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Here’s my vision for solving the looming worldwide shortage of petroleum while reducing the accumulation of greenhouse gases: We’ll ban lawns and cruise ships.

Lawns are evil. Banning them makes all kinds of sense. The chemicals needed to get grass to grow while killing everything else are a prime source of pollutants. Lawnmower engines burn a lot of gasoline and pollute more than automobiles. And for what? Green in front of the house? Shred used tires, turn them into a ground cover and paint it green. Or, just let whatever wants to grow in front of your house grow.

Cruise ships aren’t exactly evil, but they are entirely pointless. They’re behemoths that exist solely to create a place where people can eat, enjoy entertainment, be pampered, and end up where they started. Convert a warehouse and save the oil.

Nothing to it.

Except that there’s a lot to achieving even such seemingly easy, practical and beneficial changes as these. If you don’t believe me, drop down from 100,000 feet and figure out what you’d have to actually do to get the job done, assuming you escaped the lynch mobs that would hunt you down if you tried.

The synonym for “the view from 100,000 feet” is “wrong,” because from 100,000 feet, everything that’s important to how the world works is too small to see. Nonetheless, many executives think their role is to create the vision — the view from 100,000 feet — and leave the details to others.

Which is to say, everything looks easy until you have to do it.

Truth be told, this wouldn’t be much of a problem if visionary executives would just hire competent people to execute their visions and then get out of the way to let them do it. Instead, here’s what usually happens to even the best of corporate visions:

  • Bad thinkers: Since managers tend to hire themselves, executives who are careless thinkers generally hire other executives who are also careless thinkers. The result is that the first layer of the company at which careful thinking occurs is at too distant a stratum to have any influence.
  • Not knowing what they don’t know: It isn’t that executives want to make bad decisions. It’s that their altitude makes complex decisions appear simple. That simplicity means they don’t ask any questions, or enough, or the right ones before deciding.
  • Reliance on witty sayings: “We don’t want to suffer from analysis paralysis.” “By the time we make a decision the Cubs will have won a World Series.” “Don’t talk. Do.” And the ever-popular, “We don’t have time to dance around the pyramid, holding hands and singing Kumbaya.” Sure they’re witty, or at least they were witty twenty years ago. But while they don’t actually mean anything, they do inhibit the exchange of important ideas.
  • No time to think: We’re running lean and mean. We’ve cut out the fat. Sadly, to those who never studied anatomy and physiology the brain looks like a cantaloupe-sized lump of fat, so out it went. The result is that nobody in the company, including the executive ranks, has enough time left to think things through. It leads to the Nike mentality — just do it. It sounds clever when the subject is putting on running shoes (but aren’t you supposed to stretch first?); it’s far from clever when your goal is to achieve change in a complex environment.

The basic techniques for achieving change are well-known. They require breaking down the big idea into small, clear, understandable tasks. They require building organizational consensus on the importance of achieving the result. They require steady, consistent, day-to-day leadership. They require having people sweat the details.

Vision is important. Whether yours is about banning lawns and cruise ships, designing industry-transforming products, or launching industry-transforming projects that will eliminate lawns and cruise ships, vision is the difference between milling about aimlessly and being able to focus everyone’s efforts to achieve a common purpose (yes, schwerpunkt).

But if you think your job is done with the vision, you’re missing two essential points. First, your vision is probably wrong. And second, even if it’s right, it will never happen.

Aside from that, you’re doing fine.

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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

The word is schwerpunkt (and a round of applause to regular correspondent Sean Murphy for telling us about it). Add it to your vocabulary and impress your friends. It encapsulates the concept discussed in last week’s column — that the difference between a dent and a hole is focus.

This week’s work is schmear. It’s what cream cheese is on a bagel — spread out. Some things are better spread out. Schwerpunkt cream cheese would be hard to swallow.

If the schwerpunkt of last week’s column wasn’t clear, let me make it so now: It isn’t that you should concentrate all of your efforts on just a few high-profile initiatives. Far from it. Doing that will cause you to miss a whole lot of low-risk, high-benefit investments in business improvement.

Unless your company is so badly run that it has choked the creative thinking out of everyone, you have pent-up demand — ideas generated in workgroup after workgroup on how to run things better. Want to find them? Scan your network shares for Excel spreadsheets.

(Sidebar gripe #1: Over and over, I hear IT professionals complain about people in the business using Excel as a database. And, over and over again I also hear IT professionals explain how dangerous it is to deploy Microsoft Access to people in the business. Please, folks — one or the other, but not both.)

Excel is the general-purpose tool business users and managers use to keep track of task assignments, figure profitability, keep track of assets, forecast spending, keep track of work in progress, and otherwise automate — clumsily, perhaps, but still automate — a thousand bits and pieces of what they do.

(Sidebar gripe #2: Isn’t it pretty obvious by now that the world needs a good, general purpose, configurable tracking system development platform? I’m not talking about full-blown business process management (BPM) software. I’m talking about something inexpensive that lets a business manager lay out a series of steps, define what triggers the transition from one step to the next, track status within each step, and automatically maintain a history of each job that progresses through the steps.)

As I was saying, many of these bits and pieces are supposed to be temporary solutions, which persist until IT gets around to doing them the right way. At a rough guess, I’d estimate that something like 18,542,147 business managers have, by now, created 96,834,549 tracking systems in Excel, and every one has wished they had something better. And no, Bugzilla doesn’t really do the job either, although using it for this purpose is probably something less of a kludge than using Excel.

Which brings us to the IT schmear. That’s what you need to help people in the business. You need to reserve a certain amount of your total discretionary labor budget to help lots of people with their small needs.

And don’t try to get fancy with governance. Fancy governance is for big, risky requests. Too many companies try to force their one and two-week “project” requests through the same governance process they use when deciding whether to replace their legacy environment with SAP. All that does is bog things down: Investing 60 hours to decide whether to approve a 30-hour request is a great way to make sure nobody submits a 30-hour request.

(Sidebar gripe #3: I like agile methodologies. They have a lot going for them. But why haven’t any of their proponents explained what’s best about them — that they turn big projects into the equivalent of a big pile of 30-hour requests, virtually guaranteeing completion and at least semi-useful results.)

Where was I? Oh, yes, you want lots of people to submit 30-hour requests, because unlike big IT projects, the completion rate for 30-hour requests is something approximating all of them. Screen out the obvious duds, but don’t spend much time or effort on it. Enough will be good ideas that in the aggregate they’ll pay for themselves without much trouble.

Don’t try to measure the value either. It’s like trying to measure the value of changing the oil in your car — the value is there, but try proving it using modern accounting methods. Heck, try applying the typical, ROI-driven “best practices” IT governance to oil changes and see how far you get.

It’s about balance. When it comes to achieving large-scale, risky change, concentrate your forces. But when it comes to surviving until the future gets here, you need a different set of tactics.

Place your schwerpunkt on schmearing.

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