BankerVision

I like it when

I like it when I discover that people are trying to get their hands on the talent in my teams.

It is nice when they ask if I mind first, but even if they don't, I still like it.

It is far better to have a team that everyone wants than one no-one care about.

Or even worse, one that no-one knows exists.

Zombies and Standards

A very clever man who worked at Microsoft once explained the problems with the Windows operating system to me like this:

General Electric make nuclear reactors and they make domestic kettles. What they don't do is use the same technology for each.

A kettle is not the same thing as a nuclear reactor, obviously, and clearly, trying to create a standard way of boiling water, no matter the application is folly.

But Microsoft have spent years building forcing a figurative standard for water boiling on us, no matter the application, from gaming to high end servers.

And the result is that Windows is adequate, but not brilliant when you want to run home applications. And it is adequate, but not brilliant for business apps as well.

Microsoft is not the only company that's guilty of this attempt to standardise. All large companies do it, from banks (with their lowest-common denominator product sets), to retail (the same experience each time, no matter the customer).

Standardisation is a race to the bottom. Build the thing that suits the most people possible. Reap economies of scale. Deliberately design out anything interesting  to those at the edge of the curve. 

We are wedded to standardisation in big organisations because it makes it feel like we're in control. The thing is, we're not in control. In fact, we're in less control the more standardised we get.

The more standardised you make something, the more you force those who don't fit the lowest-common-denominator profile to go outside the standard. THey are forced to do so because they are creative, or high achievers, or want to make a difference. Standardisation is an attempt to make them mediocre, and they won't put up with it.

The tighter you lock something down, the greater the chance you'll force a break with the standard. The more you standardise, the narrower the band of people who are perfectly satisfied. People who aren't satisfied often take matters into their own hands.  You're less in charge as a result.

The only time standardisation really works is when you have either a zombie customer base or a zombie workforce. If it is your highest goal to achieve either, good luck to you, and have all the standardisation you want. 

But if you want to innovate, delight customers, and have happy employees, find a way for them to break the standard with safety and surety. Most people aren't zombies, and when they're given a choice to not be one, they'll usually take it.

That's why Apple is now a bigger company than Microsoft, by the way. 

Asking for Authority

If you are doing something genuinely new, you can waste a lot of time tooling about trying to find someone with authority to say "Yes". 

Frankly, if  whatever-it-is is that new, no-one will know if they have the authority or not. 

So, unless you're asking the very top guy for permission, you're far better off assuming you have the authority yourself. 

Then, at least, you have the chance of asking for forgiveness. 

Instead of begging for mercy at review time because you've failed to do anything at all. 

9 signs you know you shouldn't bother with innovation

1. There is no money. Organisations sometimes think you can get innovation without investment. They believe in an "innovation culture" where employees do new things as part of their day job. The reality is that innovative companies have creative employees and some kind of formal enablement. Enablement costs money. Companies that don't spend any (hoping that assigning a person or two to the innovation challenge will do), rarely do very much innovation.

2. Your boss is late majority, or worse, a laggard. They don't like new things, and always need plenty of positive reinforcement from people they trust before they'll even try something new. If they have an innovation programme, it is likely its been forced on them. They won't see the point of the work, and certainly won't support it.

3. Everything is controlled by the Finance Director. Another don't bother moment, because this individual will likely want to make sure of the business case for every single innovation you undertake. Because most really interesting things don't even start to pay off in the short term, chances are you'll get nothing major done. You'll be reduced to incrementalism (not that there's anything wrong with that, if that's what your innovation strategy is), and you may as well rename yourself the Lean Team, rather than the Innovation Team. 

4. The organisation is laser-focussed on core business. If this is the case, especially if it is because the organisation is in distress, then probably innovation will be considered a distraction. Oh, the right words will get said, but when the chips are down, the innovators will be told to go away. Retreat to the core is a classic strategy of an organisation that is disconnecting itself from change, for whatever reason.

5. The company is riding high on established product and service lines. There may be competitors, but for now the position is secure. Innovation will probably not be seen as all that necessary in the scheme of things, because there's nothing going wrong right now. Such organisations have no burning platform for innovation, therefore, none will happen.

6. Audit and governance functions are over-powerful. If your organisation is full of security people, audit people, and governance people with the power to call the shots, then you should consider whether to bother with innovation. These are not bad people, but the organisation has programmed them to shut down change in all its forms. To innovate, you first have to find a way to eliminate their power over the innovators. In many organisations, that's a task which is  practically impossible.

7. The organisations has never had a recovery from a near-death experience. Really innovative organisations have a generation of managers who were either with it when it started (when every day was a near death experience), or who went through a period where there was every chance of a close down. Without such people in place, there's no entrenched belief in the power of change. Ergo, no innovation.

8. Your innovators are stuck in IT. This is a hard one, but the reality is this. If you're an IT innovator, chances are you're there to find ways to "enable" better IT through innovation. This is all very well, but enablement of a support function has much less money associated with it than enablement of a core business line (which in turn, uses IT). Sooner or later, the innovation team will look less attractive as an investment than other available opportunities.

9. Your CEO is risk-averse. If this is true, then even the very best innovations, no matter how well constituted, are likely to fail. This will not be because the CEO doesn't "get" stuff. Rather, the amount of reassurance that he or she will need before they make a "go" decision is likely to be excessive. You can spend all your available time trying to convince everyone whom the CEO might consult of the value, and still miss a key individual that will plant the seeds of doubt. Then you'll have to start all over again.

The "Gone-Native" Account Director

What follows is another excerpt from my forthcoming volume on the way the enterprise sale appears from the inside:

"Gone native” is generally hated by Sales Directors because their traditional tools of control: the pipeline, the contact reports, the CRM systems, and, ultimately the target, are all pretty much incidental to the gone-native. Gone-Natives do what is required in order to keep their jobs, but are concerned primarily with becoming as close as possible to being an employee of the customer.

What are the behaviours of a gone-native Account Director then? Here are some observations I’ve made watching some of the best and brightest I could find.

Firstly, they’ll hardly ever see the resources they get assigned to make sales as their key asset. In fact, if they get more sales people assigned to them, they are just as likely to refuse than accept. They know that customer will come to them for help in any appropriate situation, because they are trusted. There’s no need to shove propositions down the customer’s throats in order to get new business. The Gone-Native Account Director is more likely to request resources which are ordinarily paid-for. They’ll fight tooth and nail to get them, too, because their number one priority is serving their friends, not making money from them. The internal challenges they face in doing so is likely to be shared with the customer, too, and the customer will probably be extremely sympathetic, rather than just bored with all the machinations their Account Director is going through. Friends, after all, look after each other and try to support each other through difficult situations.

Another sign of gone-native is when there are overly familiar personal relationships that develop, quite outside the normal professional ones. For example, if your Account Director is invited over to the homes of customers for social reasons, its a pretty fair bet you’ve got a gone-native on your hands. I have never seen this happen - ever- with an Account Director who plays relationships in order to optimise economic returns.  But it happens all the time with those who have a deep, and real, concern for their customer.

But the best sign of gone-native is when Account Directors start putting up walls inside your sales organisation to limit the amount of contact other sales resources have with their customer. There will be many excuses for this, but the real meat of the issue for the gone-native Account Director is that they’re embarrassed by the traditional sales approach. They have developed real, abiding friendships. They are doing genuine, partner-forming work. The last thing they need is for some senior person who focusses on economic returns banging around upsetting the applecart.

And upset it they will. It is so obvious to the customer when someone new shows up that has one thing on their mind: doing what they need to do to extract money. A gone native account director is right to be embarrassed. The fact that they allowed a genuine relationship to be abused by someone who has their own selfish interests at heart is mortifying.

Empire Disruption

My experience is that big organsiations create situations where the politics of success dictate you grow your control of people and resources, even when that is counterproductive to the task you're actually supposed to be achieving. 

You see it all the time, in fact: groups which have, for example, their own HR organsiations, even when there is a central HR team supposed to do the work. Or their own communications groups, because it is "easier" to get things done when everything is located in the one place. And the list goes on and on through Finance, procurement, sales and so forth. 

Empires are wasteful because they are artifices constructed for the sole purpose of providing life-support to the Emperor in charge.

You can often see how the mechanics of disruption work not only against large companies and their operations, but against people and their empires in large organisations as well.

Now, I'm sure very few people reading here have a need for me to explain how disruption works, but just in case, you might read this wikipedia entry on the subject. The basic point is that empires get disrupted in the same two situations that companies do.

Firstly, an empire gets disrupted when someone offers to do quite a bit less than what the empire is setting out to do, but does it more nimbly and cheaply. You see this all the time. Imagine a big development shop with a heavy lifecycle process and miles of governance. When a little team pops up that can just churn out apps at a rate of knots, everyone turns to them to do the work for them, even though there is less assurance. The apps might not work at scale, but at least they work. And they're quick.

The second time an empire gets disrupted is when someone offers the services of something like the empire to a group that previously couldn't access the empire at all. The same example applies as above: most large development shops prioritise work from big paying customers - like core business lines - over the needs of smaller groups like communications. When the new little team pops up, communications is suddenly able to access the same resources as their big-money counterparts, and flock to the startup as a matter of course.

Now, initially, the startup dev group won't even be on the radar of the Empire, but sooner or later, their activities will get noticed. That will most likely happen the first time that the new group gets offered something that would be at the low end of what the Empire would normally take on.

The result is fairly predictable. The Empire will marshall its arguments that the new team should either be disbanded, or folded into the Empire entirely. They'll argue that this will result in "efficiencies" and a superior product. The organisation will be safer, because the "risky" nature of the startup will be mitigated. And blah and blah, onwards for every reason under the sun that explains why the Empire is good and the startup is bad.

The Empire is actually doing all it can to remove a threat to its existence. Even if the Emperor realise it, what the startup is doing is showing everyone that, in reality, the Empire is highly inefficient at what it does, and that's because its purpose is to sustain the top guy, not deliver good outcomes for the organisation.

Disrupting the Empire directly is rarely a successful strategy, because the critical mass of clout and resources it holds means it will always win any battle of attrition. 

On the other hand, the inefficiency of the Empire is also what kills it in the end. It attracts more and more resources in an organisation  (because it is inefficient, and therefore grows its inputs faster than it can grow its outputs) and sooner or later this gets noticed by someone with the power to do something about it.

Almost all empires get broken up in the end, usually taking the Emperor who architected the whole thing with it.  If you can wait long enough, and be beneath the radar so you don't get absorbed, the disruptive little startup group will probably be the trigger that causes this to happen.

Be Ready to be Fired

There are really two kinds of people who do innovation jobs. Those who rock the boat, and those who don't.

My observation is the latter usually don't make much difference to anything. They're too scared to make a difference. Because they're scared, they only consider doing things that don't matter much.

The fact is this. Innovation jobs aren't supposed to be safe. If you sign up to do one, your duty to your organisation is to change things, to rock the boat.  If there was no desire to change the old way, why on earth would an innovation job have been created in the first place? Innovation jobs are permission to rock the boat.

The skill is in rocking the boat enough that things happen, but not rocking so much you capsize. 

Here's another observation I have about people in innovation jobs. They need to have alternative employment opportunities available to them at all times, or else the financial freedom to be without work for a bit while they find a new role. 

When you don't have that sorted out, you judge every innovation you undertake in terms of how much boat rocking it will likely cause. You limit what you do to preserve yourself. Consequently, you do very little, because there is no such thing as a comfortable innovation job.

It is inevitable that sooner or later someone is going to try to take out the innovators in an organisation if they try to do anything substantive. They'll get called distracting, or "not core to the business", or disruptive, or, even, dangerous. They'll try to take out the innovator, because what else do they know how to do? 

You have to plan for this, be ready to deal with it. Your plans have to handle everything up to and including getting fired. Some innovators do get fired when they cause a capsize. That's tough, but it comes with the territory. If change was supposed to be easy, everyone would be doing it.

But there are plenty of innovators who don't see it this way. Theirs is the land of the comfortable, where taking a justified risk is never justified. 

They are the failed innovators.

Are you too scared to rock the boat? You may comfortable and safe in that case, but you're also irrelevant. You should think about getting a new job, doing something meaningless that doesn't matter. 

By doing so, you will be safe and comfortable, and you will give someone else a chance to make a difference. 

Tricks Vendors Play

This is an extract from the second chapter of my next work on what the enterprise sale looks like from the buy-side. I've stopped writing "One Big Thing" temporarily to do this, because I'm of the view that a decent guide for enterprise salespeople - not written by a salesman -is overdue. Hopefully, there's some value for people in hearing a few stories about what its like to be sold to.

In this chapter of the book, I'm covering the difficult first meeting, how to get one, and the kinds of preparation we appreciate. And, of course, I'm looking at some of the things that vendors do which we actually hate.

Unless your organisation already has a relationship with the buy-side, getting the first meeting with an organisation can be somewhat difficult. On the buy-side, everyone is deluged with requests for meetings, usually to such a degree that the only way to get any actual work done is to refuse to see any vendors at all.

In the last chapter, I explained that usually, the wares of vendors have much less value to us than they do to the vendors themselves, so unless there is a specific reason for a meeting, we are usually not all that motivated to use our time speculatively. We put up barriers to guard our ability to meet our internal objectives, because however much we might like to see new and interesting things, doing too much of it will get us fired.

So difficult can it be to get a hearing at the beginning of a relationship that vendors have resorted to a number of tricks that usually start things out on the wrong foot. Lets examine a few of these here.

Going to the Boss

One of the most effective ways to get a meeting with anyone in an organisation is to get to the decision-maker’s boss.

On the buy-side, we hate this passionately, and here is the reason. By seeing our bosses, you have essentially forced us to agree to meeting with you whether we have the time or not. We have to meet with you, because we must be in a position to report back to our bosses if they ask us whatever happened. And, of course, because the referral came top down, we are scared that if we don’t meet with you, you will go back to our bosses and complain.

It is even worse when an Account Director has somehow managed to extract some kind of agreement to do something from the boss.

The fact is most bosses don’t have the time to be across all the details of whatever the decision-maker is trying to achieve. Neither will they be aware of whatever else is presently going on that might be affected by whatever agreements the Account Director has managed to extract.

This puts the buy-side in a very invidious position. On the one hand, they want to support whatever calls their bosses have made, but on the other, they have to be able to achieve their goals by pursuing whatever direction of travel they’ve already invested in.

By extracting high level agreements, what you’ve essentially done is create an adversarial situation internally: you’ve made it likely the decision-maker will have to say “no” to their boss.

As you can imagine, this makes the buy-side nervous at best, and openly angry at worst. Not exactly a firm footing with which to start a relationship.

I was once in a situation where a vendor wrote a letter to my chief executive complaining that he’d had no success getting any meetings with any decision makers in our organisation. In this letter, he suggested that we “didn’t get it” and that we were “missing out on huge economic benefits”, and that the approach we were presently following was “just plain wrong”.

Faced with such a letter, what is a CEO to do? Naturally, the letter was immediately referred to us, and we were forced to explain - in detail - our reasons for pursuing the current direction of travel. We also had to agree to see the vendor, even though we expected the meeting to be a waste of time.

It turned out it was, of course. The product gave us capabilities we already had, and was, in fact, inferior. We explained this to our CEO, then blacklisted the vendor. Blacklisting, essentially means we’ll put up even bigger barriers to protect ourselves in the future, and the nett-nett is its unlikely you’ll ever get a meeting again.

This, by the way, is never something that happens on paper. We talk to each other, and the message gets around.  No-one on the buy side is stupid enough to write down a blacklist, but we do have our own jungle-drums that work very well, thank you very much.

The remainder of the chapter explains a number of other tricks vendors use to get first meetings (using Introducers, approaching personal networks, updating the sales pitch, and a few more). Then it goes on to explain what makes a good first meeting, and how to prepare for one. I expect the material to be available in full in about 3 months time.

Walking with Dinosaurs

Tomorrow, I'm going to be giving a talk to a group of young people who have come to our organisation through our graduate programme. They are all very, very bright, and some of them are just about the most motivated to succeed I've seen in a while.

I love working with people at the start of their careers, and particularly this generation. The reason? They know and accept there are dinosaurs around, and they aren't scared of them.

I know when I was starting out, there were also dinosaurs. They had all this experience, all this knowledge, probably won in the "school of hard knocks". They were all senior, and you would never dream of questioning their determinations and decisions. If you did, there'd be consequences. I mean, what would you know about anything? Why would you be entitled to an opinion? Youngsters, you should listen and learn.

Well, that's over.

The dinosaurs today - and I hope I'm not turning into one myself - are hopelessly ill-equipped in many cases to deal with the way things are now. The problem is their years of experience are now a hindrance in a world where what's really important is freshness in absorbing concepts, ideas, and innovation. Things at which young generations have always excelled.

You can imagine the collective meltdown those words are likely to cause in the established IT community, of which I am a part. We're all in charge because of all those years of experience. How dare I suggest all those years are not that valuable?

But, for example, have a look at your IT organisation, and especially at your development processes. I bet you'll find they're gummed up with gates, and procedures, and evaluations and reviews. Everything takes ages, and the mantras will be "reuse" and "architecture" and "governance". These are the hallmarks of the dinosaur.

Why do I say that? Because they are mechanisms for controlling rampant spread of technology solutions in an age when doing big systems was expensive. It is still expensive, but only because of  the artifacts that have been left behind when things actually were expensive. It is our control artifacts that are now making us expensive, not the problems we are asked to solve.

This new generation of tech managers we're growing know this. They sit there and sigh when we ask for "one more gate", knowing that the new world is completely throw away. "Just build it", they mutter under their breaths, and could, indeed, fire up their personal laptop and do it overnight probably if they were of a mind to do so.

Don't laugh. We had this group of students show up once and do a hack-day. In about 24 hours they'd accomplished about as much as we'd done with traditional methods in several months. Oh, of course, it wasn't "governed", and "reusable" and "consistent with our architecture". But is was throwaway. Throwaway is what you want when the cost of development is a reducing function.

And it is a reducing function. I am amazed at what young-people start-ups can accomplish with practically no money. They maybe get half a million dollars from an angel investor and a month or two later have a system that's actually really useful and which people are desperate to use.

They go into these ventures serially. They work until something is obviously not working, throw it away, and start again. It is no accident that many of the most successful tech entrepreneurs presently are pretty young. They're not dinosaurs.

Anyway, back to what I'm going to say to these young technology managers I'm going to speaking to tomorrow.

Firstly, I'm going to tell them to recognise there are dinosaurs around. I'm going to tell them their bark is worse than their bite and even if they get bitten, they have years to recover. But of course, the best won't get bitten, because they will be clever about how they get their messages across.

And I'm going to tell them to question everything that comes from dinosaurs. And that their inexperience with the old way of doing things is their best chance to make a huge difference now.