CircaSpecting: People, Tech, and Business

Collaboration in the Executive Suite?

It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, especially on the upper floors of big corporations.  The ME generation really moved the cultural needle in the last 20 years, and not for the better.  But, things are starting to change.  Believe it or not, an emerging corps of younger leaders is bringing with them to their new executive digs the collaboration habits they learned down in the trenches.  And, that’s creating new models for leadership, moving away from generalists governing via hierarchy, toward specialists coordinating with other near-peer specialists. 

I love this quote from Jena McGregor in the August 20-27 issue of Business Week:

"The job of the CEO has become so consuming and complex that if you actually list all the things a CEO is responsible for, no human being can do them all," (Spencer Stuart’s senior recruiter James Citrin) says.  Over the next five years, Citrin believes boards will need to embrace the concept of the "specialist CEO."  Boards of directors, he says, will need to get more realistic about the rarity of the perfect CEO.

She goes on to list five specialist roles that should each be represented on a healthy, collaborative executive team: 

• The Brain:  Someone with deep technical expertise and visionary foresight in the area of your team’s focus;  "Innovator-in-chief"
• The Ambassador:  Someone able to forge high-level relationships that open doors in new markets
• The Dealmaker:  Someone able to deal with the financial community
• The Conductor:  Someone able to keep things humming among the various groups of people implementing the team’s plans
• The Casting Agent:  Someone able to find, groom, and place talent to keep the team growing and producing

With a little bit of imagination, I think the list is instructive for ALL LEVELS of teams, not just executives.  The questions for each of us are: which are you, which are on your team, which do you need to find, and how do you foster effective collaboration among a strong group of specialists?

The Beauty and Difficulty of Small Teams

At Eyeris we spent the last decade designing and implementing big, complex projects for large enterprises, involving dozens of systems and billions of records of data.  Yet, we have found that the most effective way to implement such projects is via remarkably small teams -- usually about 3 people.

Effective team work is core to our culture.  In fact, I’ve made the same commitment to every recruit with whom I’ve met before hiring: if you’ll commit to being honest about whether this is a fit for you, and if you’ll give the team your best effort, I’ll commit that you’ll never fail because you lacked good tools or had to work with poor team members.  Here are some of the big picture things we've learned by living with this organizational philosophy.

On the positive side, small teams allow our firm to deliver projects at a fraction of the price to the client AND at greater profit to our firm, as compared with traditional consulting firms’ large-team approach.  Small teams also allow our people to grow faster, broader, and deeper.  And, small teams cultivate skills of vision and improvisation and initiative in our associates BEFORE they are promoted to manager, where those skills are essential for success.  Finally, small teams are just plain more fun; every productive person I’ve ever met hated the wastefulness, bureaucracy, and diseconomies of scale associated with large project teams.

But, small teams require intensive Staff Quality Management.  Small teams require a high level of proficiency in each member.  Losers, slackers, paint-by-numbers people, and order-takers kill great groups.  They frustrate high-achievers, they create work-load imbalances, and they drive up management oversight costs significantly as a result.  To make management matters more challenging, the capabilities of members in a strong group are always growing, because strong staff members are curious, self-driven learners.  So, the small team approach requires careful management that can allow the group to breathe and morph and thrive, while also making sure that the group maintains consistency of capability across its members.  It is hard for leaders to remove a failing team member, because we grow attached to them personally. 

But, especially in small-team cultures, the leader’s first responsibility is to the team, before any individual team member.
 

Business Intelligence Health Inspection

There are lots of scorecards out there for tools and technology.  Unfortunately, I think that misses the crux of the matter.  As Lance says, "It’s not about the bike."  Likewise, organizations that build competitive advantage in Business Intelligence are first and foremost ORGANIZATIONS.  I’ve enjoyed listening to some excellent discussions lately regarding various organizations’ success with BI, because there is ZERO consistency in the brands or types of technology they use, but there is 100% consistency in the culture/team/atmosphere they cultivate.

So, here is a scorecard for your organization: (This list borrows from work by Cohen and Prusak)

How ready are you to create competitive advantage through Business Intelligence? 

1. How well do people know what others in the organization know?
2. How many people in your business are curious, self-initiators of data-intensive analyses on various issues relevant to the business?
3. How much peer-to-peer communication is happening regarding business questions/intelligence?
4. How much of that communication is crossing departmental boundaries?
5. How accessible is a person with knowledge on a subject to a person how needs that knowledge?
6. How often, easily, and quickly do people with specialized expertise engage meaningfully in assisting colleagues with their investigations?  For instance, meeting physically to get an analysis diagrammed on a white board.
7. How frequently do people admit to colleagues that they do not know something and they need help?
8. To what extent does your culture encourage listing "credits" and authorship on reporting materials?
9. Do people spontaneously create FAQ’s and discussion boards on their own to publicize corporate knowledge to the members of the organization?
10. Are business departments experimenting with their own BI solutions, or is IT trying to coax them into BI?

That’s ten questions.  If you don’t answer "YES" or "A LOT" or "ALL THE TIME" to at least nine, you cannot create competitive advantage in Business Intelligence by buying a cool BI tool or building a cool data warehouse.  Start with the culture, even if you have to use free/cheap tools for a while.  Ultimately, demand from a curious, vibrant, dynamic BI community - even one "making due" with whimpy tools - will take care of the tools/budget problem, will solve the Business-IT alignment problem, and will insure a good return on your long-term BI acquisitions.

Good Gossip

There is bad, corrosive gossip that destroys community.  Let’s avoid that sort of thing.  But, there is also gossip that reinforces community.  We need to cultivate the latter kind of gossip.

Here’s why: it is the means by which trust networks communicate norms and enforce them.  Here’s what some other, smarter guys have to say about the subject:

Gossip helps devise an annotated map of communities and networks, telling people where they should and shouldn’t turn when they need help, keeping tabs on the reputations that define the social structure.  We talked earlier about the importance of reputation, that barometer of trustworthiness which determines whether someone will be ignored or confided in, ostracized or sought after.  Gossip shapes and communicates reputation.  It makes sense that the word gossip derives in part from sib, meaning close relation, as in sibling.  Gossip is intimate.  It reflects and increases people’s sense of membership.  Don Cohen and Laurence Prusak, In Good Company

Healthy organizations have behavioral norms for members, norms that guard the practices of the organization, which are really the understructure of the brand itself.  As an organization grows, the founders cannot police the culture effectively; they have to rely on the culture to propagate itself if the brand is to thrive.  Good gossip is an essential habit of any organization based upon social networking, teams, and trust. 

Sex and Software

The USS Ronald Reagan is a seriously macho machine.  It could single-handedly whip half the countries of the world.  It carries the name of the man who stared down the USSR.  In other words, it has seriously manly genes.  So, how does the commander of the USS Ronald Reagan refer to the ship?  "She."

Nascar drivers and airline pilots refer to their machines as female.  Politicians refer to the country, and the principle of liberty upon which it is based, as female.  So, what sex is software?

Ok, so Apple’s stuff is a BIG exception to the rule.  People talk about that stuff like it is Catherine Zeta Jones channeling Audrey Hepburn.  But, besides Apple, when someone implies gender for a software package, it almost always relates to coarseness, unfriendliness, CPU greediness, instability, inflexibility, or similar negative attributes.  And, it’s usually characterized as male. 

It seems that we instinctively associate the feminine with perceptions of collaboration, beauty, awe, thoughtfulness, elegance, refinement, belonging, and satisfaction.  I’d like to see more software that tempts us to love her.

Be Human

I saw a GREAT billboard today:  I RISK THEREFORE I AM.

Kudos to the company who broadcasts such a non-PC heresy.  In this era of SOX, how could it possibly make sense to advocate taking risks?  Simple: smart people know that the secret is taking risk well, because "no risk, no reward."

The course of human history is one extended tango with risk.  It's what drives us forwad -- the willingness to take chances, to try new methods, to look at things from unconventional perspectives.  Courage and curiosity and creativity and persistence and aspiration in the face of possible/recurrent failure: this is something essentially human.

Ok, yes, stupid people take stupid risks.  I'm with Darwin on that one: they should pay the price.  But, if we remove all risk from our lives, then something beautiful about us will wither and die a slow/boring death while generating little new value for our enterprises.  Find ways to take smart risks and encourage your colleagues to do the same.

Black & White AND Gray

I'm finding myself in lots of discussions lately about information governance -- which is the thoroughly undemocratic topic of "who gets to see what."  All of these conversations end up revolving around SVOT, or Single Version of the Truth.  We all know how Sarbanes has dictated SVOT for financial info, and I wholeheartedly agree (as a CEO myself) that the guys signing the SEC filings MUST know that there's solid agreement/auditability on those numbers.  It's a Black & White issue.

The interesting thing (for a logic geek like me) is how lots of people jump to the conclusion that ALL information issues are Black & White, that SVOT applies everywhere simply because it applies somewhere.  I am pretty sure that there are other areas, besides external reporting, in which some variety and independence should be tolerated -- even encouraged.

For instance, you and I can agree that $100 mm in revenue was booked last month; but, I can use unique data sources, factors, and models to forecast my business unit's revenue for next month -- and you can do your own thing for your business unit's forecasts.  The important thing is forecast reliability, and the nature of my business unit may warrant a different approach using different data.

Yesterday, I heard a speech from a smart guy named Evan Levy (www.baseline-consulting.com), in which he made a good argument for "shared context as the natural boundary for shared meaning."  In other words, there is a time and place to insist on absolute Black & White consistency, but there are also times and places where the relative gray of subjectivity allows human creativity to create better solutions -- at no real cost to anyone else.  It's not either/or.

Great business intelligence practices are Black & White AND Gray.

No Analyst Left Behind

This weekend's Wall Street Journal had an interesting little article on public education, which I thought highlighted some of the same challenges companies face: how to allocate time/attention/investments between the smart kids (employees) and the not-so-smart kids (employees).  Here are a couple of the more challenging bits from the article, which was on page A4:

U.S. schools spend more than $8 billion a year educating mentally retarded students, but according to rough estimates, no more than $800 million is allocated toward the highest-achieving students.

By focusing so much on low-achieving children, schools have neglected gifted students, an approach that risks squandering the potential contributions of society's most powerful minds.

There is something deep-seated in the western psyche that biases us against the gifted.  While several prominent eastern societies invest for maximum societal return, we invest for maximum parity of outcome.

Given the similarities between education and BI, the WSJ assertions made me think about whether a lot of companies are making similarly well-intentioned-but-suboptimal investments in the name of "BI FOR THE MASSES."  It's politically correct to deliver BI reports to every stock clerk, driver, and csr. But, perhaps the bigger return opportunity may be equipping smart non-techie analysts with BI tools they can actually use.  I am not talking about power users in the traditional BI core group.  I am talking about good marketing analysts, good financial analysts, and good operations analysts -- you know, the Excel-jocks in the organization. 

How would the ROI from empowering the brightest knowledge workers at our companies compare to the ROI of scattering our investment indiscriminately across everyone?

Fortune Tellers

I experienced one of those Twilight Zone moments yesterday.  In San Diego at a TDWI conference, I took a break and walked along the waterfront.  There, along with lots of interesting vendors, I saw the oddest thing: people sitting down to have their fortunes forecast by palm and tarot readers.  For some reason I was struck by two things: the quality control issues for such a business, and the foolishness of the poor saps who would rely on another human’s supposed prescience. 

Then, I walked back to the luxury hotel where I was meeting with a few dozen senior professionals and consultants on how to improve the effectiveness of Business Intelligence projects.  To my private amusement, a presentation slide went up with the prescription: "Anticipate the business."  In other words, if we can just understand where the business is heading and what types of questions will be relevant when it gets there, then IT/BI can adapt at the pace of the market. 

These are professionals, and we should be ashamed to build a strategy around a premise which is so clearly dubious. 

But, many Business Intelligence projects are designed and managed centrally with an architect (or worse, governance committee) deciding which metrics will be included and how they will be calculated and what labels will be used.  You can have that car in any color you want, as long as you want black.  The only way those projects can keep pace with the emerging needs of the business is if that architect can anticipate those business needs.  A far more reliable solution is to create a practical model of collaboration that empowers end-users to adapt BI directly when/how they see the need arising -- not to bet on the tarot reading prowess of the architect.

Today's Strategy is Tomorrow's Legacy

We just created a visual analysis BI solution for a utility company.  The solution sits on top of their ancient-but-paid-for-and-reliable COBOL customer information system.  I won’t drone on here about how cool the solution is, though it is cool, because that’s beside the point.  The interesting point of this story is how a clever trick from way-back-when actually crippled the decision capabilities of many companies several decades later.  Here’s the story.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, far, far, far away...

Storage and memory were really expensive.  Only a few high-priests of punch cards and pocket protectors used computers directly, and they dished paper to everyone else.  So, someone came up with the excellent idea:  Let’s save space by using a character to represent both the last digit of the number and the sign (positive/negative) of the number.  A thru I represent 1 thru 9 respectively, along with a positive sign; J thru R represent 1 thru 9 respectively, along with a negative sign.  (Zeros are another matter, but let’s keep it simple)  So, for instance "10C" means "+103", and "10J" means "-101".

That all worked great when only the tech guys had access to the data and didn’t mind writing a custom COBOL program for every report request.  But, fast forward a couple of decades.  Now, there are hosts of middle managers, executives, and analysts who want to look at mainframe billing data for example, and what they see is useless to them: Acme Foundry was billed "1252G" dollars last month.  The elation on the faces of our clients when they see how they can easily visualize mainframe-based data in a legible way, says volumes about how paralyzed they felt when shackled by the baggage of a clever old technical cheat.

The moral of the story is this: if the argument for your technology approach is based upon the assumption that only a "special few" will be able/interested/allowed to do thus-n-such, you should probably consider looking a few years further ahead.