Does it ever seem these days like the economic eco system that we live in is out of control? Things like the GFC have show the frailty of just how vulnerable our economies can be. How the actions of some major companies can have far reaching ramifications on everyone else. Whilst Governments, Committees and Think-Tanks try to come up with solutions, all there are really doing is attempting to fix existing problems with existing mindsets, the same mindsets that created the problems in the first place. Einstein said that problems cannot be solved at the level of thinking which created them.
I believe that the best way to solve any problem is to simplify it. In today’s society we seem to do the exact opposite. Throughout my corporate career I witnessed some of the stupidity which seems to infect modern day corporate thinking.
Let me give you an example of modern day Corporate Problem Solving Strategy. You start with a simple idea which doesn’t work. Instead of admitting that the simple idea doesn’t work and looking for alternative options, Corporate Problem Solving Strategy dictates that you instead make the simple idea more complex. It won’t solve the problem, in fact in most cases it makes it worse, but at least now you can tell your superiors that the reason it’s not working is because it’s quite complex and will take some time to fully roll out and implement. I call this process “Worse-ify” or “Worse-ify-ing”.
That buys you a bit of time to keep your job by worseifying the problem, continuing to do what doesn’t work, whilst you plan your next move of what you’re going to do when your boss comes knocking next time to ask why it’s still not working.
Each time you’re called to explain why your idea isn’t working, you add an additional layer of complexity and come up with fancy and complicated jargon to explain its continued failure. Ultimately, this on-going process does not end until the simple idea that never worked in the first place has become such a convoluted mess which bears no resemblance to the idea that you started with that no-body understands anything about it anymore. Modern day Corporate Problem Solving Strategy then dictates that the simple idea which never worked in the first place is finally abandoned and the person responsible for worseifying it is promoted to a more senior position as reward for having persevered with such a complex and difficult task!
Problems Caused By Lack of Loyalty.
I’ve always been told that one of my greatest strengths is my logic and problem solving ability, so for me it’s easy to see where the problem lies. Unfortunately, fixing this problem will not be easy and would require a global shift in mindset.
The real underlying problem here is that we now have a culture which does not value loyalty. Companies have no sense of loyalty to the employees who work for them, and in turn, people have no loyalty to the companies they work for.
It’s certainly not the case these days that you get 1 job right out of high school, work hard for 40+ years with the same company, keep your nose clean, don’t make trouble, then retire at age 65. These days even the most loyal people seem to be changing jobs every couple of years. “C-Level” people such as CEO’s, CFO’s & COO’s ect seem to be more likely to be working on “projects” rather then the traditional sense of working for company. A CEO will come on board and will champion 1 particular project from inception to implementation over a couple of years and then move on to their next challenge with another company.
All of this has created an eco-system where loyalty is now non-existent. It has created what I call an eco-system of diversion. That is, people are no longer interested in what they can do the help their company, they’re more interested in what will look good on their CV when they go for their next job. So rather than doing what needs to be done, people are intent on setting themselves up for apparent success. The kind of success that looks good on paper. What in effect happens is that they create diversions.
Let me give you an example. A Mid-Level Manager is charged with the task of managing a new project. It’s a difficult project that has only a 50/50 chance of working. He/she knows that within a couple of years they will be sitting across a desk from someone who is interviewing them for a new role with a completely different company. This project is going to come up. Do they want to say they were in charge but it didn’t work out? Certainly NOT! So how to avoid this 50/50 chance from coming up at their next interview?
They decide instead to convince the Management Committee (yes, all decisions are made by committee these days in order to spread blame when things don’t work out) that the organisation as a whole is not yet ready to embark on such an ambitious project just yet. Instead they suggest a series of smaller projects designed to get the organisation “Implementation Ready”, followed by a smaller scale “Test Project” designed to test the “Organisational Readiness” to tackle the original project.
The smaller projects designed to make the company implementation ready are all very vague in their scope so as to make it virtually impossible to have any kind of objective measurement of their success. Hence it is virtually impossible for our Mid-Level Manager to fail.
Following the “Complete Success” (well there’s no evidence of failure so therefore it must have been a success) of these strategies our Mid-Level Manager now embarks on the Test Project. The Test Project is something akin to a High-Jump competition where 5 year-olds are in danger of tripping over the bar. It consists of a final objective assessment allowing our Mid-Level Manager to claim an emphatic victory by pointing to how well his team performed about the KPI’s that were measured, all of which were of course set so low as to avoid any possibility of failure.
Following this unprecedented success, our Mid-Level Manager not only declares his company to be Implementation Ready for the project he was supposed to start 3 years ago now, but asserts that he is so confident in what he has achieved that he raises the bar of what they hope to now achieve with the original idea they had 3 years ago. The Management Committee duly agrees and gives him a promotion along with a fancy new Title.
It is now time for our illustrious Mid-Level Manager to take his place across the desk from someone interviewing him for a new position with a competitor. He highlights the unparalleled success he has achieved over the past 3 years (the 3 years he spent by-passing what he was supposed to be doing) and impresses his new bosses with scope of the ambitious new project he’s secretly desperate to get out of before anything has a chance to go wrong!
This, of course, has a flow on effect right throughout his company, which of course has a flow on effect to other companies. Nobody is really focused on doing what needs to be done these days because they’re more worried about where they’ll be in 3 years’ time. They’re not interested in doing things that are going to have a big pay off in 3 years because they won’t be around to get the credit then. It’s more important for them to create diversions which will make what they do right now, look good on paper in 3 years’ time when they’re somewhere else.
Understandably, companies are increasingly reluctant to invest in their people when there’s a good chance that none of them will stick around. Unfortunately, this is not a problem which can be solved on a micro scale. If you’re an employee, being loyal and always acting in the best interests of your company will unfortunately put you at a disadvantage these days. You’ll be trampled by people using diversion to kick short term goals for themselves. The benefit to your company of all your hard work may not be evident for another 5 years. At your annual performance review, your efforts won’t seem nearly as good as someone promoting their own short term self-interest with things that will ultimately cost your company BIG TIME in 5 years, by which time they will have already left the building!
So What Is The Solution?
Well as we’ve discussed, this is not a problem that can be solved by any 1 individual or any 1 company. To solve this problem would require a macro approach and massive shift in culture on a global scale.
Perhaps we may take inspiration from organisations such as the armed services. I recently met a guy from the Navy who told me that he had just joined the Navy and his particular job required him to sign a contract with the Navy for the next 7 years. For their part, over that time, the Navy would be investing over $1 million into his training. It seems like both parties therefore have a vested interest in a long term relationship. But of course a lot of things can change in 7 years, so this approach is certainly not for everyone as it would give you almost zero flexibility. As it was, he informed me he could choose to leave within that period but would be forced to pay massive penalties in excess of $100K to compensate the Navy for him leaving.
Another solution would be to have some kind of a “Rating System” similar those used by companies such as eBay and Uber. Whereby people who leave a company would take their ratings with them. Let me explain what I mean. People would earn ratings based on their performance with a company. The better they perform, the better their rating score would be. If they were to then leave, then they take their rating score with them to the next company. With me so far? Well now add in the ability to be rated by the success or failure of what you’ve done even after you’ve left the company. So, for example, if you’re working on a project that will take 5 years to come to fruition and you leave after 2 years, in 4 years you’ll still be being rated on how that project is performing. Obviously, you wouldn’t want your rating to be effected too much by the performance of other when you have no direct control over it. So therefore your ratings would be weighted. Once you leave a company and you have no direct input into the project you were previously working on, then the continued ratings that you receive based on the success of the project would be rated lower than if you were still working on the project. Likewise, some who works on a project for 6 months would have a lower weighting applied to their ratings then someone who worked on the project for 6 months. Likewise, someone at the coalface would have a lower rating than the person managing the project and so forth.
Doing this would certainly go a long way towards eliminating the incentive for people to think in terms of their own short term self-interest. If you knew that doing something that made you look good now but would not be so great for the project in 3 years’ time would have a detrimental effect on your ratings, you wouldn’t want to do it. But on the flip side, you would have a vested interest in always acting in the best interest of your company. Because you know if you do what is in the long term best interests of your company now, in 5 years’ time, even though you may be with a different company by then, your going to get a boost to your rating when this project pays off!
Of course, this wouldn’t be a perfect solution, but it would go a long way to solving some of these problems. Lastly, I would like to say the reason why I believe it is so important to look for solutions to these problems is that we REALLY COULD be living in quite a different world if we could get over these problems. It seems to me like there is so much wasted money in the current corporate eco system. So much money is wasted in these diversionary things that people do to make themselves look good. It seems like everything we do takes twice as long and costs twice as much as it should. If we could cut through all the bullshit, and cut right through to doing just what needs to be done, we could accomplish everything in half the time, for half the money.
Now this is important, if we could do everything for half as much, then what would we do with the other half? This money could then be re-invested into new projects, which would in-turn, take half as long and cost half as much as well. Think for a moment about the flow on effect of THAT! What new technologies could be invented, what medical breakthroughs could be discovered? It has been said that people lived for thousands of years in caves, living a subsistence existence. Hunting and gathering enough keep alive so they could keep hunting and gathering. After thousands of years of little or no progress, an explosion in technology that catapulted us into the modern age began when we learned how to hunt and gather more food than we needed. Once we could get more food than we needed, we had something we’d never had before, “Spare Time”. With this spare time, we could turn our energies to other areas, creating and inventing things we’d never imagined. This let to better tools to hunt and gather, giving us even more spare time and so things exploded exponentially. Tools, technology, art, weapons, poetry and time for circumspection. This was the dawn of the modern age.
I truly believe that we are right on the cusp of a new era of explosive growth. What will happen when we eliminate this self-interest wastage? What new technologies will we discover? How will the world benefit and evolve in the years to come? I for 1 think that this is truly one of the most exciting times to have ever been alive and I can’t wait to see what the future holds.