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I’m banishing excuse (the noun, not the verb) from my vocabulary. It serves no useful purpose. I made the decision after I realized that the only difference between an excuse and an explanation is which side of the conversation you’re on: It’s an excuse when it’s an explanation you give me that I don’t think is good enough.

Certainly, some explanations are better than others. “I didn’t get it done because my daughter’s appendix ruptured and we had to take her to the hospital for emergency surgery,” is a better explanation for failing to meet a deadline than “I couldn’t find a banana to put into my breakfast smoothie, so I decided to go back to bed for the rest of the day.”

Unless, that is, an employee presents the latter as a symptom of some psychological pathology, at which point we’re in ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) territory and the explanation might prove to be both legally and clinically valid after all.

When discussing failed assignments and missed deadlines with employees, there are three variables to consider: Timeliness, reasonability, and emphasis. The sins of what we commonly call excuses are that they are too late, not reasonable, emphasize a problem instead of a solution, or some combination of the three.

When your daughter tells her Literature teacher “My dog ate my homework,” her explanation is a problem even if Spot really is digesting her book report.

If Spot hasn’t masticated your daughter’s essay, and is therefore blameless, we’ve left the realm of excuses and entered that of outright falsehood — an entirely different domain. You should not tolerate dishonesty, because it makes you work much harder than necessary to get accurate information.

This is the real problem with dishonesty. It’s worse than immoral. It’s inefficient. It also isn’t the subject of this column, which is, just to remind you, about the explanations employees give to explain why they fail to deliver assignments on time and in satisfactory form.

When employees give you an explanation for failing to deliver on an assignment, here are the key issues:

  • They are giving you a problem instead of a solution. Even when an employee blows a deadline completely, he or she is still responsible for providing a plan for recovering from the problem. This is always the case.
  • They are giving you an explanation after the deadline instead of a warning before it. Unless the explanation is an unforeseeable, last-minute event, basic professionalism requires employees to let you know of problems before they happen, not after.
  • The explanation they provide might, in your eyes, be something you expect them to be able to handle. This is where managers and employees most frequently find themselves at odds.

If an employee fails to make a date or to meet your needs, there’s always a reason. The reason might be insufficient competence, procrastination, conflicting priorities, an unrealistic deadline, motivation, unclear expectations, changed circumstances, new information, unexpected circumstances, or insufficient communication, to name just the most common.

Not one of these deserves to be waved off as just an excuse. If the employee wasn’t competent to perform the assignment, the fault is yours for delegating to the wrong person. If it’s procrastination, you should ask yourself whether more frequent follow-up meetings might have kept progress on track. Conflicting priorities? At a minimum, help employees understand how to deal with them (and yes, “work more hours” is a reasonable expectation for salaried employees, so long as you ask it as an exception, not a way of life). And so on.

Too often, when managers complain that employees are making excuses, they’re really using it as an excuse for their own poor delegation technique. Always, when an employee fails on an assignment the manager’s second question should be, “What might I have done differently?” (The first question: What really happened?)

When you delegate, handle the assignments the way good project managers handle projects — schedule regular follow-up meetings with the employee to review progress, recognize risks and issues, and in general keep things on track. If you do, you’ll help employees acquire the right work habits while you prevent both unpleasant surprises and the need for employees to give you an explanation for why they missed a deadline.

So I’m retiring excuse from my vocabulary. It’s useful only for starting arguments, encouraging defensiveness, assigning blame, and damaging relationships. These are all enjoyable pastimes, no doubt about it.

But in the end, because the word does so much more harm than good, there’s just no good excuse for using it.

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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

The subject is strategic change. The question, posed last week, is whether we can lichen business change to Agile software development — whether we can devise an Agile Business Change (ABC) methodology that “chunks” strategic change into a melange of small, manageable adjustments.

The alternative is some flavor of reengineering, business transformation, and replacing the engine while flying at 40,000 feet. Companies often wilt under the pressure of making it happen.

Lettuce peas start with a framework for describing any business. It has ten dimensions — five external, five internal. The external dimensions are:

  • Customers: The people who make buying decisions about what the company has to sell.
  • Product: What the company sells its customers.
  • Price: What the company charges for its products, along with margin goals, contract terms and conditions and so on.
  • Marketplace: The business ecosystem — suppliers, distribution channel, competitors and partners.
  • Messages: How the business explains itself and its products.

The internal dimensions are:

  • People: Employees and contractors — the human beans themselves, their skills, knowledge and experience.
  • Process: How people do the company’s work.
  • Technology: The tools people use when fulfilling their roles in the company’s processes.
  • Structure: How the company is organized — its reporting structure, celery structure, policies and guidelines, and internal communications.
  • Culture: How employees respond to common situations.

In healthy organizations, the ten dimensions are consistent, interconnected, and mutually reinforcing.

Companies don’t undertake strategic change just because one or two are a bit moldy. They undertake it because their salad days are behind them — because the company’s business model no longer works. Perhaps the company’s products are no longer relevant, or the customer segment it serves is shrinking, or its pricing is no longer competitive in its marketplace, or its marketplace has changed in some serious way. It’s fallen behind.

Happens all the time: Competitors turnip the heat, putting some company, whose business model is as tired as a bunch of botanical puns, in a pickle.

Many companies enter a sort of vegetative state in which doing nothing at all becomes the strategy — they pare spending down beyond the minimum, hoping someone buys them before they’re completely beet. The alternative, though, is nearly as bad, because there is no such thing as changing just one of the ten dimensions of organizational design. Any attempt to ketchup will hit a bunch of them, if not the whole enchilada.

For example:

You manufacture a line of premium products, which you distribute to hardware stores throughout the United States through a group of trusted, experienced, independent brokers.

And then, last month, a Chinese manufacturer started selling a knock-off product, direct to Lowes and Home Depot. Its wholesale price is half what you charge your brokers, and it sells direct — no intermediaries.

Sufferin’ succotash!

Your competitive challenge is pricing. But you can’t change just the price. You need a butter response than that, because just cutting price is cheesy — you’ll lose money on every transaction.

To cut prices while preserving margins you’ll need to change your processes. That means “changing” your people in some way too, because new processes wholly or partially invalidate old skills.

Most likely, you’ll have to change structure and culture as well, and reposition yourself in the marketplace (including, perhaps, bypassing your current distribution channel). All of which will require significant changes in technology.

That’s a lot to change all at once. You have to take an interconnected ten-dimensional model of the business that worked and redesign it into a new interconnected ten-dimensional model of the business that works.

Then you bet the farm, implementing the new organizational design as one massive process. And you don’t get to stop running your business during the change-over.

Enter ABC.

Unlike re-engineering, which is top-down and waterfall (and most of the time curiously devoid of actual engineers), ABC blends top-down and bottom-up design. From the top, the company’s executive team decides the basic shape of pricing goals, production strategy (process), and distribution. It also decides on any structural changes that will be required, putting the right people in charge of critical business responsibilities.

And, it will define the underlying cultural changes necessary for everything else to work.

The executive team will focus its attention on the cultural change. The rest of the company will use the 3-1-3-4 formula (3-year vision/1-year strategy/3-month goals/4-week plan) to figure out everything else and make it happen in manageable increments.

That, at least, is the theory. Whether it holds up when you peel the onion is an open question.

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