It was another travel week, with no time to write a fresh column. So I’m asking your indulgence – what follows originally ran 10 years ago today.

I think you’ll find it just as relevant this week as it was 520 weeks ago.

And, … plot spoiler alert! … the business in question did fail as predicted.

– Bob

---

As we speak, a business is about to fail.

I’m not talking statistics. I’m talking about a specific business, one that experienced years of rapid, profitable growth. It’s about to fail, its management has no idea it’s about to fail, and the reason it’s about to fail speaks volumes about both the nature of business process, and its limits.

As a result of Hammer and Champy’s publication of Reengineering the Corporation in 1994, Jack Welch’s highly publicized adoption of Six Sigma at General Electric in 1996, and Toyota’s development of Lean Manufacturing, publicly codified in the 1990s, a perspective has coalesced among business leaders and thought leaders that corporations are collections of processes. Optimize processes, the thinking goes, and companies will decrease costs, improve quality, and increase throughput, all while reducing their dependence on individual employees.

As is so often the case when it comes to business thinking, the search for silver-bullet solutions blinded the searchers to the difference between validity and completeness. Yes, businesses are collections of processes (more accurately, they’re collections of business functions — a term we use in my consulting practice that includes process, practice, and all points between).

But that’s not all they are. Businesses are also composed of:

• Individual, self-interested human beings,
• Interpersonal relationships,
• Communities,
• Knowledge … subject-matter expertise,
• Contests for power and influence,

… to list just a few of the most important perspectives.

And while legally “the corporation” might have hard, clear, well-defined boundaries, operationally the boundary separating inside from outside is both fuzzy and permeable.

The most obvious example is outsourcing. When a company takes a business function handled by staff and puts it in the hands of another company, it’s still that company’s business function.

Supply chain management and the use of independent distributors are also outsources: Whatever components a company purchases from outside suppliers are components the company could also choose to produce internally; likewise, whatever an independent distributor does is something a company could do with its own warehouses, trucks and so on.

Customer relationships are another fuzzy boundary. While customers are outside the corporate wall, customer relationships lie partially inside the company.

Which brings us to the about-to-fail company. Like many other companies, it relies on Asian sources for its components. Also following a familiar pattern, it employed a local representative to deal with its suppliers on a day-to-day basis while establishing formal processes for managing the supply chain.

Regrettably, the company followed another familiar pattern. Its founders mistook their success for their being the sole cause of success. As a direct result, they lost both their on-shore supply chain managers and their local representative in the course of just a few months. The on-shore managers’ departures were caused by the poisonous atmosphere engendered by the company’s founders. Without the on-shore managers to provide insulation, the local representative was exposed to the same atmosphere, and left as well.

What does this have to do with process, practice, and the company’s impending failure?

Everything. Because it isn’t just true that companies are collections of interpersonal relationships as well as business functions. They’re collections of interpersonal relationships before they’re collections of business functions.

And the smaller the companies involved, the more this is true — smaller firms are qualitatively different from bigger ones. The relationship between Apple and Foxconn might depend on nothing more than a negotiated contract and regular flow of controlling documents and management reports. I doubt it, but it’s possible.

The flow of components (or finished goods if the company fully outsources production) to a company with 250 employees that designs, manufactures, and sells, say, specialty shoes, or designer purses, or high-end baseball gloves, or any other product produced in quantities counted in thousands rather than millions … the flow to a company like this from its offshore suppliers of similar size depends on the relationship between the people who own and run its suppliers and the company’s local representative, and to a lesser extent to their relationship with the company’s on-shore supply chain management team.

Lose both and when the time comes to introduce new products that depend on new components, the negotiation will be between strangers, not between trusted partners.

This doesn’t make the situation irretrievable. Employees do move on to other opportunities, after all, and if they were able to build effective working relationships, their replacements can, too.

Whatever it is that a company needs to run effectively, whether it’s a critical piece of machinery or interpersonal relationships, when the people who run a company don’t value it they won’t invest in it. And if a company doesn’t invest in what it needs, it won’t get what it needs.

Which is why I expect it to fail.

My plan was to condense my leadership book down to 2,000 words or so. Hold that thought.

I’ve started the final section of my CIO.com “Building effective IT 101” series. It will cover the most important organizational effectiveness dimension – human performance.

Strong human performance entails leadership – all eight tasks of it, along with compensation and organizational structure. Having already written 28,000 words about leadership, I figured I could knock this one out without breaking a sweat.

Somehow I’d forgotten a long-ago-learned publishing lesson: editing is harder than writing.

Not that writing is easy. But at the risk of splitting hairs rather than infinitives, bad writing is easy, good writing is hard, and editing is easier or harder in inverse proportion to the ease of writing.

(Metrics sidebar: Some publications pay by the word. That’s counterproductive, because the more words a writer puts in, the more time an editor has to expend to remove them.)

Effective writing is part of every business executive’s, manager’s, and knowledge worker’s job description, too. But they (you) don’t have the mixed blessing of an editor to sharpen up the dull penpoint that’s supposed to be mightier than your average sword. Then add this challenge: Much of the advice you’ll find about how to write effectively pertains to scribing for publication. Its value for your average Reply All email ranges from limited to counterproductive.

Don’t believe me? Google the subject and count how often you’re told to eschew adjectives. Plot spoiler alert: You’ll find this advice scattered all over the Googleverse.

I’ll take it when someone explains how I’m supposed to describe an edifice made of stacked blocks that reflect 700 nanometer electromagnetic radiation without preceding the noun “brick” with the adjective “red.”

In business writing, sometimes the most tedious adjectives (adverbs too) are modifiers – words like very, somewhat, mostly, and so on – and they’re essential.

They can make a published work dreary. But excluding them in business writing can commit a manager to unachievable results. “We’ll get this done by the end of the year,” makes a dangerous promise. “We’ll probably get this done by the end of the year” does not.

Nor is “probably” just a safety play. It’s more accurate. Certainty might make for better writing, but when it’s about the future it’s best left to the Oracle at Delphi, not those responsible for implementing Oracle.

When you, like me, need to squeeze a first draft that fully explains a complex or contentious subject into a much smaller space, cutting down on modifiers doesn’t help. What you need to do is to make hard choices about what and what not to leave in.

For example: The first of the eight tasks of leadership is setting direction. I could limit my explanation to a definition – “Setting direction is about how things are now that the leader wants to be different and better in the future.”

Or I could break setting direction down into its component parts: “Setting direction includes vision, strategy, mission, and values,” and leave it at that.

But that still leaves a lot of room for misunderstanding. I’ve tentatively decided (this is, after all, a work in progress) to provide brief explanations of each of these, along with a few dos and don’ts.

But extrapolating my leadership word count to all human performance factors, I’m going to exceed 10,000 words – roughly five additional articles to give human performance its due.

There’s another factor people who write in business settings have to contend with: What we know exceeds our audience’s reading appetite. Whenever we leave something in to reduce the chance of misunderstanding we also motivate our audience to scan our deathless (or, in many cases, lifeless) prose instead of reading it for complete comprehension.

For this, two tips. #1: When you do decide to provide in-depth information, use bolded headings or paragraph labels so readers know what to expect. That puts them in a position to choose whether to dive deep or be satisfied knowing you dived deep.

#2: Keep paragraphs short to give your audience’s eyes a break. Ten lines is a practical maximum. Five is better, two to three is better yet.

Bob’s last word: Editing is harder, and more painful (for the author), than writing. Trimming, not just fat but a fair amount of muscle and connective tissue hurts.

As evidence: The first draft of this essay was about a hundred words longer than what you’re reading, and I was quite fond of every one of them.

Bob’s sales pitch: The holidays season approaches. What could be a better gift for your favorite business and IT professionals than one of these beauties? (And yes, that was a rhetorical question.)