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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Just once, a scientific approach would be nice. Just once.

The pundit class’s reaction to the imminent demise of Hostess and its tasty collection of bad-for-us products has been anything but scientific. Because instead of enumerating the possible causes and evaluating each on its merits, they’re mostly engaged in the popular pastime of starting with their one-size-fits-all solutions and working backward to ammunition in the form of bits and pieces of data that reinforce their panaceas.

Hate unions? Hostess’s unions didn’t accede to the company’s most recent requests for concessions. See ­– it’s the unions’ fault!

Except that the unions made significant concessions to Ripplewood Holdings, the private equity firm that bought Hostess in 2009. And, while the union was making these concessions, executive compensation was more than doubling. According to the best available information, three executives alone accounted for more almost $2.5 million in executive compensation increases. And the company’s top executives will share another $1.8 million in bonuses for successfully liquidating its assets.

(Reminder: My consulting company, IT Catalysts, has a long-standing service offering: We’ll wreck your company for half.)

Also … had union members agreed to work for nothing, the only impact would have been on price. Does anyone seriously think Twinkie sales are down because Twinkies cost too much?

Then there are those who figure greedy private equity firms are what cause companies to fail. It’s all Ripplewood’s fault. After all, it extracted significant management fees following its acquisition. That theory, though, doesn’t stand up to Ripplewood’s decision to stop taking them when the business didn’t turn around. All in all, Ripplewood invested a bunch in the attempt, and it’s taking a bath on its failure.

Innovation! That’s the problem. Hostess didn’t innovate, so as consumer tastes changed, Hostess didn’t change with its customers, who now want healthier fare.

Well, maybe. Certainly, there hasn’t been a flood of new Hostess products over the past decade or so. But on the other hand, there hasn’t been a flood of new beef products either, and despite plenty of evidence that eating lots of red meat is bad for you too, Americans are still eating lots of steak and hamburgers.

Here’s a theory I haven’t read anywhere: Hostess sales declined because Hostess stopped advertising its products.

When I was a kid, Wonder Bread built strong bodies twelve ways, Hostess Cupcakes and Twinkies were all over the airwaves, and when Hostess introduced its fruit pies, everyone in the country knew about it.

I can’t remember the last time I saw an ad for a Hostess product.

Sometimes, what kills a company is nothing more complicated than ignoring the fundamentals. Using advertising to build and maintain demand for your products is as fundamental as it gets.

My point in all of this isn’t to explain why Hostess failed. Without a doubt, it failed for more than just one reason (a horrible thought for purveyors of panaceas).

Or, it failed for just one reason, by definition. Namely, it failed because of bad management. That’s the definition of bad management, isn’t it — management that leads to business failure?

Why does this matter to you? No, not you as a junk food consumer. You as an IT leader. The answer is, I hope, clear: A failing or broken organization is only rarely like a car with a flat tire, where you can make just one patch or replace just one bad component and everything will be groovy a week later.

Pushing the analogy a bit, a failing or broken organizations is more like car with a tire that gradually went flat, starting to lose air five thousand miles ago and out of air a few thousand miles later. Had the owner fixed the tire at the first sign of trouble, the fix might have been easy, but after driving on a bad tire for a couple of thousand miles, the car will require a major overhaul, and the flat tire will be the least-expensive line item on the repair bill.

Organizations, that is, have lots of interconnected moving parts (we’ve identified 150 for IT alone), so when an organization is failing, any attempt to find the root cause, to fix the organization with a single change, is a fool’s errand. Turning the organization around will rarely be as simple as fixing just one broken element. That’s as true for a failing IT organization as it was for Hostess.

My opinion: Any CIO who doesn’t understand this point is a Ding Dong.

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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Last week’s column introduced Michelle McQuaid’s “Bad Boss Study,” which seems to show bad bosses in the United States outnumber good ones two to one, although given how few details of the study are available, the title might actually mean it’s a bad study about bosses.

It would have to be awfully bad, though, to completely invalidate the results. While the ratio might not be two to one, we can safely conclude there are a lot of bad bosses out there.

The question: What can executives do to prevent bad bosses in their organizations? It’s a question with two complementary answers. The first: Develop their organizational listening skills. The second: Don’t wait for bad.

Organizational Listening

Organizational listening is the art of Knowing What’s Going On Out There. This isn’t as easy as it might seem.

Many executives and middle managers rely, as a matter of habit, courtesy, and efficiency, on their chain of command. They all will, eventually, end up with bad bosses in their organizations, and they’ll never know.

That’s because (this really ought to be too obvious to require explanation), they’re relying on the bad managers to reveal themselves. That isn’t going to happen. Worse, if one bad manager has a second one further down in the chain, the first will conceal the second. Even those managers who aren’t bad personally will, if they rely on their chains of command, inadvertently conceal bad managers who are lower down in the hierarchy.

Early in their careers, most managers learn that they’re supposed to “respect the chain of command.” They take this to mean they should rely on it for all employee interactions. They take it wrong.

Respecting the chain of command means only assigning work through it … a practice that’s essential for maintaining a healthy organization. Executives and middle managers who fail to respect the chain of command in this way end up with overworked employees — and the better an employee is, the more overworked he or she will be. The best employees gain visibility because of how good they are. They’ll already be the go-to people for their direct manager; because they’re visible they’ll also be the go-to employees for the manager to whom their manager reports, and so on, and so on, and so on.

But assigning work has little to do with Knowing What’s Going On Out There. So establish, with everyone in management, that listening to everyone who has information to share is an important use of a business leader’s time and attention.

Starting with you, and starting with a redefinition of the old open door policy.

Not that an open door policy is a bad idea. It’s just that when an employee makes use of it, other employees, and their manager, can see them making use of it. All that’s needed is an employee’s manager asking, in a kidding sort of way, “Hey, I saw you talking with Jane. It wasn’t about me, I hope!” and it’s game over, because it takes a good poker player to avoid giving away the subject, and the contents, of the conversation.

So expand your open door policy to an open-door-or-meet-offsite-for-beverages policy. That will protect employees who have something to say and a concern about what will happen it their manager finds out they said it.

Don’t wait for bad

Bad is a bad word. Avoid it. Few bosses are simply “good” or “bad.”

At least, not at first. By the time a manager becomes a truly bad boss, their boss has missed a lot of salvage opportunities.

Every manager is better at some dimensions of management and leadership than others. None are so good that no further improvement anywhere is possible; few have so little aptitude for the sport that they can’t improve in some ways.

Your goal: Help all of your managers be better at leading and managing tomorrow than they were yesterday. You will, on occasion, have to demote or terminate the few who are hopeless, but that isn’t your goal. In a very real way it’s an admission of failure.

Set that tone with employees who take advantage of your new, expanded open door policy. If one says, “I report to a bad manager,” ask, “Where does she most need to improve?”

The answer will be more informative than just allowing the employee to vent. Even better, you’ll hear something you can do something about.

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