The Unforced Error by Krames Jeffrey A

Author:Krames, Jeffrey A.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PENGUIN group
Published: 2010-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

CREATIVE ABANDONMENT

The manager who takes responsibility, or ownership, of her unit will look beyond the walls of her department or unit to ask the question: Even if I can get my team to the very peak of performance, am I getting them to perform a function that is truly worthwhile that will add value to the organization? Is an old line of business now dead? Or is one I have been pursuing a dead end?

Peter Drucker thought that was one of the critical questions leaders have to face. “When do you stop pouring resources into things that have achieved their purpose?” he asked. “The most dangerous traps for a leader are those near-successes where everybody says that if you just give it another big push it will go over the top. One tries it once. One tries it twice. One tries it a third time. But by then it should be obvious this will be very hard to do. So I always advise: Don’t tell me what you’re doing. Tell me what you stopped doing.”

In his book The Leadership Engine, Noel Tichy (with Eli Cohen) offers a perfect example of this. Leaders must have the courage to change core, fundamental elements of their businesses—that is, their product lines or their economic models—if the ones they had been pursuing no longer seemed to be the best, says Tichy.

To illustrate someone doing this, he talked about Debra Dunn, who at the time was a young general manager in Hewlett-Packard’s test and measurement business. What she said has always stuck with me. She was talking about a line of business that she had championed and had personally worked really hard on, but ultimately killed. First, she explained that she had to face reality (think of chapter 1): “I had been involved in building the business (for the two years). . . . I had spent lots of time with . . . all of our key customers, and I liked this business. When you invest a lot (of personal energy) it’s very painful to walk away from. . . . I didn’t like the conclusion. But that didn’t cause me to deny it or hide from it or pretend that reality is different than it is. . . . It was very difficult, but it’s what I had to do.”

Later, she talked about how she approached the situation. This is where her sense of ownership and responsibility jumped out. Once she saw the reality that the business wasn’t going to fly, she said she began to think: “If you just envision continuing in the path that you’re on, you see that it’s really unfair to the people (on my team) who are invested and committed. I think I need to lead these people to success. And, if we’re not on a path that can be successful, then I have to get us on a different path. . . . I have to be willing to say, ‘You know, I appreciate your endurance and I empathize with your emotional investment in this business, but this doesn’t make sense.

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