Power Listening: Mastering the Most Critical Business Skill of All by Ferrari Bernard T

Author:Ferrari, Bernard T. [Ferrari, Bernard T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: urn|isbn|9781101560549
Publisher: Penguin Group
Published: 2012-02-29T22:00:00+00:00

Question 2: Are there any misalignments?

Any lack of alignment or acceptance of a mandate can have disastrous consequences for a company or organization. More than one major corporation has suffered in this way, squandering both time and resources. I would argue that U.S. car companies’ recent troubles could be traced to a lack of alignment on their mandate over a long period of time. These companies seemed to be pulled in many directions, with little coordination between management and labor, or, for that matter, within management and labor. As a result the companies were nearly brought to their knees.

Perhaps it seems overly simplistic to portray the troubles of the automotive industry purely in terms of mandate. One could argue that it was not the absence of a mandate, but rather a surplus of mandates, that caused the problem. Each stakeholder group—labor, management, shareholders, suppliers and retailers, not to mention customers and regulators—may have had clarity about its own goals and aspirations, but there was no unity and no alignment between those individual mandates. In the real world, this is going to be the case more often than not. The best leaders listen to and monitor, and then manage, the complicated interplay of conflicting mandates, a fluid phenomenon that requires ongoing attention and regular reassessment. The dynamic tension generated by the multiple mandates of different stakeholders provides grist for the mandate discussion again and again, and can produce richer, more beneficial shared mandates when managed thoughtfully.

Questions of mandate become even more complex and interesting when one considers how a mandate aligns with external factors, like a changing marketplace or a volatile economy. Businesses and organizations need to remain flexible, to know when their articulated mandate doesn’t make sense in new conditions. Mandates in business are not written in stone, nor do they come from a higher authority. A wonderful illustration of this is IBM, a company that completely remade itself after revising its mandate to fit a new competitive environment. After years of supplying big-box computers to business, the company got a sharp wake-up call in the 1980s from its customers, who no longer needed IBM machines when they realized they could get comparable equipment at lower cost from a growing contingent of Asian manufacturers. Recognizing that their homegrown hardware business offered them a shrinking competitive advantage, IBM began working with a new mandate—to provide computing services rather than just computing machines. It aligned itself around a new fundamental imperative: offer custom, designed, or outsourced information services to customers, and if that happens to facilitate some hardware sales, all the better. IBM discovered the need to amend its historical mandate by listening to loyal customers. The company was able to revise its business model, reclaim customers, and develop new ones, at higher profit margins than in the past. The company not only survived a grave competitive challenge, it thrived.

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