Respect for the Business and Its Values
The acquisition must be a “temperamental fit.”
No acquisition works unless the people in the acquiring company have respect for the product, the markets, and the customers of the company they acquire. Though many large pharmaceutical companies have acquired cosmetic firms, none has made a great success of it. Pharmacologists and biochemists are “serious” people concerned with health and disease. By the same token, few of the big television networks and other entertainment companies have made a go of the book publishers they bought. Books are not “media,” and neither book buyers nor authors – a book publisher’s two customer – bear any resemblance to what the Nielsen rating means by “audience.” Sooner or later, usually sooner, a business requires a decision. People who do not respect or feel comfortable with the business, its products, and its users invariably make the wrong decision.
Managing the Boss
There is nothing quite as conducive to success as a successful and rapidly promoted superior.
Almost everybody has at least one boss. And the trend is for knowledge workers to have an increasing number of bosses, an increasing number of people on whose approval and appraisal they depend, and whose support they need.
There are keys to success in managing bosses. First, put down on a piece of paper a “boss list,” everyone to whom you are accountable, everyone who appraises you and work, everyone on whom you depend to make effective your work and that of your people. Next, go to each of the people on the boss list at least once a year and ask, “What do I and what do my people do that helps you do your job?” And, “What do we do that hampers you and makes life more difficult for you?” It is your job to enable each of your bosses to perform as unique individuals according to their working styles. Your bosses should feel comfortable that you are playing to their strengths and safeguarding them from their limitations and weaknesses.
In Innovation, Emphasize the Big Idea
Innovative ideas are like frogs’ eggs: of a thousand hatched, only one or two survive to maturity.
The innovative organization understands that innovation starts with an idea. Ideas are somewhat like babies – they are born small, immature, and shapeless. They are promise rather than fulfillment. In the innovative organization executives do not say, “This is a damn-fool idea.” Instead they ask, “What would be needed to make this embryonic, half-baked, foolish idea into something that makes sense, that is feasible, that is an opportunity for us?”
But an innovative organization also knows that the great majority of ideas will turn out not to make sense. Executives in innovative organizations therefore demand that people with ideas think through the work needed to turn an idea into a product, a process, a business, or a technology. They ask, “What work should we have to do and what would we have to find out and learn before we can commit the company to this idea of yours?” These executives know that it is as to make a major innovation. They do not aim at “improvements” or “modifications” in products or technology. They aim at innovating a new business.
Managing for the Future
Prediction of future events is futile.
The stating point to know the future is the realization that there are who different, though complementary, approaches:
- Finding and exploiting the time lag between the appearance of a discontinuity in the economy and society and its full impact – one might call this anticipation of a future that has already happened.
- Imposing on the yet unborn future a new idea that tries to give direction and shape to what is to come. This one might call making the future happen.
The future that has already happened is not within the present business; it is outside: a change in society, knowledge, culture, industry, or economic structure. It is, moreover, a major trend, a break in the pattern rather than a variation within it. Looking for the future that has already happened and anticipating its impacts introduces new perception in the beholder. The need is to make oneself see it. What then could or should be done is usually not too difficult to discover. The opportunities are neither remote nor obscure. The pattern has to be recognized first.
Predicting the future can only get you in trouble. The task is to manage what is there and to work to create what could and should be.