Dispatches from the Climb Ev’ry Mountain department

Boy, there sure is a lot of jostle and champing at the bit out there in blogville. A disturbance in The Force. I love it! Yesterday afternoon, I was pointed to Seth Godin’s post on Alpha Credit Card Execs and Beta CPAs (Fair characterization, Seth? Probably not.):

I just finished giving a talk to a group of 400 high-powered (high-leverage, high-paid) credit card execs. As I left the hotel, I passed a much smaller room, where a seminar for local CPAs was going on...

The difference, i think, was that a long time ago, the people in the second room had made a decision about what they deserved, or what they were capable of, or what they were going to stick with. And it was a bad decision.

Then, I find Business Pundit lamenting the lack of ambition and rambunction in companies:

Talk is cheap. I guess that is why so many people talk about being great but never do anything about it.... I. Don't. Understand. Sometimes I think we benchmark not to see if we are better than our competitors, but to make sure we are all doing the same things so that we can feel comfortable.... I think most companies are confined to mediocrity because they want to do what everyone else is doing. It gives them a sense of confidence that they are on the right track when in truth they are just playing follow the leader.

And, in comments, vinod has this:

Generally, there are only 2 [opportunties] to get out of "Chasing Taillights" mode -

1) at the VERY START of the venture - before any revenue commitments are made, employee orgs are designed, relationships with external firms are constructed, etc. This is the "having sex" part of new venture creation ;-) You've got a blank slate.

2) AFTER the company is profitable / out of the woods - when the short / medium term health is secure, and you've got enough time / $$$ to fund exploration.

Fair enough. But relative to what Seth, Rob and vinod are saying is this point: many of these people are only following the rules as they’ve been set out for them. Set out wrongly. In my estimation, we see the tail wagging the dog of what Business is really about: Allowing men and women to exercise their creativity and energy, with profit as proof of their success, not a ring through their noses.

In that vein, let's add another, third bullet, to vinod's above--one I think has far more probability of occurring than his "#2":

Henry Kissinger once said "A lack of choices clears the mind marvelously." When companies are against the wall, when every available arrow in their quiver has been shot and missed, their "sliderules" are failing them, they then become open to new ideas; teachable, as it were.

Large scale case: Chrysler was in the dumper several times in the last few decades. In many instances their problems stemmed from a lack of leading their market and getting stodgy and bureaucratic, causing finance/senior management to dictate strategic risk choices due to their lesser size relative to competitiors. This led finance to go to the only bag of tricks they knew and felt comfortable with. Messy, wrong acquisitions and projects as silver bullets and "leapfrog " moves--Lamborghini, for instance. I'm simplifying for space, but these suit-centric choices, if you will, got them in holes and delivered them to death's door. At this point, many traditionalist auto-types gave up on Chrysler and bailed for another "host". Suits gone, guys like Bob Lutz, were allowed a "What the F*ck," last ditch effort. In other words, freer reign.

("Whadawegot to lose?" Who was watching to say, "NO"? )

What did Lutz do? He raided design schools and foreign and unusual sources and shipped in a hot rod culture and let them go to it... Cars built for love of curve and metal, for love of cars. Bing bang boom, Viper. Using a V10 development people in finance hated because of parts economics of scale, and because it wasn't their idea in the first place. Next: Prowler. Next PTs. Next: Curvy-fendered Ram pick-ups when the trend was to GM's boxy longbed frame and body of the 1500s and Suburban genre.

They were designing cars people suddenly "had to have." Lotta craft, lotta love, lotta intuition, and Bob Lutz out front running interference with his "First law": The customer is not always right. In this case, he meant designing to the customers desires, ahead of them, not to the customers specifications, which was what previous management had done with focus groups and market testing concepts to death--not one, but three! cupholders as "design breakthrough!" He let people exercise their love and skill, used some unususal research models like cultural anthropology and resurrected a winner. Even Daimler-Benz got interested, not for Chrysler's sexy balance sheet--it still wasn't all that sexy, yet--but for their ideas.

And that brings us to the prologue. Once craft and goofy passion had generated the new appeal, guess who got re-interested and re-exerted their control? Yes, the suits. Cat's away the mice will play. The suits then went to their "craft" and engineered a very dumb M&A with D-B, two different DNA streams, poorly imagined and merged. Not impossible, but poorly understood and intuited. And now, the indigestion is getting worse. Germany and the US are at each others throats. Again, an arranged marriage signed in differing blood types, on a balance sheet, not--NOT--on a dogeared 1969 copy of a Le Mans month Autoweek, after a suitable period living in sin to learn and blend each others quirks, as it should have been.

Now, race back to the 1920-30s when car manufacturers were everywhere. Look at a PT cruiser or Ram. Shape remind you of anything? A Packard, Ford, Doble, Velie, Studebaker, Hudson or Dodge of the era? Of course it does. Car designers didn't have CADCAM or statistical sampling or one way mirrors with customers behind them to guide ideas. They had their gut, their art and their craft.

Now go back further: Adam Smith. Division of Labor. 1776. Wealth of Nations. Smith knew he was onto something good. But, while he may not have seen all the effects of his newly new minted economic description, he recognized one: It’s stifling potential on people’s minds and ambition….

“if man is not asked of his work to exert his understanding, or his invention when presented with challenges, then he generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.

Funny how most of us business types gloss over that one for the more soul-crushing but "actionable" examples of mass production Smith used in his Pin Factory example, eh?

And herein lies the entrepreneur's dilemma: We are allowed to make it very personal, to actualize ourselves in the extreme through our business efforts. For us it's not business, it is personal. But the structures we then create, unless we're very careful, suck the very same passion we crave out of the efforts of those who work for and represent us. We then demand of our people "Where's the commitment!? Where's the magic?!" Once we're done huffing, we then unleash them on unsuspecting customers who somehow sense from these employees: "Gee, it's all business with this guy. Where's the humanity and flexibility and can do? Where's the power? Where's the personal?"

Ladies and gents, Seth and Rob and Vinod are right to wonder. They're just right. It doesn't have to be that way. This way.

You have the Pole.