Agile Montage

A lot of folks in corporate world remember the late nineties and early years of this decade as 'boom and bust'. Those tales of riches and the plunder in corporate boardrooms that followed have become folklore lately. And then there are subtle variations of these in other places where the CXO are either chucked out for lack of performance of they just walk out because the change they initiated is not going to happen for another 2 years or so. Result - an impatient investor, a board that will most likely behave like a headless chicken and and a looming uncertainty that instills fears and haphazard decisions. The habit of instant sense gratification has now perched itself high up, even in the board rooms and on Wall Street. Everyone desires success and demands immediate results. Or, at least that's how it is likely to be in North America. The Big Corporate Disconnect Having gained most of my experience as a consultant in this kind of environment, where overnight turnarounds, complete overhauls, reorganizations, etc. have become the staple strategies for results, it came across as no surprise to me that the leadership started showing signs of ruthlessness, shallow understanding of their problems and business models, and far too little commitment to solving problems from the bottoms up. The top down approach of command and control is still being used as a means to communicate vision, rather than encouraging participation of the employees to set the vision of where they want to take the company. The result is a big disconnect between the definition of success as the senior management usually understands it and how the rank and file of their companies understands it. A side effect of that is rationed communication when it comes to morale boosting of the employees, which starts to dilute the communication and inturn the trust and faith that the CXO has invested in him/her. At the end of the day every CXO utter very similar things - investor, walls street, and earnings. No one either cares or has the confidence and courage to talk about technology, training, infrastructure, IP, quality of people, etc. The reason probably is the slow turn around of the latter, whereas the numbers (profits, earnings, etc.) can change month to month significantly. Long story short, CXO exits start when there's a bad run of numbers and since these folks never invested time and energy in studying and exploring other fundamentals, dollars is all they have got on their report cards. I think, that it is not only foolish but also misleading. The lack of willingness, passion, and experience in concentration, investment, and tracking the fundamental of any business like people, training, etc. is not only a disservice to self but also a breach of trust that the workforce indirectly invests in their leaders. Paradigm of Vision and Leadership So, what's new about it and so alarming that I am investing time to write about it? Recently, I met a CIO and started to work for him and had a chance to listen to his plans. In the process, I am also getting some insight into the decisions he has made, and most importantly the thought behind those decision. His thought was along the lines of getting ready to be successful and then embarking on the mission, and monitoring that progress as often as possible. He defined it as a 'Road to Success' and wants to watch mile markers. The mindset in itself is very radical, for an executive at his level, where more often than not people lose sight of the appropriate details, and don't want to be bothered by what's going on on a daily basis. They have people and they expect those people to just somehow magically produce results for them. The analogy of road to success is very refreshing to come across in the business today. This is going back to the basics of management, where you determine your goals and target, evaluate what it'll take to get there, the resources you have, and the path you want to take, with the courage to solicit help from outside if desired and then having the energy and appetite to follow it through and absorb the shocks in between. It is fun and rewarding to work for people who understand that getting on to the road to success is as much of a cause to celebrate as it is getting there. I am almost tempted to use, "Well begun is half done". Looking back at a lot of work that I have done, it isn't very difficult to pick out experiences where we, as a team, knew that we were headed in the wrong direction, but helplessly watched us go down that path because we didn't know what the road to success was. We knew that it was not the one that we were following, but lacked the courage to stop, a determination to explore, and the leadership to raise this issue to the people higher up. Most importantly, on a monthly basis we got to know from our managers that the VPs, and EVPs just don't care how we do it, we just have to do it. 'Road to Success' is a paradigm that not only instills confidence in the team but also gives purpose to projects and extracts the best out of people. They know that they are on the right path, the leadership knows that they are on the right path, and in the end the board, the analysts, Wall Street, and investors know that the results will follow. Image taken from: http://alum.mit.edu/ne/whatmatters/200501/images/success.jpg