Love your bureaucracy

Donald Keough’s commandment number 8 for business failure is Love your bureaucracy (the other two so far are ’send mixed messages’ and ‘be afraid of the future’).  How often does the corporatization of a successful business snuff out entrepreneurial spirit under the burden of bureaucracy?  And the more bureaucratic layers introduced the more competent managers think they are doing to safeguard the future.  And yet nothing could be further from the truth.  I like the idea that leadership requires two definitional competencies:  entrepreneurial spirit and corporate discipline.  Too much discipline and you might as well work for a bank.  Too little and … well you will end up working for the bank anyway when they foreclose on you due to poor cash flow and control of costs.  What is to be done then? 

As with all good things there must be a balance.  The greatest factor working against you in trying to get the balance right is that human nature loves the ’security’ that bureaucracy gives you.  So too do regulatory authorities.  This security however is based on the fallacy of control and bureaucracy feeds that fallacy.  Jack Welsh reckoned you needed to hunt down bureaucracy and kill it wherever you find it.  I reckon precisely because it gives you a false sense of security and uses up valuable time that would be better spent on generating better relationships with your staff, your customers and other stakeholder groups. Leadership is inspiring.  And as long as you can find it under the bureaucratic layers of the corporate world … be inspired.

Send mixed messages

Donald Keough’s 9th commandment on how to fail at business is ‘Send mixed messages’.  How often do you encounter that in an organization?  Everytime a consultant walks through the door there is a new model or business philosophy.  Did you know that rationality is defined in terms of consistency?  Conversely irrationality is based on inconsistency.  When you look at it like that it’s easy to see why some strategies become irrational as they take on a schizophrenic personality of their own.  Leadership depends on consistency and with it comes a rationality that attracts people to you.  The past weeks have seen turmoil in financial markets the likes of which have not been experienced since the 1920’s.  Now more than ever leaders are expected to present a consistent, and with it rational approach, to business.  Such leadership is inspirational.  Be inspired.

How to fail at business ….

Don’t you just love it when someone takes exactly the opposite approach to business enterprise as everyone was expecting?  Donald R. Keough, a former President of Coca Cola, was approached on his retirement to hit the speaker circuit to talk about how to succeed at business.  Now considering how lucrative the speaker circuit is in the USA imagine the response when he politely turned the offer down?  His rationale was that there is no such thing – there is no magic formula or bullet for success and what works for one company may not necessarily work for another.   What he was prepared to talk about however was how to fail at business and he promptly wrote a book ‘The Ten Commandments for Business Failure’.  Oprah would be impressed. Commandment No 10 – I’m going to work backwards – is ‘Be afraid of the future’.  Leadership requires that even if the future does scare you the trick is to embrace it and to use that negative energy in a positive way.  There may be few certainties about the future but equally so focussing on the past is guaranteed to get you know where fast.  Leadership is inspiring.  Be inspired.