, the golden rule is to sell the problem, not the solution. Consider the above an object lesson: The solution we’re being sold is “reign in big tech.” The problem we’re being sold that this is supposed to solve

has little or nothing to do with companies that actually are in the technology business.

Which leads to a piece of actual professional advice, namely, whenever you’re asked to evaluate a business proposal of any kind, begin your analysis by making sure the proposal clearly states the problem (or opportunity) it purports to solve.

If it starts with a solution, toss it.