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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

Human beings are nature’s superior communicators.

That’s the theory, at least. Watching how often and how persistently we misunderstand each other, we can only be jealous of honeybees. They admittedly have less to say to each other (mostly, the subject is where to find food), but they’re able to ask and understand the answer with perfect precision.

Our hidden assumptions just might be the biggest barriers to understanding each other. When they differ, what you say and what someone else hears can be radically different.

And when the “someone else” is the CEO, it really doesn’t matter that the root cause was different hidden assumptions. The problem is yours.

Last week we explored four types of CEO — competitors, mechanics, referees, and economists — each of which makes very different assumptions about what “business benefit” means. It matters to you because if you work for, say, an economist … a CEO who thinks of the enterprise as an asset whose value must be maximized  … then you aren’t going to get very far proposing investments intended to (for example) reduce time to market for new products.

The issue isn’t whether you disagree. If you both understand that you disagree you can have a productive discussion about it. It’s when your hidden assumptions disagree that you get into trouble.

To improve your odds of spotting these crossed assumptions, this week we look at three more types of CEO: explorers, servants, and players.

Explorers are red-ocean/blue-ocean sorts of people, and probably embrace my friend Adam Hartung’s Phoenix Principle as well. For explorers, competition is for other, less imaginative people who aren’t able to find brand new, unexplored territories to colonize. Or, even better, territories others who aren’t very good at colonization have discovered– an approach at which the late Steve Jobs was superb; likewise Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and, prior to his retirement, Bill Gates.

Servant leaders … a concept first codified by Robert Greenleaf … think of themselves as “humble stewards of their organization’s resources,” to quote the Wikipedia entry on the subject. Businesses run by servant leaders are wonderful environments. It isn’t at all clear how they fare when faced with a competitor, though. Being the steward of a resource isn’t necessarily correlated with obtaining maximum competitive leverage from that resource. Servant leaders will have a lot in common with mechanics — in the end, their view is internal. Where they differ is that where mechanics focus more on processes, servant leaders focus on the people.

No CEO taxonomy would be complete without the player. Players see business as a game. Not as a game among businesses, as competitors do. As a game among individuals, which they intend to personally win. For players, the business is the playing field, not the point, and so long as they win, they’re happy.

Players are the CEOs most likely to encourage conflict among the executives who report to them. They do so for two reasons. One is that this is how they see the world. They’re competing against everyone else, and look how well that thought process has worked for them. So of course everyone else should be doing the same thing.

That’s the first, more benign reason. The second is more manipulative, but just as clear: By pitting the executives in the next level against each other, each is kept politically weak enough that none pose a threat.

Players are, after all, very good at playing the game to win.

Every one of the seven CEO perspectives presented here and last week are just as valid as the others. While each is incomplete, they all accurately reflects a very real aspect of organizational dynamics: Companies do compete in the marketplace; they are collections of processes organized to get the work done; they do consist of individuals whose self-interests aren’t in perfect alignment; and they really are assets, too.

Many do have untapped markets they could exploit given the right collections of insights, creativity, and attention to detail; and they all certainly are collections of people who need management support to do the best work they can.

And, like it or not, not only are we each responsible for our own careers, but executive-level career management really is a game. Those who refuse to play generally lose.

But just because these seven perspectives are equally valid, that doesn’t make the CEOs who prefer each of them equally enjoyable to work for. Given a choice, most of us would, I suspect, prefer to work for competitors, mechanics, explorers or servants.

I wonder what the odds are.

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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Call it governance. Call it “managing the project portfolio.” Call it whatever dull, uninspired, bureaucracy-invoking name you prefer.

Just don’t ignore it, because it’s one of the most important subjects in any business, one that victimizes … sorry, that profoundly affects … every IT organization in the world.

And it has a deep dependence on the same basic physical principle that governs billiards: The angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection. (They both also depend on a second physical principle that isn’t the subject this week: Spin matters.)

The angle of incidence is the perspective through which the company’s decision-makers view the enterprise. The angle of reflection is the set of investments they decide to make in the business … the outcome, that is, of their governance processes, which turns into the project portfolio.

Too few executives are competitors. Their angle? The marketplace is a playing field and their company is a contestant. (Some, more bloodthirsty, see the marketplace as more of a coliseum and their company as a gladiator).

Many other executives are mechanics. Mechanics think of the business as a machine — that’s their angle of incidence.

Then there are those who see themselves as referees. It’s an all-too-common perspective. When viewed from this direction the organization is the playing field, on which the company’s executives and managers are contestants who play against each other.

There’s another category, which started to emerge with the rise of the leveraged buyout, and whose influence has been expanding with the rise of private equity investment firms and the increasing dominance of the financial sector in our economy. It’s the economist … executives who think of the business solely as an asset, and view their job to be maximizing the value of that asset in an entirely different marketplace … the marketplace of companies that can be bought and sold through mergers and acquisitions.

This isn’t just an abstract set of distinctions. Which of these perspectives a company’s executives take (and this isn’t an exhaustive list) has a profound impact on just about every aspect of how a company is run, including which investments the company makes in itself.

Take the competitors. They’ll assess how other companies are trying to gain mindshare and marketshare at their expense, and plan countermoves so they win more mindshare and marketshare instead. They invest in what’s needed to win in the marketplace.

Mechanics will take a different approach. The gears, cogs, pulleys and levers of their business machines are the company’s processes and practices. What are they most likely to invest in? Projects that make those processes and practices more effective, whether through iterative improvement or fork-lift replacement.

How about referees? They don’t lead organizations. They preside over a collection of independent actors, each with a different opinion of what matters (their organizational silo and, to a lesser extent, the silos their silo depends on) and what doesn’t (everything else).

It isn’t that referees don’t understand the principle that in order to optimize the whole you have to sub-optimize the parts (unlike you, they haven’t read Chapter 1 of the KJR Manifesto). It’s that they’re incapable of understanding it. That being the case, they oversee investment decisions based on a combination of what makes sense in the context of individual organizational silos and whose turn it is to receive CapEx largesse, combined with a generous helping of trying to do everything at once, because after all, they’re all good ideas, so why should we make painful decisions when instead we can share staff among all the projects?

Competitors lead success. Mechanics build companies designed to succeed. Even referees make sure something gets better from time to time. How about the economists?

When the company is an asset, and you’re trying to maximize its value in the M&A marketplace, your focus will be on the balance sheet and share price. Invest in operational improvements, products that are more competitive, or improving the odds that customers will be more likely to come back and bring their friends?

Why do that when we can use our capital to buy back stock or acquire an undervalued company with an attractive balance sheet of its own? Especially when project costs hit our books right now but the returns won’t show up for a year or two.

All of these perspectives are equally valid. The challenge isn’t choosing which one is “right.”

What matters to you is what those responsible for running the company are trying to accomplish. It matters to you because referees and economists are less likely to invest in why IT exists in the first place: Helping every part of the business run better, and helping the company win in the marketplace.

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