Keyword: vision

I talk a great deal about visions.  About how they should drive organizations, about what they should contain, and about the importance they have on the effectiveness of teams.  I see many cases of strong, clear, focussed visions leading to great success.

And I see the opposite.  I see organizations that either lack a vision, or that don’t measure operations against the vision on a regular basis.  I have two examples right in front of me.

Both examples are from the software industry and both show how easy it is to get distracted from the main point of the company and off to “the plumbing”.  It’s a tale of my trying, seemingly in vain, to simply purchase two different companies’ products.

I have had, since youth, a deep interest in photography.  And I have owned, in recent years, a parade of better and better photo printers.  When I decided to donate two of my older printers to my children’s school, I found that it was a case of “you can’t get there from here”.

You see, both printers were driven by software called a RIP (raster image processor).  RIPs are sophisticated programs that control, to minute detail, the output of the printers.  They insure that what you see on the screen, ends up on the printer.  Sure, you can just press “print” from within your program, but for best results you use a RIP.

There are a number of these programs, and they are all absurdly expensive.  The license for these two printers was several thousand dollars (ouch!).  So when I decided to donate the printers, clearly I wanted to donate the RIP to drive them.  I wouldn’t want the school to have to pay for them.  So began my ordeal.

You see, the licensing is obtuse, and is controlled by a tiny (the size of about 6 dimes stacked up) device called a “dongle”.  You need the dongle plugged into your computer to run the program.  This is a silly form of copy protection.  I emailed the company and explained what I wanted to do.  It went south from there.

Colorbyte explained that would have to return the dongle (to Florida), pay hundreds of dollars, pay for shipping both ways, and so on.  I pleaded for mercy, this was merely a donation, perhaps they would want a charitable write-off too?  I exchanged 8 emails, and had five 20 minute phone calls with the sales manager.  In the interim I lost, and later found the silly little dongle.  I offered to handle the case in any number of ways.  I even agreed eventually agreed to their terms, and they suddenly changed the terms.

Eventually, I gave up.  I convinced my local dealer to sell me the competing product at cost (and take a write-off for the balance).  Colorbyte set up so many hurdles they lost an upgrade sale — and ongoing maintenance updates from the school, no doubt.  And undoubtedly cost the company many times the profit they ever made on me just from the time the sales manager spent handling my case.

I’m not alone.  Reading the support forums for their software, Colorbyte’s confusing and obtuse licensing, and this ridiculous little device, cost their customers hours of frustration.  The dongle drives people nuts, and makes all the customers feel like criminals.

Colorbyte’s vision clearly wasn’t to create hurdles for their customers, it was surely to create the best RIP they could.  But their tech support time, their sales time, and I’m sure their software development time, has been sapped by the silly paranoia about software theft.  This clearly costs the company in the long run.

My other experience involves the venerable giant of the graphics software industry, Adobe.  Makers of Photoshop, Illustrator, and a number of other high-end graphics arts tools, the company has been a software industry stalwart for decades.  Simply put, if you are really concerned with the quality of your graphics, you use Adobe’s products.

But the company’s vision of creating the world’s best graphics software and serving the graphics professional, which has served them so well, clearly doesn’t extend down to the licensing department.  Buying Adobe’s products has always been hard.  And I have the wounds to prove it.

Adobe has always charged far above any comparable product for their software.  And because they make the best products, people pay the price.  But along with this premium strategy (high price, but you get what you pay for) should come good service, respect for your customer, and a certain amount of benefit-of-the-doubt thinking.

But, no.  Adobe, you see, is paranoid too.  Because their products are out of the reach of the non-professional, they get stolen.  Probably a lot.  So Adobe has complex licensing and authorization hoops to jump through when you buy their products.  And their licensing people are ruthless, and treat every customer as a potential criminal.

I’ve just hung up the phone from a 54 minute phone call with Adobe customer service.  My seventh such phone call in the last month.  All because I wanted to buy their latest upgrade.

But I made it hard, you see, because I recently switched from Windows to the Mac.  This makes it a “cross-platform upgrade”.  And apparently something really hard to do.  I had to sign and fax in three different affidavits, certifying that I’m going to destroy the old versions.  I had to pay for the new version in advance.  And I apparently had to wait.

I placed the order and jumped through all my hoops, five weeks ago today.  I still have nothing to show for it.  In the meantime, I’ve called customer service seven times, each time having more hurdles tossed in front of me.  All for this seemingly simple $399 purchase — a purchase every other company would let me do online and download the software immediately.

Each time I call customer service, I find that the purchase has been stopped on another bureaucrat’s desk.  Each time, no one bothered to tell me.  Each time, I had to call, wait on hold, wait while some poor sap in Bangalore looks up the information, only to find that somehow the purchase failed to meet some ridiculous test.  Last Friday, after another hour of hoop jumping, “Jen” promised me it would be expedited, and shipped overnight.  She promised to email me the status immediately.  I never heard from her again.

Today, “Frank” spent 54 minutes looking up my order, and eventually gave me a tracking number for DHL.  A number DHL says does not exist.

And amazingly, I just got a call from “Jen” at Adobe to tell me that the heavens have opened and the product has shipped.  Ground, not overnight.  I should see it in 7 - 10 business days.  Almost seven weeks after this simple purchase was made.

Clearly, Adobe, like Colorbyte, has lost all profit from this sale.  Even at the rates of customer service in India, the phone charges, overhead, and pay to “Frank” and “Jen” has to have made this sale a total loss for the company.  And has left them with a thoroughly upset customer.  And as the old adage goes, “a happy customer tells a friend, an unhappy customer tells everyone they know.”

In the end, Adobe has probably lost site of their vision, just because of all this paranoia.  And all because people who wouldn’t buy the product in the first place are stealing it.  There is no lost revenue here, the thieves never could afford it, and people who make their living with it happily pay for it.  And perhaps, when they grow up and can afford it, since they’ve been using it, the thieves would buy it.  But they have to jump through the hoops — maybe it’s easier to steal it.

Both of these companies forgot why they got into the business — to create great software.  They let paranoia over come them, and let their lawyers or “compliance people” rule the day.  They forgot customer service, and respect for their customer.  They forgot their vision.  And they are much the worse for it.

Let me say this right from the top: there is no single more important factor to the success of a project than a clear, crisp, shared vision.  Period.  Now let me tell you why.

I have seen a lot of projects.  Big projects involving thousands of people over many years and with tens of millions of variables.  Small projects involving a couple of people over a couple of weeks.  And many in between.  While it is self-evident that having a clear, shared vision isn’t a magic bullet that solves all problems, it is equally clear to me that every project without one struggles and often fails.  To put it in science terms: having a clear, crisp, shared vision is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to project success.

There are a number of reasons why having a vision is so important:

• A vision helps everyone on the team make decisions
• A vision is a useful yardstick for project completion, success, and failure
• A vision can form the basis for the promotion and marketing of the project
• A vision is a rallying cry, greatly improving team morale

Helps the team make decisions

Without a vision, team members make many day-to-day decisions in a vacuum.  Most of our lives are made up of hundreds of small choices, and a few large ones.  What should I have for lunch?  Should I take I-5 or the surface streets?  Should I marry this person?  In the workplace it is no different.  Should we add this feature to a product?  Should I do this right or just get it done?  Should I hire/fire this person?  Some context for making all these decisions is vital.

In our personal lives, we make these choices based on many factors, from our experience, our research, perhaps even our faith.  Our work lives are very much the same, decisions get based on some framework.  If we work for an organization where cost is the key concern, we make decisions in that framework and look for ways to make each choice be the one that is most cost-effective.  If we work for a firm providing only the best products or services, everyone can make each of their myriad choices based on that knowledge.

Without a vision, everyone from the top of the organization on down is left to make decisions without a foundation.  For example, let’s say you are constructing a new building whose vision is: create the tallest building in the world on this specific site in Tokyo for a budget of 750 million yen.  With that vision, the architect clearly knows that anything less than the tallest building is not correct.  They also know the parameters of what they can spend on materials, because they have a budget.  The construction managers know precisely what the location is, what access to the site is like, and what they need to consider with respect to zoning laws.  And each worker knows where to report.

But it goes beyond that.  As the project progresses, questions will come up.  Should we add this flagpole to the top?  Having this vision helps make that decision — it adds to the height and furthers the vision, so “yes”, add the flagpole.  The people working on the project know clearly the objective, so this decision doesn’t have to be discussed and debated to death.  There are thousands of other small decisions that having a clear, crisp, well-communicated vision can help you with.

Is a useful yardstick

A vision provides often provides a clear yardstick for success.  To take the previous example, if the building is 10 meters short of the tallest building in the world, you know precisely that it was not a success.  As it progresses, and the budget is consumed, you can tell precisely how you are doing against the goal of 750 million yen.  And so on.

The vision can illuminate well down into the organization as well.  If you are working on a small part of the project, and what you are doing is not in concert with, or worse, in direct opposition to the vision, you know there is a problem.  With a properly defined vision, everyone on the team can not only measure their part in the project, but also their performance against it.  I made the decision to put on the flagpole, that pushed us over the top, my contribution to the project was essential.

Forms the basis for the promotion and marketing

Once you have a clear vision, it also can enlighten outside the organization.  Again taking the above example, you know the promotional material for this building will trumpet the fact that it is the tallest building in the world.

Having the vision defined early in the project also allows the marketing development work to happen simultaneous with the project, instead of having to wait until later when the project nears completion.  This head start can save months of headaches and can lead to positive feedback loops.  As the marketing messages are floated early in the project, the team can even react to input from the initial customer reaction to the vision, instead of after the project is over and has been released to customers.

Great visions also lead to great marketing.  If a vision is exciting and invigorating for the team, it can also be so for the customers.  And some great visions have even made it into the real world from inside a company.  Rumor has it that Wal-Mart’s “Always low prices.  Always” was a vision established internally by Sam Walton, and it escaped into the wild…  and eventually got plastered everywhere.

Is a rallying cry

Perhaps the most important thing that a great vision can do is serve as a rallying cry for the team.  Each and every member of the team will be asked by friends, coworkers, family, everyone, “what are you up to these days?”  Having a crisp, snappy reply can be extremely invigorating for people. “Building the tallest building in the world” as a quick comeback to the question is enough to make most people extremely proud.  Not only are they proud of what they want to do, but it enables them to speak spontaneously about their part in it, and to feel like what they are doing has some meaning.

Contrast this with the typical reply: “oh, you know, same ol’, same ol’.”  Most people aren’t fortunate to go to work doing something they love to do, or can be proud to be a part of.  Use the vision for your project as a way to communicate the importance of the project to every member of the team, and let them share in the passion you have for the objective.

Besides, if your vision is good, clear, and full of impact, you can use it at the end of every meeting, at the bottom of every slide, and even as part of a secret handshake…

Summary — Vision is Extremely Important

A clear, crisp, well-communicated vision that is shared by, and used by, the whole team can be the difference between success and failure of a project.  You need to work on defining the vision early in the process, and use it constantly throughout the project to aid in decision making, as a rallying cry for the troops, and as a yardstick for success.  Next up, how to define a great vision.  More on that soon.

James McNerney took over as CEO of Boeing a little more than a year ago.  But you haven’t heard much about him for the last year.  That might lead you to think he’s not been busy.

But he’s been doing what any good deciple of Jack Welch would do when taking over a company — “deep dives”, taking a long hard look way down in the organization to see what he inheritted.  I’m sure it was an eye-opener.

Jim McNerney

Boeing has taken a lot of hits for a long time, not just in the recent ethics scandals.  In Seattle, Boeing has been ridiculed as the epitomy of bloated big business.  One nickname from the late 20th century was “the lazy B”.  Around here, you can pick out the Boeing employees just like the Microsoft ones.  They are stereotypical nerds all, differing largely only by the generation.

The tens of thousands of proud Boeing plane builders are local fixtures, and their relationship with company management has been rocky since the beginning.  Not aided by a argumentative union (see my post on that here), the ebb and flow of the company’s fortunes take the larger local economy with it.  This effect has been lessened, but by no means removed, by the additional of software and biotech to the local scene.

Boeing’s relationship wtih Seattle hit a big low, when the former CEO Phil Condit made the rather absurd move to take it’s headquarters to Chicago.  This choice was ridiculous because the company had essentially no business operations nearby (and was shuttering those it did have).

In an amazing show of hubris, Condit held a public contest to see which city would give the most largesse to Boeing for moving their headquarters there.  In an over-hyped press event, the company selected Chicago while on board a Boeing jet headed for…  may I have the envelope, please…  Chicago!  It was a ridiculous spectacle, it moved less than 0.1% of the employees there, and (rumor has it) was only done because Condit and his wife wanted better restaurants and night life.  The reasoning was to put them in the middle of their customers, within a short flight to them all.  But, in point of fact, their largest growth market for the company is the Pacific Rim, and Seattle is far closer to those customers.  Yet another reason why Condit is long gone.

All of this makes McNerney’s challenge even more important especially to those around here.  He needs to restore a sense of sanity in a company that seems to lost its way much like Enron, Worldcom, and the other famous debacles of the end of the last Century.

His biggest challenge may well be finding a a way to get this behemoth, famous for everything from commercial aircraft, huge government contracts, and questionable ethics, to focus on something…  anything.  The company appears to be involved in all manner of large military and aerospace projects and master of none.  As I have said repeatedly, focus on some vision, any vision, is important.  McNerney seems to agree.

With recent wins in the big plane arena, whether because Airbus is stepping on its own tail or not, McNerney has a great chance to celebrate some successes, and move toward the future.  Their new “Dreamliner”, the 787, looks to be a hit — just what the company needs right now.  If they can actually ship the thing (friends inside tell me this will be no small accomplishment) they stand to regain their crown as the world’s planemaker.

This gives Jim McNerney one great leg upon which to rebuild the company, and I wish him the best of luck.  Not only because my own selfish interests wish well for Seattle, or because Boeing is the strongest exporter fighting in our national balance of trade war.  Mostly I wish them well because the whole country needs to see a large company that clearly lost its way in the last century regain it in this new one.

While on a plane for hours a few days ago, I found myself drawn into the inflight “entertainment”.  Among some interesting fare (a classic Everybody Loves Raymond among other things) was the usual self-serving drivel from the airline, and a strange infomercial about a Marriott hotel in Florida.

It was a weird piece, several minutes long, devoid of any real information and filled with cliches.  I had seen it on the outbound flight, and it struck me as unusually sappy.  On the return I was overwhelmed.

As with any hotel propaganda, there were the required panning shots of the lobby, the pretty girl diving into the swimming pool, the enchanted couple gazing into each other’s eyes over plates of tiny morsels of food, and the family happier than any other you’ve ever seen after a long plane flight.  And the interview with the manager was insipid, with so much for me to love: “our outstanding personnel” and other ridiculous HR miscues.  But the thing that struck me the most was:

We pride ourselves in exceeding our customers’ expectations every day.

I’ve always had trouble with this whole concept of “exceeding your expectations”.  It was obviously created by marketing people from words that seem to sound good, but what does it mean?  Let’s examine it…

What are my expectations?  When I go to a nice hotel, I expect a clean room, a nice bed, no bedbugs, and quiet.  Hard to exceed those…  Hermedically clean?  Anechoically quiet?  Less than zero bedbugs?  OK, that’s simply being petty and splitting semantic hairs.

But, really, how do you consistently “exceed my expectations”?  Only by me expecting to be disappointed in the first place, or by having your market placement so far off base that you trick people.  Either of these are failures on the part of the company.

If I go to a Motel 6, I don’t expect Four Seasons level service.  So if I get it at a Motel 6, something’s wrong.  The Motel 6 is wasting money providing services to people who aren’t looking for them, and probably losing a boatload doing it.  And it’s impossible for the Four Seasons to exceed my expectations, because I expect them to be the best.  Anything less is a failure.

All of this plays hell with the employees.  It’s like saying: “set a really low bar for our customers then surprise the heck out of them by being competent.”  Expecting your employees to do daily slight of hand with their level service isn’t a good thing for business, it’s a sure path to frustrated and disgruntled people.

So, please, stop “exceeding my expectations”.  Just set a really high bar, and meet it every time.  Consistency is what matters, not the occasional random overshot.

Today, George W.  Bush, ended his press conference (after the surprise drop-in on Baghdad yesterday) by waxing on leadership:

I understand leadership.  Leadership requires determination, you gotta be determined to do something in order to be able to lead particularly in difficult circumstances.  You gotta have will, you gotta have desire to succeed, and you gotta have a plan.  And that’s what I’ve found in Iraq.

First, let me assure you that I’m not going to turn this blog into a political soapbox.  I’ll leave that for others (like my brother at BarkBarkWoofWoof).  However, I should reveal that I am virtually never impressed by the President.  So, when he speaks on one of my favorite topics, leadership, I feel compelled to comment.

Photo by Jason Reed / Reuters

And surprisingly, he’s got a lot of it right.  As I say time and again, a lot of leadership is knowing where you are going, making that direction really clear to everyone, sticking to that in the face of distraction, and pushing until you get things done.  And that’s what Bush is talking about here.  So, I guess he’s on target.

However, another big part of leadership is listening, and I’ve got to say it’s a part that Bush doesn’t seem to do very well.  Surely he listens well to those immediately around him, some of the buzz is that he’s merely a puppet at the control of his handlers.  But that’s not the real issue.  The area where he seems to have the most trouble is getting bad news.  It seems (albeit from a great distance) that he either doesn’t like to hear bad news, or his handlers keep it from him.  In either case, it seems that bad news just doesn’t get much of a hearing in the oval office.

To be fair, this is arguably the toughest part of leadership.  You have a vision and a direction, and something comes in unexpectedly to upset that plan.  It can be a very tough decision whether to modify your plan or to press on in the face of the adversity, hoping to push past the difficulty.  So Bush is neither alone in his challenge, nor to be faulted for his perseverence.  But at some point everyone needs to take stock, listen to all the input, and make the tough choice.  Key to this is good, quality, honest feedback straight from the people in the trenches.  I’m just not sure how much of that gets to the president, or how much he really hears.

And let’s not get me started on the “you gotta have a plan” part.  I’m pretty confident that the plan ended with “Mission Accomplished”, and we’ve been flying blind since then.  But that’s another topic, and one best left for others.

I had the wonderful fortune to drive from Seattle to L.A. and back a couple of weeks ago.  You see a lot of nothing and do a lot of thinking in those 40 hours.  Spotted on a truck was this statement:

Providing customer solutions through trust and innovation.

OK, so now the quiz: what does this company do?  The answer is at the end (no peeking).  Your choices:

• Computer systems integration
• General freight handling
• Food services distribution
• Electrical contractor supply

I’m a huge believer in visions.  I think every organization and every project needs one.  You simply can’t have too much focus on a team — people really need to know what they are doing and why.  It’s not optional.  It’s so important the better part of a chapter of my upcoming book is devoted to it.

But quality is at least as important as quantity.  Just opening the corporate buzzword dictionary and choosing at random doesn’t work.  Take this example.  Please.

There just is nothing there.  What the heck does this mean?  How does this inspire?  What is a “customer solution”?  How does this help me do my job?  Can I make any decisions based on it?  What would I choose to do or not do based on this statement?  I have a lot more to say about visions, why they are important, and how to develop and use them.  But let’s just make one thing clear, this statement is worse than nothing.

If you are an employee at this company, this statement is painful.  Not only does it not mean anything, you can be sure it was rolled out with fanfare and lots of sincerity.  You probably sat there at the announcement and went “huh?”  You couldn’t believe what you were hearing.  You thought: “the CEO and his team spent months and how many thousands of consultant dollars to come up with this?  What a waste.”  You wondered why they didn’t put the energy into fixing the stupid products we sell, or the health care plan, or the silly payroll glitches, or heck, even the toilet in the bathroom.  You are deeply depressed.

This vision is worse than no vision.  At least with no vision, the employees don’t know the management team is a bunch of idiots.  As the old saying goes: better to say nothing and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.

Much more on visions to follow.  But in the mean time, your answer: it was a food services company.  They move boxes of Cheetohs from the warehouse to the grocery store.  Where are the “customer solutions” there?  What “innovation”?  Sheesh…

Big pay package, perks aplenty, hobnob with the famous…  who wouldn’t want to be a CEO?  And there is no shortage of wannabes and/or scoundrels among the CEO ranks.  But I’ve been around a large number of CEOs and one can tell the good from the bad pretty quickly.  And today I stumbled across a symbol for the downside (and I’m big on symbols).

CEO Express

I was just trolling around the net and found a stunning site [ed: stunning has many meanings, here I mean it literally — knock your socks off, take your breath away].  The site is CEOExpress, and it defines for me the problem with many CEOs today.

Open CEOExpress’s front page [ed: go ahead, I’ll wait].  Just the front page, no need to go further.  If you can breathe again, let me know.  My immediate response was “holy cow!” (ok, I lied, see this post).  My second response was that this is the perfect symbol for all the bad CEOs I know.

Half of you know exactly what I mean, the other half are saying “what? what’s the problem?”  The problem is that both the webmaster and the CEOs who like this page need a double dose of ritalin.  There must be 200 links on this page, all lumped into some random collection of categories.  There are moving graphics, headline tickers, and ads aplenty.  It’s so busy, it’s hard to even focus.

But worse is the tag line: “connecting busy executives to information that matters”.  That’s only true if the information that matters is all the information on the entire internet.  There’s no discretion here.  No attempt to separate the wheat from the chaff.  Oh, OK, some links have little symbols next to them, but really, it’s just a massive link page.  It’s just a “business porn portal”.  For me it’s a symbol of the bad CEO because it’s just as scattered, unfocused, and random as the worst CEOs I know.

You see, the best CEOs have a vision for their company.  They have decided what’s important and what’s not, and they hone in on that vision.  They repeat it constantly, they work toward it daily, they focus other people on it rigorously.  And they reject chaos, interruptions, and distractions.  Sure they are busy, yes they get interrupted, and of course to an outsider they look like they are a chicken with their head cut off.  But the reality is the opposite.  They are focused and guided by their vision.

The last thing they would want is a web page like CEOExpress.  If an employee walked in their office and started being as random as this web site, they would be fired on the spot.  That’s what makes it the perfect symbol for the bad CEO.