All Posts in Strategy and Tactics

|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

When Hewlett Packard and Compaq first announced their plan to merge, one writer commented that both companies had spent several years searching for a strategy.

Ain’t that pathetic? I picture Carly Fiorina wandering around the desert, looking under rocks and behind the occasional saguaro like some National Geographic photographer hoping to capture a rare, elusive Strategis corporatus on film.

As if anyone ever doubted the inevitable result of a merger in which neither parent company had a viable strategy, it’s now official. Zero plus zero equals zero: The combined company also lacks direction.

It isn’t entirely Fiorina’s fault. In 1997, the Business Roundtable — an association of CEOs from “leading” American corporations — made it official: Shareholder value is the only responsibility of a company’s leadership. Translation: All that matters is the price of a share of stock.

The problem is, the “shareholder value” strategy is an obvious loser.

Imagine your company focuses on shareholder value. Meanwhile, competitors focus on designing and building the best products in the marketplace or on taking care of their customers better than anyone else.

Is there any doubt which company will come in dead last? It might seem paradoxical, but the surest way to make the price of a share of stock plummet is to try to push it up.

Career advisors have preached a similar message for years: Stop worrying about titles and salaries and instead do what you love and are good at. In this case, what’s true for individuals is also true for corporations. Concentrate on doing something exceptionally well … to choose a word, a mission.

This insight is equally valid at every level of an organization. Whether you lead a whole company, an IT division, or a project management team, your clearest route to success is to establish a goal for everyone who reports to you, make it clear why that goal is important, take away all the organizational obstacles that get in the way of achieving the goal, and reward and promote the people who do the most to help you achieve it.

Mission statements have fallen out of fashion, and that’s a good thing. Most leadership teams, faced with creating one, spent no time at all discussing ideas. Instead they word-smithed and group edited, never considering that mission statements don’t matter.

What matters is understanding the mission.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

Usually, I get the joke.

I don’t always think it’s funny, but at least I get it. Not always, though — in a recent column I reported on the antics of a certain “Dr. Richard Paley, teacher of Divinity and Theobiology, Fellowship University,” who exposed all of us in IT as Darwinians, atheists and pagans. As a number of readers were kind enough to explain, “Dr. Paley” is a satire. In my defense, The Register reported the story as fact, a Hoaxbusters search came up empty, and I did find it hilarious. I just didn’t realize it was supposed to be.

Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection appears in this column on a regular basis. This isn’t because “Survival Guide” is related to “Survival of the Fittest.” The latter phrase, never used by Darwin himself, comes from Herbert Spencer’s ludicrous theory of “Social Darwinism” — ludicrous because it considered fitness to be absolute, justifying hereditary aristocracy as the consequence of natural superiority.

In Darwinian theory, fitness is contextual, measuring how well a heritable trait fits specific conditions. That’s a concept you can take to the bank when managing your career: Success comes from how well you adapt to circumstances. There are no panaceas, which means we can all ignore the 90% or so of all business pundits who sell “the answer” without first hearing the question.

This same philosophy can help you plot a course for your IT organization. I’ve read various authorities expound on the proper role of IT in business. Some call for strategic partnership, some consider IT’s proper role to be a service provider, while yet others think we’re an “information utility.” If they understood modern evolutionary theory, they’d spend less time advocating one or another as the right answer, and more assessing which circumstances each of these very different models is best suited to.

Evolutionary theory applies to all situations in which entities compete, which means we in business can benefit from a century and a half of scientific research. To take just one example:

The estimable Richard Dawkins has argued that natural selection is a competition among genes, not whole organisms — that an organism is just a gene’s way of succeeding. This insight simplifies the apparently mystifying behavior of companies that self-destruct while creating “shareholder value.” Substitute gene for shareholder and organism for company and everything suddenly makes sense –plenty of bodies are designed to die in order to help their genes succeed.

The lesson for you: Shareholder value and your own best interests don’t necessarily coincide. Plan accordingly.

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