Introduction
I’m always screaming from my pulpit about the lack of professionalism within most modern businesses. Where as true professions such as doctors, lawyers, and airline pilots operate within disciplined processes and procedures, business “professionals” continue to approach business as a hobby, rather than a serious practice.
How many business leaders spend hours every week improving their skills and finding new ways to create value? How many would rather spend their time at the bar or on the golf course rather than studying foundational principles to bring their business to the next level? How many decisions are based on guesses, rather than data and talking to customers? How much of day-to-day operations have not changed in the past five years? How many managers just wing it?
These are just some of the foundational issues within organizations. And the modern MBA courses do not help. MBA courses emphasize on finances and archaic tools and techniques that most people never use. You rarely learn about Deming, Imai, Drucker, Ries and Trout, as well as creative and critical thinking in the halls of academia. The skills for the real world, are missing.
And the leaders who feel they are “skilling up” just read the latest HBR articles or the top books from an ever-growing list of celebrity academics and business leaders. Unfortunately, these authors have zero awareness of what is happening on the front lines of businesses; they are only focused on the words-of-wisdom from the business rock stars. How many authors and researchers have talked to front-line employees about how the “decisions from above” really panned out? It is time for business schools and organizations to stop pretending like business is an actual profession. It is time for a complete RETHINK of how business is conducted and create strong organizations of the future.
The Problem
Do professional athletes stop practicing and learning after they leave university? Do professional musicians stop practicing when they hit it big? Or do physicians stop learning when they end their studies? No. Absolutely not. All of these professionals are just that, professionals. They know that to stay at the top of their game they must never stop learning, practicing, and improving. They know that success is about the never-ending quest for greatness. A life of never-ending learning and growth.
Unfortunately, senior executives and those in all areas of business don’t look at work in this same light. For most employees, work is about a paycheck, health insurance, or a fancy title. I don’t know how many times I have heard people tell me, “Yeah, this place is horrible, but I only have 10 years until I retire.” 10 YEARS? You will stick it out, for another ten years? Really? Wouldn’t you rather be excited to go to work and create great things and improve lives? Don’t you want to spend the majority of your waking hours have fun and growing and learning?
Mindsets like these result in a wasted life, poor organizational culture and morale, and sub-par business performance. For business to be considered a true profession, everyone who works in an organization should focus on five key areas:
Process discipline
Customer-centricity
Data-driven decisions
Continuous learning
Informational ecosystem
Lack of discipline
As Edwards Deming noted, everything is a process. Unfortunately, outside of manufacturing teams, most sales and marketing teams do not realize they need to look at their operations as processes. They avoid the hard work of carefully mapping and optimizing operations to align with customer desires and behaviors. Sales and marketing teams need to carefully map every process to identify areas to improve customer value and reduce time and costs. Unfortunately, too many executives avoid the hard work of truly understanding operations and customers. They prefer the status quo, even if they do not know if the status quo is effective.
How about the simple process of meetings? How many organizations do not have Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for meetings? How often are agendas and meeting minutes developed? How is the organization able to learn and keep track of decisions, without proper documentation? Professions focus on disciplined and process thinking to ensure a well-structured and efficient organization. Unfortunately, most organizations outside of manufacturing prefer to “wing it” and feel that sales and marketing are “unique” and cannot be standardized. This is just laziness and an excuse to avoid the hard work of data-driven operations.
How about straightforward, basic organizational goals and objectives? I have been in too many firms where there were no actual organizational goals, the organization just focused on sale targets and market share. Who cares if the business is profitable or customers are satisfied? As long as sales targets are hit, all is good. Really? Come on, there are much better ways to succeed. To understand the business, you need to go on field trips in the “real world”.
When sales and marketing leaders think in terms of processes, they will find a plethora of new opportunities of growth. They will uncover new areas of value for customers, and unearth underserved areas for competitive advantages. Moving to a mindset of measuring-and-learning, will allow sales and marketing to move from chaos to discipline, while increasing creativity. And it all starts with properly understanding consumers.
Get Out of the Building
“I’m too busy to visit customers.” “I’ve been in this industry for 20 years; I know what customers wants.” How many times have you said or heard this? How many of your senior executives have spent time with end-users, actually experienced what a customer goes through, or attended research events? Probably not many.
All of us are guilty of sitting at our desks making decisions based on static, lagging data. We avoid “field trips” as we feel our work will pile-up or we will fall behind if we leave the office. Organizations place too strong an emphasis on quantitative data. Everyone is enamored with pretty visualization reports from Tableau and Cognos. Legions of employees stare at spreadsheets every day, resulting in “surface level” insights, rather than digging below the surface for areas of differentiation and under-served customer needs.
Don’t get me wrong, quantitative data is important, and all of us need to be familiar with current sales and market information. However, it is critical to take “field trips” to visit end users and retailers. The real insights are found through qualitative data. Talking to customers, using and experiencing your products and competitor products first hand, and developing empathy for changing consumer behaviors are where real opportunities are found; in the real world, not behind a desk. Unfortunately, too many people within organizations never spend time with the actual people spending money on their products and services. And thus, poor decisions are made which align with the status quo, and not to create the future.
Or think about all the current senior leaders who have been promoted from either Sales or Finance and have had limited to zero interaction with the people who buy your products or services. The further away they are from the end-user, the lower probability of success their decisions will have. They will be making decisions based on past experiences, static sales data, or from second-hand information. Or worse, they will be using personal opinions and limited, probably dated perspectives to make decisions. These habits result in maintaining the status quo, copying competitors, and avoiding change and experimentation. Not the best recipe for ongoing growth and success.
Lack of data
Big data is all the rage (thanks to companies like Facebook and Google who have developed the narrative to sell their services). Business leaders love to talk about how their organizations are redefining how they leverage data to make decisions. Unfortunately, the truth is that most organizations do not properly use the never-ending waterfall of data that pours into the organization daily. Decisions are made based on the same sources of information, avoiding ways to find new areas to measure and monitor for unexpected insights. All of this data just sits around, not being used. The status quo continues.
Organizations need to go beyond the “industry standards” of data; everyone keeps using the same data to make decisions resulting in me-too products, and unexciting, generic sales and marketing activities. Teams need to use data that competitors do not measure. Most teams measure the same things – market share, unit sales, inventory levels, and Net Promoter Scores (NPS), without questioning the value. To find new ways to exceed customer expectations, teams to measure what really matters to customers, and find under-served areas which competitors are ignoring.
Worse, I talk to too many “front-line troops” who share the same stories. They have great insights from both quantitative and qualitative data, but their executives continue to ignore the findings and recommendations. Leaders continue to rely on their experience, intuition, and gut feelings; resulting in sub-optimal decision making and business performance. Leaders ignore information which contradicts their long-held beliefs, or feel their experience trumps market information. Fear of change and insecurities drive most decision making, resulting in me-too products and unimaginative sales and marketing activities. There is a better way.
Learning
Most organizations provide extensive online training opportunities and often offer in-person courses. Leaders tout how they offer employees extensive resources to grow and improve. The problem is that most of the training is never applied to actual day-to-day operations. Either employees are never given the opportunity to apply their new learnings to their jobs, or the training is not aligned with current organizational practices. For example, leaders talk about the need for 5S and provide online training, but no actual effort is applied to make 5S a mandate throughout the organization. When employees receive mixed-messages, they tend to follow the lead from above, and do nothing. Unfortunately, most business leaders forget that the most valuable corporate asset is the employee, and improperly utilizing this asset results in horrible Return on Investment (ROI) on the most critical asset to create corporate success.
Worse, leaders go to fancy off-site training seminars and workshops, where the same, ineffective methods are shared from one high-priced consultant to another. Truly effective methodologies are ignored in lieu of more “flavor of the month” theories. Leaders latch on to the latest theory from the Harvard Business Review (HBR) and provide “cheer leading” rather than actual leadership. This all results in lack of confidence in leadership, and loss of opportunity to change and improve. Instead of motivated employees wanting to improve and win, these leader actions cause employees to lose confidence and maintain the status quo. Disinterest leads to complacency and reactiveness.
Islands of Information
As the organization gathers more-and-more data, the less is actually used. Silos prevent the sharing of information, resulting in duplicity of work, sub-optimal decisions, and lack of lessons learned. When information is not shared (or used), employees cannot learn and improve, and the organization suffers.
Millions of dollars are poured into fancy digital solutions, resulting in poor ROI of a very expensive tool.
Unfortunately, most of these projects fail as the data is not optimized to allow all employees to use it and learn and improve. The informational puzzle has pieces scattered throughout the organization, with no way to triangulate findings for proper analysis and synthesis. Also, the “same” data is often different from group to group; resulting in lack of confidence (e.g., Sales team and Product Strategy have different unit sales numbers, though for the same product). Without a central repository for all information, the organization will keep missing opportunities and wasting time and effort. If information is not shared and used for decision making, it is as good as if it never existed.
Conclusion
As more organizations struggle to navigate the current COVID landscape, leaders need to realize that past business practices were not only ineffective, but now more than ever are not effective for long-term success in this “new world”. Leaders need to resurrect learnings from the past and get back-to-basics. Lessons from Deming, Drucker, Ries and Trout, and even military strategy need to be the new foundation for business excellence.
Leaders need to focus on offering exceptional quality and value, based on direct interaction with consumers, sharing the knowledge throughout the organization, and creating a culture of lifelong learning to develop a truly never-ending cycle of improvement and customer loyalty. Every leader and employee must strive for excellence in all areas of the business. A desire to raise the level of professionalism is needed at all levels of the organization. Teams that become more disciplined and professional, will create a unique proposition which differentiates their organization from competitors.
This is not about slogans, posters, or exciting town hall meetings and fancy videos. This is about the basics. It is about the blocking-and-tackling that too many organizations have moved away from. It is about leaders “walking the talk” and leading from the front. It is about providing clear direction and focus. It is about corporate boards scrutinizing organizational leaders, and moving beyond “ideas with no substance” and focusing more on leaders that lead and do, rather than those that talk without substance.
To succeed and prosper, leaders need to change themselves before they can change the organization. They need to create an organizational culture based on process thinking, ongoing interaction with customers, data-driven decision-making, a culture of sharing, the acceptance of failure, and the power of experimentation.
When the organization is focused on a unified vision and direction, a team mindset, and a strong desire for excellence, success will follow. This new mindset will allow business to become more of a profession, rather than the Wild West. We all need to move from hoping our actions succeed, to ensuring we position the business for the highest probability of success. This does not happen by guessing and winging it. Leaders need to stop messing around, and RETHINK how they and their organization can improve and succeed.