3 challenges in implementing a strategy

If designing a good strategy is difficult, then designing a strategy as if implementation matters is far more challenging. Louis Gerstner articulates the challenge in his autobiographical account of IBM turnaround¹ “Who says elephants can’t dance” - It [IBM] had file drawers full of winning strategies. Yet, the company was frozen in place. IBM hadn’t missed predicting any technological trend and yet the company was paralyzed enough not to act on any of those effectively. What are the challenges in implementing a strategy? Here is my reflection based on Prof. Richard Rumelt’s video interview.

1. Not simple enough: A few weeks back I witnessed following conversation in a senior management meeting. It got started when someone asked, “How is our innovation program aligned with our strategy?” One response came, “What is our strategy?” This was followed by a noticeable silence in the room. Then answers started - One answer was “Our vision statement articulates our strategy”. Another one was “We have percolated our strategy through a balanced score card. Hence, our KRAs tell us what to do in line with our strategy”. Each answer had an element of truth. However, my conclusion after witnessing this discussion was, “If the company has a strategy, nobody in the room has articulated it in a simple manner.” Each member in the room was making various decisions – including selection of large impact ideas. And yet there was no coherent view on how they would win in the market – today & tomorrow. I like what Rumelt says in the interview, “A good strategy is essentially simple. If you can’t explain your business strategy in a few minutes and in a few pages, there is something wrong.”

2. No good progress indicator: Infosys announced its results last week and missed its annual guidance for the first time in two decades. Infosys revenue had grown by 15.8% YoY and profits by 14.5%. Market reacted harshly; the stock shed 13% in a single day. It has been little over a year since Infosys announced Infosys 3.0 goal of getting its revenue equally from transformation, innovation & operation. In March 11, 2011, transformation, innovation & operation constituted 25%, 10% and 65%. Last week, Infy CEO Shibulal emphasized their commitment to make the portfolio balanced. However, its “innovation” bucket portion seems to have dipped from 9.5% to 6.2% of its revenue. Is Infosys strategy working? There is no easy way to find out, especially for an outsider, perhaps even for an insider. As Rumelt says in the interview, “It is difficult to determine whether or not you are accomplishing your strategy by looking at current results. You can have a company that is producing excellent results but has a poor strategy. Vice versa, you can have a company that has poor results but an excellent strategy.” My friend Prof. Rishikesha Krishnan who visited Infosys Labs recently is right in pointing out, “It may be premature to knock Infosys off”.

3. Ambivalent messaging: Andrew Grove tells a story of his Intel days², when he & CEO Gordon Moore made a significant strategic decision in the middle of 1985 – that of getting Intel out of the memory business. This was the business Intel had identified itself with for more than a decade. Initially when Grove talked about it to his team, he had a hard time getting the words out of his mouth without equivocation. In his own words, “Saying it to Gordon was one thing; talking to other people and implementing it in earnest was another”. Several months after this decision, Grove was visiting a remote Intel location. He was still not ready to announce that they were getting out of the memory business. He would usually give negative-to-ambivalent answers to questions pertaining to memories. And one of the senior managers attacked him aggressively, “Does it mean that you can conceive of Intel without being in the memory business?” In Grove’s own words – “I swallowed hard and said – yes, I guess I can. All hell broke loose.” Communicating an intent (like that of getting out of memory business) with clarity is not easy. Most companies mess it up. Rumelt says in the interview, “There is an essence of compromise that is part of human character. While competitive success comes from focus of resources, our natural tendency in the organizations is to satisfy multiple constituencies.”

Sources:

1 “Who says elephants can’t dance” by Louis Gerstner, HarperCollins, 2003 (reference to drawers full of winning strategies is on page 16)

2 “Only the paranoid survive” by Andrew Grove, Doubleday, 1996. (reference to the visit to the remote location is on pages 89-90).

Highlights of the Tech Reach program, April 12-13, 2012

I co-facilitated the Tech Reach program held at Hotel Grand Mercure, Bangalore this week (April 12-13). The participants had 7 to 15 years of experience as technical experts and had designations like: Architect, Principal Engineer, Senior Lead Engineer, IT Manager, Program Manager etc. The objective of the program was to learn 3 levers that increase your sphere of influence as a technical leader. These levers were: communication, innovation and mentoring. Here are highlights of the program:

Destination postcard: As a first step, each participant went through a self-assessment exercise to answer the question: “Where do I stand?” Next, he reflected on what he would like his brand to be one year from now. Here is what we got (click on the image to see each card):

Communication: Taking and communicating a position on a technical issue is an important attribute of a technical leader. In this session, each participant wrote a 300 word position blog and got it buddy-reviewed using a simple framework. For example, we checked if the problem definition is clear. To add a fun element, some of the ideas were presented through a 2 minute skit.

Innovation: We were privlieged to have Lakshman Pachineela facilitate the session on Design Thinking. Lakshman is the Head of Innovation at SAP Global Delivery and also a visiting faculty at School of Design Thinking at Hasso Plattner Institute, Potsdam, Germany. Design Thinking is rooted in the three core elements of systematic innovation: multi-disciplinary teams, iterative process and variable space. Participants got a glimpse of the design thinking process through an exercise of re-designing the wallet of their partner.

Mentoring: When a junior engineer comes to you for help – either as a sounding board for an idea or with a technical issue – how do you react? Through role plays we explored the 3 different helping roles we take on – expert, doctor and catalyst. And various traps associated with these roles. We also assessed what role Gokhale played in this meeting with Gandhi as depicted in the movie: expert, doctor or catalyst?

Panel discussion: As one of the participants has mentioned in the feedback, the panel discussion with senior technical leaders was “icing on the cake”. We had Dr. Sanjeev Krishnan, Founder Director of Magic Lamp Software (earlier a Senior Architect at Sun Microsystems), Balaji Rangaswamy, CEO of Sooktha Consulting (earlier Chief Architect at Nokia Siemens Networks) and Abhijit Tongaonkar, Director, Software Development at Cisco to discuss the topic: Role of technical leader in Indian technology industry – today & tomorrow. Questions that got clarified were – Does a senior architect code? How do you innovate in a delivery / offshore organization? What does a senior manager value? How to overcome fear of failure? How to find a mentor?

Registration has begun for the next Tech Reach program scheduled on May 17-18 at the same venue.

Preparing to fight a crazy system? Learn to become invisible

Do you really want to fight a crazy system? Say, a system that is hugely corrupt & unforgiving to non-conformists? Or a system steeped in bureaucracy and unsupportive of new ideas? A system that can easily tame the likes of Anna Hazare and Dr. Kiran Bedi? Think again. As the Intelligence Bureau agent Khan tells Vidya Bagchi (Vidya Balan) in Kahaani, “This can be very dangerous”. Do you still insist? Then you may have to prepare an arduous journey like going through 36 chambers of Shaolin. Question is: what do you learn in the first chamber? Well, here is a good candidate: How to be invisible. Every crazy system has ingenious ways of making you part of its extended family. So, one of the best ways to avoid getting crushed is by becoming invisible. Let’s see how using the Hollywood movie “One flew over the cuckoo’s nest”.

Randle McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) finds himself in a mental hospital and realizes that the whole system is torturing its patients through therapy sessions and subtle humiliation. McMurphy rebels against the system loudly and gets himself trapped in the process. What do you expect happens to McMurphy? Hospital management ensures that his brain gets appropriate treatment and becomes numb. Nothing new in this. This is what is expected from a crazy system. So what does one do?

Well, there is another dumb looking character in this movie whom McMurphy calls “Chief”. The tall Red Indian Chief (Will Sampson) is not part of any of the therapy sessions. Why? Because he is deaf & dumb. Or so everybody believes… until one day when McMurphy and Chief are sitting next to each other, McMurphy offers a gum to Chief. And Chief says, “Thank you”. And that is when McMurphy realizes Chief is not dumb. He is normal like anyone else but pretending to be deaf and dumb. Why? Because he can remain in the background – almost invisible – until he can figure his way out of the crazy system. And Chief does find his way at the end to escape the mental hospital.

Does this strategy work in real life? Yes, it does. Edgar Schein, Professor Emeritus at MIT, discovered this strategy when he talked to prisoners of war in Korea. He says in an interview, “In organizations, individual learners lie, cheat, go underground - they do whatever they have to remain invisible. And in large organizations, going underground isn’t that difficult.” Remember what Patrick’s boss in IBM, Jim Canavino, Senior VP for Strategy and Development, told him about their Internet project? “You know, we could set up some kind of department and give you a title”, Canavino said, “But that would be a bad idea. Try to keep this grassroots thing going as long as you can.” Here is a rare case where boss helps you remain invisible – away from the management review meetings. Do you work on a sunset product? Congratulations! You are already in the first chamber. Make the most of it.

In the world of Facebook and Twitter “learn to be invisible” may look just as bad as suggesting “learn not to breathe”. Don’t be so sure. Andrew Wiles used a brilliant ploy to fool “the system” before embarking on a solitary journey in his attic to solve Fermat’s Last Theorem. Instead of sending one long paper to a journal from the results he had before embarking on the journey, he split them into several smaller chunks and kept sending one small paper at regular intervals. “The system” kept thinking Andrew is slowing down.

Now, please go ahead and conclude what I am up to based on my Facebook status!

Image source: http://nativeamericanactors.tumblr.com/post/11095074717/will-sampson-with-jack-nicholson-in-one-flew-over - McMurphy discovers Chief is not dumb

Catalign Quarterly - March 2012

Catalign Quarterly is an attempt to put together insights relevant for fostering a culture of innovation in organizations. This is the second issue of the Quarterly.

Theme for this Quarterly is “Intuition & innovation”. There are five articles in this issue. The first article is a book review of what I believe is a landmark book on the theme of this issue. It is written by Nobel Laureate psychologist Daniel Kahneman. The second article is on the legendary mathematician Srinivas Ramanujan and marvels & flaws of his intuition. The third article explores the relationship between creativity and intuition as discussed by Kahneman. The fourth article explores a classic bias called fundamental attribution error through the question "Is poor idea flow a people issue or situation issue?" Finally, the fifth article looks at the metaphor of weighing scale as a type of measure and its relationship with culture change.

Hope you find some of the articles helpful.

1. Book review: Thinking, fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman (Nobel Laureate and the living authority on the subject)

2. The marvels and flaws of expert intuition: story of Ramanujan’s first letter to Hardy

3. Is creative thinking an oxymoron?

4. Poor idea flow and fundamental attribution error

5. Weighing scale, intelligent gossip and the culture of innovation

Next quarterly will be based on the theme: Design of strategy as if implementation matter.

Poor idea flow and the fundamental attribution error

Imagine you are looking at the flow of ideas coming into your idea portal. You see the rate of ideas languishing for the past several months. What will you conclude? Will you, for example, feel that the employees don’t know how to think creatively and need some kind of training on tools / techniques for generating ideas? In case you feel this way, you may be committing what psychologists call fundamental attribution error. It is a deep-rooted inclination to attribute people’s behaviour to the way they are rather than the situation they are in. In this article, let’s explore how lack of ideas could potentially be a situation problem.

A few months ago I facilitated an idea generation session for a corporate finance team. The expectations weren’t high. Traditionally finance folks are the low scorers on the innovation activity. We thought of first gathering “top of the hat” ideas and then after 10-15 minutes when we begin to get long silence breaks, prompt with some leading questions. The session began with the manager highlighting the importance of small ideas and how when added up they can cumulatively create a large impact. It was pointed out that one of the participants has submitted an idea in the past and was recognized by the organization. And then the idea generation session began. And to my surprise, it continued uninterrupted for the next hour when 53 ideas were gathered. Many ideas were built on top of each other’s ideas. At the end, every participant among the 18 had given at least one idea.

What happened here? Did the participants become more creative? Did they learn any tool? No. What happened was that a space & time was created where idea generation was the primary focus. There were no other distractions. People were told by their manager that small ideas are welcome. And in this case people believed him. What changed was the situation not the people.

There could be several reasons why ideas don’t come into your suggestion box or portal. Here are a few:

Unresponsive: The system could be slow in responding to submitted ideas. For example, it might be several months before you receive any response. You lose faith.

Lack of transparency: Similar to Roger Smith’s experience you might get a “not selected” response with no further explanation. You don’t even know if there is a well-defined criterion and if so, it is being used.

Conflicting message: On the one hand, the campaigns may be saying that small ideas are welcome. One the other hand, top management rewards / mentions only BIG ideas. You doubt whether you have any BIG idea.

There are several ways to tackle these specific issues. Scott Cook of Intuit talks about how an environment of experimentation shifts the decision making related to idea selection from politics and power point to validation through low-cost high-speed experiments. This reduces the burden on the idea selectors and improves responsiveness. Similarly, organizations use social networking features – peers commenting, doing “like” on ideas to improve both transparency and speed of idea movement.

This does not mean that tools / techniques for idea generation are unimportant. In the organizational innovation ecosystem I identified learning & development as one of the five key dimensions. Besides, training programs also tackle the situation problem by bringing the people out of their cubicle and creating a space conducive for idea generation – irrespective of the tool / technique. The point is that we sometimes view training programs as the primary lever for improving innovativeness and ignore the other dimensions.

Next time when you label something as a people problem, ask yourself, "Am I committing the fundamental attribution error?"

Related articles:

1. It's the situation, not the person, 3:23min video by Dan Heath (YouTube)

2. Fundamental Attribution Error, wikipedia.org

Is creative thinking an oxymoron?

Eckhart Tolle quotes Einstein in his bestseller “The power of now” that goes – “Thinking plays only a subordinate part in the brief decisive phase of the creative act itself”. And then Tolle writes further, “So I would say that the simple reason why the majority of scientists are not creative is not because they don’t know how to think but because they don’t know how to stop thinking!” Contrast this with Edward de Bono, famous for his work on lateral thinking. De Bono is the proponent of creativity as a learnable skill and his thinking tools are part of school curriculum in over twenty countries. de Bono says, “Creativity should be producible on demand. Formation and design of new ideas can’t merely be left to chance.” Is creative thinking a skill that can be learnt like de Bono says or is thinking a hindrance to creativity as Tolle says? Let’s explore.

Let me start with one of my favourite stories on creativity in the last 25 years – Andrew Wiles proving Fermat’s Last Theorem on 15^th Oct 1994 – a famous mathematical problem open for 350 years. This is how Andrew views the process leading to the moment of insight: “Often you write something down to clarify your thoughts. In particular when you’ve reached a real impasse, when there’s a real problem that you want to overcome, then the routine kind of (mathematical) thinking is of no use to you. Leading up to that kind of new idea there has to be a long period of tremendous focus on the problem without any distraction. You have to think about nothing but that problem – just concentrate on it. Then you stop. Afterwards there seems to be a kind of period of relaxation during which the subconscious appears to take over, and it’s during that time that some new insight comes.”

Andrew’s version of the moment of insight looks closer to what Tolle & Einstein are saying. In particular, Andrew is saying that there comes a time when one type of thinking (he calls it routine kind of thinking) stops and another type of thinking (he calls subconscious thinking) takes over. Daniel Kahneman calls the former – slow mode of thinking or system-2 thinking or rule governed thinking. And the latter – fast mode of thinking or system-1 thinking or intuitive thinking.

The intuitive thinking involves brain reaching out to a vast associative network of ideas already present in our memory. In the last one year before Andrew published his final proof, he had been struggling to solve one glitch in the proof that was discovered by one of the manuscript reviewers. The technique that finally helped Andrew overcome the issue was something Andrew had worked on and abandoned a few years ago i.e. the technique was present in his vast associative network of ideas all the time he was struggling. He remembers the moment, “I couldn’t understand how I’d missed it.”

Kahneman advocates following definition of creativity attributed to Sarnoff Mednick: Creativity is associative memory that works exceptionally well. Mednick’s definition of creativity connects both Tolle and de Bono. When Tolle says that thinking should stop, I feel he means that the interference due to the slow mode of thinking (system-2 or rule governed) should stop and let the intuitive thinking take over. Similarly, de Bono’s six thinking hats technique is trying to help you reach out to those areas of your associative network that you will not go to in the normal course.

In short, whether creative thinking is an oxymoron would depend upon the type of thinking involved.

Sources:

Einstein quote from “The power of now” by Eckhart Tolle, p 20

Andrew Wiles quote from “Fermat’s last theorem” by Simon Singh, p228

Kahneman’s definition of creativity is from his “Thinking, fast and slow” p 67

Impossible problems and successful approaches: story of Fermat’s last theorem (my blog, Oct 2008)

Technical Leadership: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

I was invited at an IT services company in Bangalore to give a talk on technical leadership last Friday. During the talk as well as in the Q&A session several questions were raised. I realized that there is a need for a platform where engineers transitioning from being a technical expert to becoming a technical leader can turn to for raising doubts, discussion and guidance. I also realized that there are several people out there, some of whom I know personally, who are in a better position to answer the questions than me.

With this background, here is an attempt to create an FAQ forum for questions related to technical leadership. To get started let me use following definition of a technical leader - we can always question the definition later. A technical leader is someone whose sphere of influence due to his technical expertise is significantly greater than his span of control. As per this definition, engineers on the technical ladder (Product / Solution Architects, Principal / Chief Engineers, Technology Consultants, Scientists) are technical leaders. Moreover, managers who are able to influence people beyond their team with their technical expertise are also technical leaders.

Please give your views by clicking on any specific question and then adding your comment. You can also raise a new question.

FAQ:

1. In IT services companies, one needs to move from project to project - each lasting only a few years. How does one balance breadth vs depth?

2. I like to work alone and not worry about other peoples’ salary / leave etc. Does it mean I should opt for technical career path?

3. I am a Java person with 6 years of experience. What can I expect to be doing 4 years from now? Where do I begin?

4. Will the IT industry in India need more managers or more technical leaders in future?

5. Technology such as .Net or Java changes very fast. How do I cope up?