Mike Lehr's Blog

We often overlook the downside of processes in our businesses because we enjoy how they allow us to scale and reduce labor costs. However, they often become the infrastructure that retards flexibility and adaptability as people’s self-interest and comfort zones become wedded to the processes.

The November 2010 issue of the Harvard Business Review, which focused on leadership lessons from the military, Boris Groysberg, Andrew Hill and Toby Johnson wrote about the tradeoffs between process and flexibility. Their article, “The Different Ways Military Experience Prepares Managers for Leadership,” discussed the tradeoffs that each of the four branches of the U.S. Military made and how they influenced leadership styles.

Their research showed that CEO’s who had military experience in the Navy and Air Force tended to “take a process-driven approach to management; personnel are expected to follow standard procedures without any deviation.” This allowed them to excel “in highly regulated industries and, perhaps surprisingly, in innovative sectors.”

Conversely, those with an Army and Marine Corps experience tended to “embrace flexibility and empower people to act on their vision.” They were able to excel “in small firms, where they are better able to communicate a clear direction and identify capable subordinates to execute accordingly.”

Throughout the article, the authors contrasted the process orientation of the Navy and Air Force with the adaptive one of the Army and Marine Corps, the important point being that there is a tradeoff between the two. Even though they justified why each branch had the orientation it did, they still contrasted the two orientations as a trade-off. In simple terms, it’s hard to have both.

Therefore, when we rush toward processes to create standardized, consistent and repeatable outcomes, we need to leave room for adaptation. After all, life never duplicates itself in exactly the same way.

One of the paradoxes of best practices is that they promote unimaginativeness because if everyone followed best practices the differentiation among competing firms would drastically narrow.

In its raw form, BP is copying. Companies do not transform markets or shoot ahead of the competition by copying. If they do, they need to enhance the original. A better practice than the best practice will achieve this especially if every other company in that space is following the best practice. As a result, BP’s encourage “inside the box thinking” resulting in a workforce based upon complying with the BP rather than thinking about making the best better.

This occurs because to find a “best practice” people only need to dredge the internet or current research material. If they don’t want to do this, they only need to find an unimaginative expert who has already done this for them. However, bettering a best practice requires much thought and inspiration. That’s why in many law firms there are research assistants assigned with this task so attorneys have more time to think about the uniqueness of their cases.

Of course, many unimaginative people offer this defense: “Let’s not reinvent the wheel.” What they don’t realize is that since 1790 the United States Patent Office has approved over 30,000 patents for wheels. This number doesn’t include many specialty wheels in toys and machines such as the wheels on toy cars or the pulleys in machines like transmissions. It also doesn’t include the Ferris Wheel.

BP’s encourage employees to do exactly that: not reinvent the wheel. They don’t encourage them to think about improvements to make the wheel better or for other purposes. BP’s say, “Someone else has already solved the problem.” Thus, the best practice of inside-the-box thinking is to adopt a best practice.

Additional recommended reading: the post “The Downside of Best Practices” by Mike Wyatt

If you examine the two opposing sides in the Star Wars Epic, The Empire (Bad Guys) and The Rebels (Good Guys), there are two major contrasts:

1. There are no women on the bad side.
2. The good side has diverse characters, the bad side doesn’t

Upon contemplation, Point #1 is easy to see. Point #2 is a little harder, but essentially the Empire’s army consists of robotic droids who all look alike in white, shock-troop armor. Conversely, the Rebels are a collection of species, some humanoid, most alien and some even animalistic. Moreover, whereas the Empire’s forces are all dressed alike, the Rebels are not. Similar themes exist in Lord of the Rings.

What does this mean? Very simply, we tend to see evil as being a life of conformity without feminine qualities. In business, this movie helps us to see the emotional forces aligned against standardization and processing. It might also help us to understand why women are making such advancements: perhaps as an offset to these negative forces. Finally, it shows our inherent emotional propensity for diversity including in personality.

Women are closely associated with diversity; as they’ve been the first ingredient of diversity in many business settings. Heck, their wardrobe alone adds immense diversity to them. What would happen if two women actors arrived in the same dress for the Academy Awards: chaos, confusion, anxiety? What if two men came in the same black tuxedo, would anyone even notice?

Movies tend to tap into our deep, unseen, collective emotional currents. Consumer research shows there is often a different between “what people buy” and “what people say they will buy.” Thus, while we wring every cost saving from standardization and processing, perhaps on a deeper emotional level we feel “The Bad Guys” are winning.

Expressing our thoughts is challenging especially when we don’t know the words to do so. Therefore, restricting our vocabulary will tend to restrict our thoughts. As a result, we will experience more difficulty influencing others and solving problems. It’s important for us to expand our vocabularies, to allow stylistic differences and to exercise our minds by defining the fine differences between synonyms rather than assume they are the same (i.e. truth vs. clarity, influence vs. control, power vs. authority).

George Orwell’s book 1984 details this thought control through a state working feverishly to restrict the words of its citizenry. By eliminating words like “freedom” and “revolution,” citizens would have difficulty thinking of these concepts.

We don’t have an Orwellian state; however, business and company cultures tend toward self-censorship because they need standardization for efficiencies. Standardization often requires standardized communication practices, as exemplified in warfare and football. They save time.

I call such words “vanilla” words. They tend to be:

• Inoffensive to the group (politically correct)
• Repeatedly used to enforce positivity and optimism (i.e. great, awesome, super)
• Technically or narrowly defined
• Promoting cost-control, speed and efficiencies
• Easily understand (no dictionary needed)
• Buzz words, phrases and acronyms
• Void of emotionalism and feeling (i.e. business reports and legal documents)
• Emphasizing groups over the individual (i.e. We versus I, They versus He/She)

Basically, vanilla words encourage us to look at our businesses in vanilla terms. We cannot arrive at new flavors by using words that encourage a vanilla filter. The cost is employees who can only think inside a vanilla box.

We often hear that good sales people don’t make good sales managers. While incorrect, the transition is admittedly difficult. However, few give reasons. I have identified three major attributes that distinguish a good sales person who can be a good sales manager from one who can’t be: patience, adaptability and introspection.

Good sales people by habit are not patient; if one prospect says, “no,” they go onto another. We can’t rollover sales people as quickly as we can prospects. As for adaptability, good sales people usually find a workable style and stick with it; they rarely need to try others. Contrastingly, as managers, we have to deal with multiple selling styles. Lastly, many good sales people will run their processes without knowing why they work; often they don’t need to know. Sales managers need to understand the “why’s” so they can solve problems and duplicate successes.

As a result, good sales people who become sales managers tend to have developed little patience, adaptability or introspection. They will tend to push their people into a single style, usually the one that worked for them, and reprimand those who don’t implement quickly or successfully. In effect, they are sales administrators not coaches.

Experientially, this means that the best sales managers who were good sales people are likely to be those who had to struggle to be good. Perhaps they had to try a lot of different things until they found their style. This might have included a real close look at what they were doing and why some things worked and others didn’t. Finally, they learned to have patience with their own development.

A recent BNET post by Thomas A. Stewart talked about nurturing dissent and provided some valuable links. Rationally, it makes sense that if you want to drive your business forward you have to ensure that everyone is on the same page. However, evidence suggests the opposite.

Brooke Harrington, a professor at Copenhagen Business School has studied investment clubs and found that “the more dissent there was among investors, the better the financial returns.” Charlan Nemeth of Cornell University takes this even further by stating, “in general, we find that dissent stimulates thought that is broader, that takes in more information and that, on balance, leads to better decisions and more creative solutions.”

One of my favorite movies is the The Bridge on the River Kwai. In the commentary that came with the DVD, it’s reported that the producer, Sam Spiegel, liked to see conflict between the director and the lead actors. He found that it tended to produce better movies than when they were agreeable. In this movie, there was tension and arguments between the director, David Lean, and the lead actor, Alec Guinness; it won seven academy awards.

In everyday practice, we tend to prefer people who think along the same lines as we do. Conflict and controversy is something we tend to avoid. Those who dissent are often considered negative. Our natural tendencies are toward peace and harmony especially when urgent business priorities are upon us. However, subconsciously, as these studies show, dissent improves our cognition and creativity.

In his landmark book, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T.E. Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia) ponders why two Arabs can hold off a dozen Turks but a thousand Arabs cannot defeat a thousand Turks. He arrives at the realization that large scale armies need to be organized around the weakest link to tap the advantages that size and technology can offer. In other words, you can’t organize your army around a set of requirements that are impossible for a soldier to perform.

With this in mind, what might happen to a Special Forces combatant who is compelled to fight in the regular army? As the article, Imperial Grunts, conveys in the October 2005 issue of the The Atlantic, many of these combatants might not “fit” well in the regular army. This is what caused the Arabs to not fight well in large groups; they could not bridle their talents. This is very much like a talented athlete who is forced to sit on the bench or compelled to perform within a structure that does not allow him to express his talents.

In the workplace, the same can occur with an employee who feels the employer is not using his talent wisely. Since a large corporation is like a large army, it will tend to organize around the weakest link. Thus, he might not have the freedom to show what he really could do because he is being forced to work like everyone else does. When we combine this with managers and co-workers who feel threatened by his talent, you could easily see his talents suppressed, his influence marginalized or his actions disruptive. All could mean his departure.

A CEO of a 150-employee services company made this astute observation: processes reduce the need for top talent, and thus, reduce labor costs. This company requires highly talented professionals to deliver its services. Historically, management allowed them to work without defined processes because the employees knew what to do. However, as the company grew, finding such talent became harder and more expensive.

Processes become the path to training and developing in-house talent. They are analogous to painting by numbers or following recipes in cooking; they improve the output produced by individuals who don’t have a grasp on the entire work. However, just as we wouldn’t confuse painting by numbers with being an artist and following a recipe with being a chef, we shouldn’t confuse executing the steps of a process with being talented. Processes allow the breakdown of a task without necessarily needing to understand the task itself. It’s like following a series of directions; you don’t need to know your destination.

Since an employee doesn’t need to understand the whole task to follow a process, he does not need the talent that that understanding requires. Essentially, the process is making the decisions for him as embodied by its rules and procedures. As a result, the company does not have to pay a premium for that talent.