All Posts in Office Politics

|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Two years ago I predicted hard times for Palm. Hard times have arrived, in the form of plummeting marketshare and negative profits.

It was not a difficult prediction. When I wrote the column, Palm hadn’t given customers any reason to buy a new PDA in years, and there are still only two reasons to replace a Palm PDA: (1) You dropped your old one; or (2) you want to upgrade to something better, which means either a Windows CE-based device or a Symbian-driven PDA/telephone combo.

Palm’s meiotic “strategy” is to reorganize, separating its devices and operating systems into two separate businesses. Which, although this is probably too obvious to bother saying, means Palm is exiting the device business. The problem, of course, is that in a marketplace driven by innovation, the Palm OS is the least innovative of the contenders. Even the upcoming Palm OS 5 is basically a me-too offering, providing a subset of what Windows CE and EPOC/Symbian have offered for years. Yesterday’s features tomorrow — impressive.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, a lot of IT organizations are equally backward, at least if Gartner Dataquest is to be believed. In Wireless Newsfactor, Gartner analyst Todd Kort said, “IT managers have generally been dragging their feet in endorsing the use of PDAs.” It’s a year-old story but given the events of the past year I doubt many IT managers have aggressively embraced new end-user technologies. More likely, most have been battening down their proverbial hatches.

It’s like a bad habit: End-users bring in technology they find personally useful; IT says no. Why? “Do you know how often we have to recover PCs that were destroyed by end-user-installed software?”

Actually, I have a pretty good idea. While the anecdotes are colorful, the numbers aren’t large, and PDA synchronization software is rarely the culprit. Is it worth it, when refusing to endorse PDAs gives IT an image of being sand in the gears of progress?

In the interest of providing solutions, not just criticism, here, for your use if you’ve been one of the foot-draggers, is your new PDA support policy:

“Install anything you want. Call for help if you need it and we’ll make a reasonable effort to get your PC up and running. If we can’t, we’ll restore it to a standard build.”

It’s an old saying: If you can’t lead and can’t follow, at least get out of the way.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

One of my clients is a newly merged company. To prepare for the engagement, I did what any self-respecting consultant would do: I called people who have been through a merger themselves.

One related this bizarre story: The leaders of one of two merging companies organized a formal “war school” to game out ways to end up in control of the new company. My source was quite angry about this, considering it unethical and subversive, not to mention sneaky.

Conducting a formal war school is certainly over the top (and made my source’s life quite difficult for a year or two as well). The underlying motivation, though, is predictable, and perhaps even laudable, the result of intense desire to beat the competition.

In the case at hand, one company’s executives considered the merger an opportunity to create a new company with enhanced capabilities and economies of scale. The executives in the other company considered it a stratagem for beating a competitor, albeit not in the marketplace. This might make them untrustworthy; it doesn’t make them unethical. “Untrustworthy” is predictive and therefore useful; “unethical” simply moralizes — a hollow luxury in the executive suite.

The odds are high you’ll go through a merger or acquisition yourself. What should you do? Let’s write some code (it’s going to look like PL/1 — it’s been a long time since I’ve written real code, I’m afraid):

IF [Your future in the merged organization is secure] OR [You’ve been guaranteed a generous severance package] THEN [Concern yourself entirely with making sure the merger succeeds] ELSE;

IF [You expect those leading the merger to reward those who help make it happen through promotions, bonuses and continued employment while making other arrangements for those who resist it] THEN [Concern yourself entirely with making sure the merger succeeds] ELSE;

[Don’t be a schmuck];

Those leading a merger are responsible for aligning the personal best interests of managers and employees with the merger’s success. What’s your role in helping the process?

Don’t ask anyone who works for you to be self-sacrificing..

IF [You want everyone working for you to help the merger succeed] THEN [Make it worth their while to do so] AND [Make sure they know it will be worth their while];

What — you expect them to be loyal to a new employer they don’t know, who shows no interest in being loyal to them?

Don’t be a schmuck.

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