22 August 2008 - 8:52Only The Paranoid Survive

A friend – and senior executive at a globally recognized department store – contacted me recently for advice.  In the competitive world of retail, how should we organize and manage our people who market and sell across channels, to develop ideas in concert, to be more creatively effective and cost-efficient?

That conversation came back to me this weekend while I was reading a study from Accenture called “Transformation: Changing Ahead of the Curve.”  In it, I recognized the advice I gave my friend.

Good talented people will naturally resist change when under the gun for an impending product or campaign launch (a near constant in retail). The greater good of the company – in my friend’s case, innovating marketing initiatives – can feel like instability, uncertainty and territorial challenges for employees.  How then can senior executives – who themselves may be judged on sales performance today, but also on producing innovating initiatives for tomorrow – execute in this environment?  Our conversation went on to include our thoughts on inspiring and managing innovation in the context of a hard-charging, creative and results-driven business — solutions we’ve seen at work with clients in Silicon Valley, practices we live by at CreativeFeed. 

It was good to see some of those ideas supported (and well told) in the Accenture research by Tim Breene, Walter E. Shill and Paul F. Nunes in the Outlook Journal:

Former Intel Corporation CEO Andy Grove popularized the business admonition that “only the paranoid survive.” There is no denying that high performance business leaders sense market changes very early and act accordingly. In these companies, the organization design and culture are intended to foster a kind of “creative discomfort”—the practical balance of fear and excitement that comes from successfully overcoming constant challenge.

One way companies create a readiness for constant challenge is by introducing a steady stream of capability-building and performance-improving initiatives, creating the expectation that change is constant. In his book Jack: Straight from the Gut, former General Electric Company chief Jack Welch describes these initiatives as “something that grabs everyone—large enough, broad enough and generic enough to have a major impact on the company.” To be sure, initiatives are not transformations; they are more akin to an athlete’s weight training: They give companies the strength and preparedness to take on transformation.

When change programs don’t succeed, the failure can often be traced to the lack of management alignment, buy-in and active support. This is especially true for companies whose attempts to change are not driven by desperation.

To overcome the risk of derailment by management team issues, high performers create top management teams prepared to drive successful early change by assembling and empowering the right team for the right challenge. This consists of three activities: putting the right people on the team; supporting them with the right resources; and ensuring that everyone on the team is pulling in the same direction.

Selecting the right people requires delicately balancing both today’s and tomorrow’s agendas.