All Posts in Strategy and Tactics

|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Whenever I take a personality profile I ask myself a Microsoft-like question: “Who do you want to be today?”

The technique is simple: Just choose a self-image and role-play as you fill out the personality assessment survey. I once got myself into considerable trouble this way: As the facilitator reviewed our team results he looked at my profile and said, “You have a classic entrepreneur’s profile!” He waxed ecstatic over my alleged entrepreneurial tendencies for the next 10 minutes, before moving on to wax ecstatic over the entirely different character traits of a peer.

Both my boss and my employer had recently asserted the desirability of being more entrepreneurial, so I’d decided to be an entrepreneur for this exercise. It was a poor choice. Infused with one too many Tom Peters videos, I’d understood them to value entrepreneurship on the part of their employees. Nope. As I later pieced it together, they wanted the company and its leadership to be more entrepreneurial, not its middle managers and employees.

Oops.

American business is in love with entrepreneurship – the word, if not the reality – so “entrepreneurial” now means “good.” And that’s just plain silly, because entrepreneurship is a constellation of traits. Some you probably value; others have no place in your organization. Be smart: Pick and choose from this, my personal list of entrepreneurial character traits.

Decision-making: Entrepreneurs decide quickly, because an unmade decision, like a hungry child, stares at you demanding attention. Entrepreneurs feel stress as unmade decisions accumulate.

Corporate managers, on the other hand, delay decisions as long as possible. Decision means risk – you may be wrong – so made decisions are like ticking time bombs. Requests for more information and analysis, in contrast, can always be defended as reasonable and prudent.

More than any other entrepreneurial trait, decision-making is the one companies want. Ask if there is any good reason to delay each decision rather than asking whether that decision’s deadline has arrived. (Sometimes, by the way, delay is good. For example, defer technology decisions until the last possible moment, given technology’s pace of change.)

Opportunism: Entrepreneurs are deal-driven critters. Strategy? That’s for other people. I can make money today.

The entrepreneurial upside? Quick, low-risk profit. The downside: It’s easy to lose focus, dissipating the energy needed to implement strategy in the pursuit of tactical opportunities.

Should you adopt this trait? Only if your company has a stable business model and hasn’t defined a program of strategic change. Otherwise you’ll establish yourself as a fringe player and a distraction.

Encourage or discourage it in your employees for equivalent reasons.

Product focus: Entrepreneurs do care about customers – that’s where the money comes from – but they focus on creating products. Having a product focus is good because it enforces mental discipline. Vague ideas don’t survive translation into tangible products and services.

The downside? It’s easy to get caught in the “cool” trap – you do things because they’d be really nifty, not because anyone actually needs them. * Sales ability: Entrepreneurs are good at selling or they aren’t entrepreneurs. End of story. As an employee trait, sales ability has the advantage of encouraging enthusiasm. It also has a huge disadvantage – it emphasizes surface over depth. Lots of companies unintentionally reward their good internal sellers.

Risk-taking: Successful entrepreneurs aren’t foolhardy. They do, however, know when to take a chance. So should you, and so should your employees. Before you start to glorify risk-taking, though, make sure everyone knows exactly what kinds of risks you’re willing to take, under what conditions, and both the rewards for success and consequences for failure. Yes, even when you encourage risk-taking you don’t want to reward failure. Just don’t punish it unless it resulted from stupidity or laziness.

Entrepreneurship, like so many words applied as metaphors inside the organization, blurs meaning rather than clarifying it. As with “internal customer” – another misapplied metaphor – you should avoid the meaningless label and instead communicate the behaviors and attitudes you value.

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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

Evolutionary theory has to account for all the bizarre complexity of the natural world: the tail feathers of peacocks; the mating rituals of praying mantises; the popularity of Beavis and Butthead. One interesting question: Why do prey animals herd?

Herds are easy targets for predators. So why do animals join them?

One ingenious theory has it that even though the herd as a whole makes an easy target, each individual member is less likely to get eaten – they can hide behind the herd. One critter – usually old or infirm – gets eaten and the rest escape. When you’re solitary, your risk goes up.

Predators hunt in packs for entirely different reasons. Human beings, as omnivores, appear to have the instincts of both predators and prey: We hunt in packs, herd when in danger.

Which explains the popularity of “research reports” showing how many of our peers are adopting some technology or other. These reports show us how big our herd is and where it seems to be going. Infused with this knowledge we can stay in the middle of our herd, safely out of trouble.

And so it was that I found myself reading an “executive report” last week with several dozen bar charts. A typical chart segmented respondents into five categories, and showed how many of the twenty or so “yes” responses fell into each one.

Academic journals impose a discipline – peer review – which usually catches egregious statistical nonsense. But while academic publication requires peer review, business publication requires only a printing press.

Which lead to this report’s distribution to a large number of CIOs. I wonder how many of them looked at the bar charts, murmured, “No error bars,” to themselves, and tossed this information-free report into the trash.

We read over and over again about information glut. I sometimes wonder if what we really have is nonsense glut, with no more actual new information each year than a century ago.

Bar charts without error bars – those pesky black lines that show how uncertain we are about each bar’s true value – are only one symptom of the larger epidemic. We’re inundated with nonsense because we not only tolerate it, we embrace it.

Don’t believe me? Here’s a question: faced with a report like this and a critique by one of your analysts pointing out its deficiencies, would you say, “Thanks for the analysis,” as you shred the offending pages, or would you say, “Well, any information is better than none at all.”

Thomas Jefferson once said, “Ignorance is preferable to error,” and as usual, Tom is worth listening to. Next time you’re faced with some analysis or other take the time to read it critically. Look for sample sizes so small that comparisons are meaningless, like the bar charts I’ve been complaining about.

Also look for leading questions, like, “Would you prefer a delicious, flame-broiled hamburger, or a greasy, nasty looking fried chunk of cow?” (If your source has an axe to grind and doesn’t tell you the exact question asked, you can be pretty sure of the phrasing.)

Look for graphs presenting “data” with no hint as to how items were scored. How many graphs have you seen that divide the known universe into quadrants? You know the ones: every company is given a dot, the dots are all over the landscape, the upper right quadrant is “good”, and you have no clue why each dot landed where it did because the two axes both represent matters of opinion (“vendor stability” or “industry presence”).

Readers David Cassell and Tony Olsen, both statisticians, recently acquainted me with two measures, Data Density, and the Data-Ink Ratio, from Edward Tufte’s wonderful book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information:.

To calculate the Data Density divide the number of data points by the total graph area. You express the result in dpsi – data per square inch.

You calculate the Data-Ink Ratio by dividing the amount of ink used to display non-redundant data by the total ink used to print the graph. Use care when scraping the ink off the page – one sneeze and you’re out of luck.

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