Why success isn't neccessarily as easily repeatable as one imagines it should be

Those of you that know me will know that I love reading books on business and business people. One aspect that I enjoy about it is understanding not only what has been successful but also, just as importantly, what hasn’t worked. Not the theories and processes that they have followed, but the stories surrounding them. The intriguing part about this is that many theories or processes only seem to work in their original context and even then often break down after a while.

I have seen similar things happen in the businesses I have been involved in – over time that great approach no longer seems so great. This is often put down to changing environment – external as well as internal – usually growth is the culprit that is blamed.

I wondering however if it is something else. If it isn’t more a case of the practice that is now being followed not actually originating from a straight-forward step-by-step process that we’re often led to believe. Quickly forgotten is the uncertainty that surrounded every decision, the difficulty of weighing all the tangibles, the confusion that comes from trying to deal with a hundred issues at once. What has also been lost is the guesswork and instinct that were involved. Instead everyone focuses on the step-by-step logic of the actions, which inevitably makes the process seem a lot smoother and more rational than it actually was.

In doing so the probability of success is diminished as we assume that we can follow the process without all the thought, uncertainty and yes, all the false starts and blind alleys.

Making a decision

One of the things that I love about doing business with Americans is that they aren’t afraid to make a decision. It always strikes me as extraordinary that decision-makers are often pretty horrible at actually making decisions. I’m not referring to the process of analyzing the issues at hand – they are generally great at that, rather they are really bad at actually getting out of the analysis and making the call.

I have long believed that this, more than any other single characteristic, is what differentiates the US (and makes them so successful) in business. Their business leaders aren’t afraid to make a decision, largely because they aren’t afraid of the consequences if they get it wrong. What the conservative people don’t realize is that by not making a decision they are guaranteeing that they will miss the opportunity – those that make the call are giving themselves a chance of success.

That isn’t to say one should rush around making haphazard calls on things but I think that we place far too much emphasis on knowing everything before making a decision. If you wait until you know 100% of the information available you have waited too long – this may have been fine 100 years ago but it just doesn’t fly today.

Knowing there are unknowns

For the past couple of years I have been looking at buying a new house. Well, to be more accurate I was looking at houses built for rabbits, plots of land that look good for vertical face rock climbing, and land-fill sites (that I’m assured by the agent will be much sought after once pigs have flown past it – I’m told that this will happen in the next 12 months or so).

Aside from you having a good chuckle at my foolishness, how is this interesting to anyone? Well it struck me how similar the process is to software development – yes, I find value in the strangest of places.

I (more correctly my wife and I) have some needs and some wishes. Some of the needs are realistic – a few bedrooms, a living room (one would think that these are realistic until you see some houses on the market) - and some not so much. In general most houses are able to tick most, if not all these boxes. The problem comes around to the wishes part. Again, some are realistic – architecturally interesting – and some not so much –affordability often seems to fall into this category. The challenge is that while we think that we have a pretty good idea of what we want, when someone shows us something that they think meets all the criteria, it is only at that point we realize that there may have been a few things that we omitted to detail as deal-breakers. Sound familiar to anyone yet?

The bottom line is that people don’t know what they want, and even if they think they do, it is very likely that they will change their minds. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t strive to understand requirements (and confirm this understanding) before starting the project/build, rather it is to point out that if you don’t build flexibility into your thinking, you’re going to get pretty miserable pretty quickly.

The myth of the 13th cheque (check)

Having recently spent a lot of time going through year-end and with it profit distribution calculations, I thought that I’d share some thoughts on one of the biggest myths that surround “bonus” payments – the so-called 13^th check (sorry, I’m using American English from here on).

I stand ready to be corrected but I believe that this is a uniquely South African phenomenon. In other countries they may give a Christmas bonus or shopping vouchers but no other country tries to pass the idea of a 13^th check as a bonus. There is probably a good reason for it as it is largely a con (by my definition, which is something that is mis-sold) as I’ll explain.

Many people are lead to believe that it is a bonus of some sort. That you receive your salary each month and then are paid an “extra” salary (importantly with it being described as a bonus) in December, hence the name 13^th cheque. This perception is perpetuated by not only those companies that sell it as such, but also those that accept it.

What these employees don’t realize is that their total cost to company is being calculated by adding all the 13 checks together. Thus instead of being paid a larger amount each month, they are being paid a smaller amount each month and then receiving the balance at the end of the calendar year.

Example: cost to company = R240,000 per year. 13^th check method = R18,461 for 11 months and R36,923 on the 12^th month, OR you could get 20,000 for 12 months.

We offer to distribute their salary over 13 payments to everyone that joins Open Box (note the way in which we describe it). Not surprisingly, we haven’t had a single person go for this “13^th check” concept – it just doesn’t make sense. We don’t “sell” as some sort of perk. While I’ll admit it is tempting to do so when so many companies around us do, it just doesn’t seem right to me. What do you think?

Servant Leadership

I’m reading a really interesting book that I got given recently (thanks Peter!) called Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership. I’m only part way through but I thought that I’d share a part of the introduction that really touched a cord and put in words what I have felt for a long time. The concept is servant leadership which was raised by Robert Greenleaf in his book of the same name.

The idea is that the “first and most important choice a leader makes is the choice to serve, without which one’s capacity to lead is profoundly limited”. The focus is on the relationship between the leader and the led and that “only when the choice to serve undergirds the moral formation of the leaders does the hierarchical power that separates the leader and those led not corrupt”.

This is a far cry from the, I will lead and you shall follow “leadership” that many whom aspire to (and even more scary, are often already in) leadership positions assume. As a wonderfully graphic expression that a good friend of mine loves using says, being a leader is not about being above someone so you can pooh on them (and they in turn can pooh on the next person). It is rather looking to do what you can to uplift those you are leading, helping them be better at what they are doing (and hopefully also better people in the process).

It means that, as a leader, you often look to do the dirty or undesirable work, not hoard the nice work and delegate to others the work you would rather not do (note this is entirely different to delegating work that you are not good at doing to those that are). In doing so you are able to build real relationships between members of the team that transcend the everyday into something really special – something worth working at.

Early Adoption (or not)

One irony that is not lost on me is the fact that I’m a reluctant early adopter of new technologies. I’d prefer to be on the leading edge but I’ve had a lot of (memorable) pain from being on the cutting (there is a reason why it is also known as the bleeding) edge to know that I don’t like it there.

There are a lot of people who are very keen on having the latest of everything (and I’m very thankful for them going through the pain for the rest of us) but I’m not one of them, although it has to be said it depends on your frame of reference – my frame of reference is being surrounded every day by really smart people who are super tech savvy, not necessarily the frame of reference that many others may have.

Why am I going on about this? Two reasons, a long disused Sony MP3 player and my Sony e-book reader. If you’re thinking that the common element here is Sony, you’d be wrong, it would be an interesting line of thought to follow but I digress.

The MP3 player in question was a 32MB (yes, I’m ok with the fact that it dates me somewhat) that I bought some years ago well before the iPod came out. It was great at the time but it got usurped by the power of iTunes and the iPod which meant that it became a serious pain in the ass. Why? Well, I just came across it when I was cleaning out and before I threw it out I pulled on some headphones and listened (yes, it still worked!) to some great tunes that only live on that player because getting them off there onto the next generation of technology (iPod in this case) was too much effort or impossible – I didn’t spend long enough at it to figure out which.

Which leads me to my e-book reader. I got one some time ago and I love it. The fact that I can carry around my whole library, omitting the minor detail of the fact that I can’t get my paper based library into the reader or the fact that not all the books in my library are available in e-book format, is fantastic particularly when I’m travelling. Also ignoring the fact that the Sony e-book store’s interface is a bit dodgy – it could do with a decent graphic designer’s touch and its availability (both for new books and uptime) sketchy - the concept and the reader itself is a masterpiece. Sony have once again done themselves proud. The fact that I’m not needlessly adding to more trees being chopped down as I throw away books (or build another bookshelf) is an added bonus (ignoring of course the fact that the carbon footprint of the reader’s manufacture and distribution probably outweighs the benefit for the moment).

It is therefore with mixed feelings that I have read about Amazon’s Kindle reader being rolled out world-wide. Is the Kindle going to be the next iPod? Am I once again going to have some great books on my Sony that will be relegated to the drawer and then the bin?

On a wider scale, and a lot more worrying, will this cycle of experience for early adopters teach them not to be? If so, will we run out of people willing to try early to market products? Should companies be doing more to reward early adopters by assisting the transition?

Shifting what is possible

I’ve just finished reading (one of the joys, no really, of being stuck in an aluminum tube at 45,000 feet for over 17 hours) Born to Run. While it is one of the best books I have read for some time, I’m going to resist the temptation to summarize it here, suffice as to say I’d highly recommend it to anyone that is interested in running or pushing boundaries beyond what they thought possible.

What this book does – or at least did for me – was to take what I saw as a mountain and make it into a molehill. Specifically, it took my concept of distance running (a half marathon that I was training for) and turned it upside down. It entirely changed me view of what far is – it made 100 miles seem not only doable but quite possibly easy. No mean feat when I was stiff and sore from an 11 mile run earlier in the day.

That got me thinking about Herb Elliott, one of the greatest middle distance runners of all time – he was never beaten over 1,500m or the mile. When he trained he wasn’t aiming to just beat the latest world record, he set his target way beyond it. He would run flat out and then stop at his goal time, well short of the finish. Did he ever attain that time? No, he retired disappointed, but he consistently blew away what everyone thought possible at the time.

This is a theme that is common through a lot of great sports teams and also leaders.

How often do we look to just improve a little bit from the last time we did something, or aim to be only a little bit better? Why are we constraining ourselves – in work and play - by what others believe is possible instead of rather shifting the view of what is possible?

What will be perceived as normal in 20 years? Well then let’s do it today.