Small, sometimes entrepreneurial companies (small and entrepreneurial are not the same) enjoy ways of working that are fit for their size. People often wear multiple hats, decision making can be fast, people’s commitment and engagement can be high (not necessarily, but very often the case) and many other characteristics that may shape a market (and organizational) advantage.

As they grow, the biggest challenge is to maintain agility whilst increasing complexity. Without critical thinking, the small company, growing towards a bigger one, will soon start to replicate ‘big company processes and systems’ because they are the mirror and the (false) aspiration. In my consulting work, I see the growing frustration of people losing the benefits of the agility every day.

The worst case is in the middle: growing to a stage not big enough to benefit from economies of scale and a ‘big company’ operating system, and not small enough to remain agile and (potentially) entrepreneurial. The middle is bad territory, a Bermuda Triangle space, a recipe for the worst of all worlds.

The transitional stages (journey) need to be crafted with care. Extrapolations from the past should be avoided. A company ‘in transition’ is at a very delicate stage, possibly very rich. The leadership for the transition may be different from the one for other stages. Travellers and Cartographers may be more important than Managers and Marketers.

The journey cannot be blind. Early warning signs of ’big company syndrome’ need to be taken seriously. People should be vigilant. The trouble is, growth is contagious and exciting. Critical thinking may be in short supply. Suddenly you may have ‘a small version of a big company’. And this is a bad situation.

A growth stage has choices: aspire to a carbon copy of the big company or reinvent, redefine, protect the agility and entrepreneurial spirit and be different. Once the cloning of ‘big company’ has started, there is no way back.

Leading growth is an extraordinary skill. Critical thinkers must be welcome at any cost.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Watch our Feed Forward Webinar Series ^[1], which looks at the need to manage our organizations differently in these Covid times.

 

These 5 webinars see Dr Leandro Herrero and his team of organizational architects, debunk uncontested assumptions and uncover the alternatives, whilst considering why this is even more relevant today in the current exceptional environment.

We have been running enterprises with very tired concepts of empowerment, ownership, accountability and other little challenged pillars.  The truth is that there is mythology embedded in all those concepts. Old traditional management thinking will be unsuitable to win in the post Covid19 scenario. 

 

1. The Myths of Change ^[1]
2. Can you put your organization through an MRI? ^[1]
3. The Myths of Company Culture ^[1]
4. The Myths of Management ^[1]
5. High tech, high touch in the digitalization era ^[1]

 

 

Discovering’ an old article that I wrote years ago, when I used to have a management column in a monthly pharmaceutical magazine, I can see how some of the themes that were pertinent then, are still relevant today. Remember the noise about the ‘knowledge economy’? Who would challenge this today?

Here is the story I told then. A rich American lady visits the most famous hat maker in Paris. She sees a beautiful, exquisite, long ribbon and immediately falls in love with it. The hat maker takes the ribbon in his hands, does a few twists with it and creates a stunning hat. Brilliant! The lady grabs it immediately. How much is it? she says. Five thousand Euros, the hat maker says. Five thousand Euros! the lady exclaims, but, it’s just a ribbon! Madam, the hat maker says, the ribbon is free.

The consulting world, where I navigate today, is a terrible place for hat makers. I’ll explain. ‘Consulting’ has developed a market focused on the quantifiable delivery of ribbons (pink, red, small, big, 20, 200, 1 consultant, 3 consultants, 300 consultants, 300 hours etc.…) ‘Delivery’ has become part of the language.

I am a Procurement Department’s nightmare because I challenge the daily rate, the number of days, the number of members of my team, the quantification of the ribbons. I provide the knowledge and the skills to work together with the client focused on an outcome. Madam, the workshop is free. I can understand, that if you sell boxes of biscuits, you would do so on the basis of the number of boxes and the number of biscuits, and, perhaps, the cost of the lorry to get the biscuits to you. But I challenge the application of ‘the delivery model’ to strategic advice, leadership development, organizational strategy and working closely with a team to make it successful. But this is only a 20-page report! Madam, the report is free. But this is only half a day with the team! Madam the meeting is free.

Am I alone in this? Surgeons, schools fees, works of arts, brand creation, executive search, these are examples of work done and priced on value, not on effort and ‘units of work’.

Just because the number of hours, number of days and number of anything is easily quantifiable, whilst  ‘value’ is much harder to measure, it does not mean that we have to take the easy route.

Starting with ‘the value question’ is the right start: employees, partners, activities etc. When I got immersed in Decision Analysis many moons ago, I learnt that people can distinguish well between preferences, and that, in doing so they are ‘measuring’ their reality.  I prefer this kind of value to that kind of value is as solid as a numerical comparison. It’s worth making the effort of comparing the value of various options: of doing A vs. doing B; of doing X vs. not doing it at all. I have come back to the ‘Madam the ribbon is free’ approach many times in my life. It has always kept me on track to keep my focus on value, to see it, to smell it, to decide on it. Not necessarily on numbers.

Surprise is a powerful strategy in its own right. Surprise means being ahead of the game, being further ahead than others thought you would be, being able to pull out an organizational solution, disclose the next new idea when nobody was expecting one, take a rabbit out of the hat, bring to the market something that nobody has asked for.

Surprise the market, surprise your boss, surprise yourself, surprise your followers, surprise your teams, surprise the guys in corporate. All of them.

I know what you are thinking. Your boss does not like surprises. In fact, there are two types of bosses who don’t want surprises. Type one is the one who does not want bad surprises. Type two, the one who does not want any surprise at all, good or bad. Type one is understood; nobody wants bad news. You would not set out to surprise with bad news. Not on purpose!  The latter is a tricky one, because there are many people who, in fact, hate unpredictability. For them ‘meeting the budget’ is better than being surprised with savings. In other words, predictable numbers are better than unpredictable ones, even if these are better numbers. If you head a cost centre, such as R&D, spending every penny or cent may be ‘better’ than producing ‘an under-spend’. I’ve seen people labelled as bad managers by not spending what they said they would. If you don’t understand this, you may not have run one of these. Markets also like predictability. Investors like your accuracy. The whole industry of ‘fixed mortgages’ is based on the beauty and comfort of predictability. Surprising needs guts.

I hear all that. Yet, I will repeat myself. Surprise the market, surprise your boss, surprise yourself, surprise your followers, surprise your teams, surprise the guys in corporate. I am confident that you know what I mean.

The trade offs are: predictability and safe journey, or surprise and leadership. Nobody can argue against safe journeys, so you will be forgiven for ‘meeting expectations’. I personally dislike the ‘exceeding expectations’ expression. It sounds like heavy rain.  I prefer surprise, regardless of expectations.

Modern and not so modern ‘social movements’ with or a without business propositions are portrayed as a concerted and positioned philosophy first, from which then, the ‘movement’ (and the business) takes shape. Translation: philosophy first, movement and practicalities, and business follow.

Take Uber; democratization of transportation in cities, competing with old fashioned taxi monopolies, disruption of a business model supported by technology. So the story reads.

Zipcar. Cars waiting for you in dedicated places, you rent by the hour, you return the car. Democratization of transport again, technology enabled do-it-yourself going from A to B by car without owning it. Disruptive model, changing the world of personal travel.

The so-called ‘sharing economy’ is another example. You own less and less and share more and more, from lawn mowers to anything. This is less consumerism, greater sustainability. Great.

Airbnb. Adios hotels; book a room, an apartment, a villa, anywhere. More disruption of the model. New concept and new philosophy embraced by thousands of followers.

All these are good examples of disruptive business models and, very often, are portrayed as ‘philosophy’, a matter of principles, an indication of the change in the world, a new lens, a clever and new worldview. Again, philosophy first and then the translation.

Nothing further from the truth. Most of these ‘disruptions’ were born out of a necessity with little philosophical, worldview, of the type ‘this will change the world for good’. Airbnb’s original members struggled to pay the rent and offered rooms. How’s that for a ‘change the world philosophy’? Uber, often portrayed as the mother of all evils (for taxi companies in cities, that is) and ‘sweatshops on wheels’, has created a lot of personal freedom (in hours to work, for example) and work flexibility. The ‘I am my own boss’ philosophy (‘don’t you see this is the thing that new generations want?’) plus ‘anything is possible with digital’(apps), plus creative or not so creative disruption came later.

The real stories are more prosaic than the portrayed philosophies in a disruptive world. Incidentally, all of them are more or less represented as enabled by incredible disruptive technologies, when technology in most of them is not really a big deal.

These examples are a mere replication of the way we shape our lives. We think that we have a theory first and then ‘we put it into practice’. The theory is the clever bit, or the romantic, or the save-the-world bit. But most of the time, we have practices first and then we extract a theory that explains them.

My experience with entrepreneurs to whom we attribute visionary, change the world philosophies, is that they are the first to be surprised about the attribution. Most want to solve a problem. Period. Not to change the world. This being said, many also love the post-hoc flattering attribution of Socratic and semi-messianic visions.

 

My ideal modern organization has different characters on the payroll. If there is a payroll. These are three of them

1. The craftsman

Perhaps nobody better than Richard Sennett  (Sociology, LSE, Humanities New York) has described  it. Himself a good craftsman of ideas, he explains the traits: skills and care to make things well, not necessarily for its immediate utilitarian reasons, with focus on detail, perhaps on beauty, or perfection, whether in a pottery workshop or a lab. What distinguishes them most is their motivation for life time learning. I imagine strategy making as a craft, more pottery than spreadsheets. I have been using the term ‘crafting’ for many moons. I hope that the use of the language makes me be one.

2. The entrepreneur

They create things, not necessarily from zero, but look for alternatives, try, experiment and above all take risks. The term is associated  with taking initiative. A passive entrepreneur checking in from 9 to 5 is an oxymoron. I want entrepreneurs on the payroll. I imagine a company of entrepreneurs, and its leadership with the sole goal of creating space for them. I imagine the question ‘how many employees do you have?’ changed into ‘how many entrepreneurs do you have?’

3. The activist

Which includes the word ‘act’. Therefore not Wait-ivists, Later-ivists or once-we-have-aligned-all-stakeholders-ivists. They understand the imperative of action; the concept of ‘agency’: take control, be in charge of destiny, express themselves. For the activist, permission was never granted, it was always taken.

OK, three more tomorrow.

I read a while ago this story. Within the highly structured and hierarchical (by design) Catholic church, a Religious Order (an internal formal community of brothers)  had been waiting for centuries for Rome to lift the ‘in excommunicationem’ status (ex-communication) or maximum penalty for gross deviation from the dogma, of one of his medieval brothers, top German theologian at the time, once high teacher and scholar in La Sorbonne in Paris. He had been, and is still today, highly regarded and influential across a broad spectrum of spiritual practices, beyond the Catholic, but had had over centuries the big weight of his unorthodox thinking and preaching on his shoulders. His battles with the official defenders of the orthodoxy only ended by his natural dead, fortunately before the planned final ideological tribunal in Avignon.

Just very recently, a ‘more friendly’ Vatican new administration, and after a polite reminder by the new Head of the Order, replied finally that there was no case for the ‘excommunication’ to be lifted because, in fact, the brother preacher at La Sorbonne had never been  excommunicated in the first place. The news apparently took centuries to reach.

Now imagine that, in real world present day, you were waiting for a permission to act. OK, not as historically glorious as the German medieval brother. Let’s say more prosaic waiting from the boss or boss’ bosses. Imagine that you get the news that the permission is not coming because you never needed it; you had that already.

Would that not be sort of embarrassing?

OK, don’t wait for natural dead as the brother in Avignon. Get up and move. Catch up with the time lost.

Here is a list of permissions that you should check whether you actually never needed them. Please do so  before brain degeneration (or pension) kicks in:

1. To push the boundaries and abandon default positions
2. To open Pandora boxes, to uncover mysteries and deal with cans of worms
3. To get fellow travellers not in your teams, not in your formal structures, working with you
4. To get ready for the unpredictable and prepare yourself with constant learning
5. To make it happen, and fix it later
6. To tell others to tell others to work across boundaries
7. To do great things that are not in your job description
8. To engage other bosses not in your direct hierarchy line
9. To initiate change and create traction
10. To talk, engage, team up, with absolutely anybody, anywhere in the organization regardless rank and geographies. Use of the phone included.

 

 

Maybe, just maybe, we don’t  need ‘managers’ and ‘employees’, as in generals and troops.

My strong bet is for a company of entrepreneurs on the payroll. Yes, they will need to be organised, yes they will need to follow principles, but they will behave as entrepreneurs, people who know what is a stake, waste no time and have what Nassim Taleb would call ‘skin in the game’. They will move fast in failure, they will start again and will have a so called ‘winning attitude’ regardless.

See I am not talking as ‘behaving as if it was your company’, a ridiculous frame created by those who really own the company for those who don’t.

A company of entrepreneurs is very different from a company of employees who work nine to five, have continuous conference calls and are, above all, very very very busy. There is not time for busy-ness in entrepreneurship, they are really busy doing stuff.

Trouble is, traditional management may have some additional problems managing entrepreneurs, whilst generals and troops are far more predictable.

A company of entrepreneurs, or a company of volunteers, that’s it.

But would entrepreneurs want to be in the payroll? Well, test it. But beware, a company made of entrepreneurs looks more like a host and less like Situation Room. Leading as host vs leading as Chief of Staff.

There is no moral judgment assumed in what is good or bad. It depends (I hate this phrase). If you have a slow moving tanker, you need employees and a system to change the oil from time to time. If you have (or want) a fast paced organization, mariners, captains and oil-changing engineers won’t do it.

I know, I know, too black and white

I still bet for the entrepreneurs on the payroll.

The old saying, ‘if you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there’ (Lewis Carroll dixit) its often invoked as an example of why you need a clear strategy, a clear direction. And who could argue?

The problem I find in many organizations is that they spend ridiculous time ensuring they know exactly where to go. By the time they move, that place may not be there anymore. The future (the market, the competitors, the ranking of companies, the product breakthrough) is a moving target. You need to move whilst figuring out where to move. That way you may catch up and arrive  first.

Being stuck is a state of mind, a state of the organization and its people, that is worse than being wrong. Being wrong has a chance of having some people pointing you to a door open, to leave, to change. Being stuck may not even get attention. People may think that you are thinking! Fools.

Barack Obama said: ‘If you’re walking down the right path and you’re willing to keep walking, eventually you’ll make progress’. I say, you don’t even need the word ‘right’. Just walk. Move. Don’t be stuck. And you’ll make good progress.

By moving you have a much more chance to discover the right path, and the wrong one, and you’ll have time to discuss their merits. Whilst moving, that is.

Reid Hoffman, father of Linkedin amongst other little adventures, said that ‘An entrepreneur is someone who jumps off a cliff and builds a plane on the way down’. Although I question the state of sobriety in which the statement was made, it makes the point that even in a bad path you can construct something good. But you need to move. As in falling off the cliff. Often, that kind of move.

Nothing happens in stuck mode.

Experimentation is the antidote. I am talking about experimentation of ideas, of organizational models, of access to market, of types of people you hire, of product and prototypes if this is what you do, of different and perhaps not-so-neat processes, of devolving decision making to people who have never made that kind of decision, of management teams with members who do not report to the boss, of holiday policies, of something you have never tried. For example. Al that is moving.

Thinking about it is not moving. We spend 50% of the time thinking of doing, 30% planning for doing, 20% telling people what will do, 10% doing it. That is called a good, solid, strategic planning. Solid and heavy. Exactly what you need to have around your neck when swimming.

 

 

 

 

Each large or not that large organization needs one. This tribe is composed of people who have a natural ability to see different points of view at the same time, who can hold and contemplate the rationale of two opposite positions without palpitations, who aim at getting things done above getting things completely understood and settled; people who can bridge between strong feelings and strong interests, not all of them going in the same direction. They bring together A and B worldviews. They have not attended the Conflict Resolution and Negotiation Skills courses. They are the courses.

This tribe is scattered around the organizations. Some of these Brokers are sitting in project teams, or a Vice President chair, or in team leadership or managing the Post Room.

There is a trick. It’s hard to identify them by their physical appearance. There is no secret handshake either. Some are young, some are not that young. But if you think a bit seriously about the characteristics above, you’ll be surprised how many people know them.

It would be good to get to know them, to see how they do it, what it takes to be a member of the tribe. Oh! Another complication. This is not a formal Tribe with chiefs and Indians. Don’t mention the tribe. They may not even know that they have been born to it. They are a sort of invisible nomadic tribe, an anthropologist’s nightmare.

You can always rely on them. And you should. Tip on how to start. It goes like this: ‘Jim, can you help?’ But you could also, and you should, create these capabilities in the organization.

Try this. Imagine that interdisciplinary project team composed not by ‘team members’ but brokers. What would they need as training, for example?

Brokers are a mixture of organizational glue, oxygen, bridge builders, fire-fighters and distinguished ,non institutionalized members of a True and Reconciliation Commission.

How do you hire brokers? Find people who have brokered things. My suggestion is that you start by looking into what these people may have done before in the church, kids sports, social groups, neighbourhood associations, anywhere else in the Civic Society. This is of far greater predictive value than a product-business-development-deal.

Note deal making is close to brokerage. They overlap. But deal making is by definition focused on a particular outcome, a deal. Brokerage may or may not end up in a deal, it’s more the work of the engineer division building the provisional or stable bridge that can be crossed again and again and, perhaps, one day facilitate a deal.

The best Tribe. They are a gem.

The job description is dead. It is replaced by a Lego box, no instructional manual and a map.

Welcome to the company. Good to have you. Your business card says Director of Business Development but this is only in case you meet another Director of Business Development somewhere so you don’t feel too lonely.

Your role is to get this Lego box of pieces called possibilities and build something. And then another thing. Here is the map. We are going somewhere around here, and if you could help us to figure out how to get there safe, fast and profitable, it would be much appreciated. Mind you, the ‘somewhere around here’ may change a bit so you’ll have to be flexible and prepared to abandon the half made helicopter Lego model, and perhaps use some of the pieces for a submarine.

We hired you because you are, or we think you are, an entrepreneur. We don’t hire employees with background and skills anymore. We hire entrepreneurs with some background and skills. Which means, entrepreneur as in ‘undertaking’ something, you know, actually doing something, as supposed to thinking of doing. Also we love an old version of the term used in France somewhere in the 18^th Century that says entrepreneur is ‘bearer of risk’.

So, just for the record. We don’t mean busy-ness, we mean business. We don’t mean any risk, we don’t mean chaos and we don’t mean permanent state of blue sky thinking. In fact, we are not much in the sky, but with our feet on the ground.

As you will find out in the next hour or so, your business card title bears no consequence internally, where colleagues do many things that the business card never says.

Here is the credit card, the toilets are next to the left and then right, build your Lego, get moving, help us in the travel and have some fun. By the way, these are the non negotiable behaviours in this journey: (specific list to continue here)

Commentary. No standard, inflexible, pre-defined job description has a place today in the knowledge economy (agrrr, sorry, the term is so old…) We are kidding ourselves. I personally would not hire anybody who is determined to follow their role description to the letter. So, whoever things like me, can we please stop writing those jobs descriptions as a shopping list for the supermarket?

The push back I get frequently is: surely you don’t mean any job description? To what I tend to twist the question and ask to list the jobs that could not follow the above rule. Usually, the list contains the ones that are most likely to be taken over by the digital revolution.

This position is not anti-skills or experts either! If I have a brain tumor, I want a neurosurgeon, not a paramedic. But, no apologies, I want accountants who can spell passion, passionate business developers who can spell spreadsheet, HR people who can spell R&D and R&D people who can sell something. It’s 2016, if you noticed.

Just get lots of Lego Boxes of Possibilities, some maps and good leaders, and forget the Quantum-Physics-like Competence System. It looks good on powerpoint and impresses the CEO, but it’s as useful as a little boat in a tsunami.

Entrepreneurs develop ideas and create a structure around them in order to achieve goals. As Seth Godin would say, they are not the same as freelancers who ‘keep hiring themselves’, no structure. The entrepreneur is by definition a builder.

Ownership culture aims and making employees see and behave as if they were the owners. But, most of the time, they are not

Volunteers do stuff because they want to, not because they are told to and simply obey orders that they may or not believe in. They don’t have to do it, but they do.

Soldiers receive orders and execute them. They don’t have to think about the philosophy behind or the merits of the orders

Old employee engagement: how to make happy soldiers

New employee engagement: how to manage a company of volunteers

Old Ownership culture: what would you do if this were your own company

New Ownership culture: it’s not your company, but you are an entrepreneur.

Nirvana 2016: a culture of entrepreneurship populated by volunteers, with no soldiers and not employee engagement pseudo-happiness, where the real owners let entrepreneurs flourish and volunteers to be.

 

 

Modern and not so modern ‘social movements’ with or a without business proposition are portrayed as a concerted and positioned philosophy first, from which then, the ‘movement’ (and the business) takes shape. Translation: philosophy first, movement and practicalities, and business follow.

Take Uber; democratization of transportation in cities, competing with old fashioned taxis monopolies, disruption of a business model supported by technology. So the story reads.

Zipcar. Cars waiting for you in dedicated places, you rent by the hour, you return the car. Democratisation of transport again, technology enabled do-it-yourself going from A to B by car without owning it. Disruptive model changing the world of personal travel.

The so called ‘sharing economy’ is another example. You own less and less and share more and more, from lawn mowersto anything. This is less consumerism, greater sustainability. Great.

Airbnb. Adios hotels; book a room, an apartment, a villa, anywhere. More disruption of the model. New concept and new philosophy embraced by thousands of followers.

All these are good examples of disruptive business models and, very often, are portrayed as ‘philosophy’, a matter of principles, an indication of the change in the world, a new lenses, a clever and new worldview. Again, philosophy first and then the translation.

Nothing further from the truth. Most of these ‘disruptions’ were born out of a necessity with little philosophical, worldview, of the type ‘this will change the world for good’. Airbnb original members struggled to pay the rents and offered rooms. What’s that for a ‘change the world philosophy’? Uber, often portrayed as the mother of all evils (for taxi companies in cities, that is) and ‘sweatshops on wheels’, has created a lot of personal freedom (in hours to work, for example) and work flexibility. The ‘I am my boss’ philosophy (‘don’t you see this is the thing that new generations want?’) plus ‘anything is possible with digital’(apps), plus creative or not so creative disruption came later.

The real stories are more prosaic than the portrayed philosophies in a disruptive world. Incidentally, all of them are more or less represented as enabled by incredible disruptive technologies, when technology in most of them is not really a big deal.

These examples are a mere replication of the way we shape our lives. We think hat we have a theory first and them ‘we put it in practice’. The theory is the clever bit, or the romantic, or the save-the-world. But most of the time, we have practices first and then we extract a theory that explains them.

My experience with entrepreneurs to whom we attribute visionary, change the world philosophies is that they are the first surprised about the attribution. Most want to solve a problem. Period. Not to change the world. This being said, many also love the post-hoc flattering attribution of Socratic and semi-messianic visions.

 

 

 

Amongst my clients I have a good representation of ‘regulated industries’ such as pharmaceuticals and financial services. I, myself, spent many years in pharmaceuticals before founding the consulting group The Chalfont Project.

A typical expression from management in these industries has always been: ‘We can’t do X,Y, Z because we are a regulated industry’. In my experience, nine out of ten of the times when the ‘regulated industry argument’ has been used, it has absolutely nothing to do with a regulatory issue. It is a default answer, a learnt answer repeated automatically, that tend to block good creative ideas and innovation. It’s a proxy for no. When I have encountered this, it has almost always been a case of managerial incompetence disguised as regulatory compliance.

I have often challenged my audience: where in the ‘regulations’ does it say that you always require 20 signature approvals for a document? Where does it say that you need 3 months to decide Y? Where that you must have al those heavy processes, some of them clearly redundant? Where in the regulations, indeed, does it say that decisions will not followed up, that people will hold on just in case the decision doesn’t stick? Where do you see the obligation to have massive monthly reports quarterly reports and reports on reports? Do ‘the regulations’ say anything about having an incentive scheme that seems written by a quantum physicist? Perhaps the size of your powerpoints deck? Minimum a terabyte? Etc.

The worse that may happen next is the smiling or even laughter, as if this was a bad joke, or a clever trick by the consultant speaker.

No, regulations are there to regulate ethics, keep standards of quality and safety and, in pharmaceuticals, to ensure public health. Sloppiness, slowness, tiredness, busyness, complexity, process exhaustion, imitative fatigue and the agility of a Panzer Division are not intended goals of regulations.

‘We are a regulated industry’ is a cheap, easy hiding.

Every organization, from a super-regulated industry to the opposite, can have speed, agility, innovation and entrepreneurial ethos. Even the Army.

I know, I know, you work on that software start-up and you don’t know what the hell we are talking about. Never mind. Keep going.

It was a cruel joke form the times of Re-engineering. ‘Here it goes Joe’, started the joke. Then the quote: not 20 years of experience, but one year of…

Cruel as real. No matter how hard and uncomfortable it may be, the name of the game is reinvention. I used to think that I was pushing this envelope too much, too far. I used to be challenged by people in manufacturing running efficacious repetitive process; by other successful leaders in financial institutions and pharmaceuticals saying’ we can’t be too creative; we are regulated’; by sensible clients saying ‘we don’t want to reinvent the wheel’. I used to be told that I seemed to preach change for the sake of it. And I did retreat a bit.

However, as I grow up (it was my birthday yesterday, fast to adolescence now), I am becoming more radical. Radical, from ‘root’ in Latin. Not radical as in blind contrarian. I think the Battle is one of ‘New Ideas in Action’. The late nineties ‘Learning Organization’ is not dead. What it has changed is the way of Learning. The most urgent learning task today is unlearning. It is Dee Hock’s old visionary quote: ‘The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out’.

People ‘with experience’ are still needed, big time. But show me ‘people with experience who can unlearn fast’, or people ‘who can question the experience’, or people hired for their experience who are prepared to shake up the experience, to the extent of, if needed, leaving the experience at the door. Then I am OK with the experience. Sure. If you want to fly a plane, you need pilots with a licence. But if this is where your thinking stops, I fear for you.

I rate good leadership by the amount of spontaneous, verbal reference to previous experience. Inverse correlation, that is. When somebody shoots ‘when I was in X, we did’ or ‘when I was in Y that happened’ at a suspiciously frequent rate per minute, I feel I am listening to personal War Stories, which may provide some comfort, but leave me restless and unsure about the future.

Maybe the wheel needs to be reinvented a little bit. How about 2015, the year of the Reinvention of Wheels? Radical new management need, err, experienced radicals.

PS. Reinventing the wheel is painful when you have a garage full of wheels. I make the point of starting any public or in-company presentation from scratch all the time. Sure, I recycle old slides, but never copy an old presentation and re-name. It’s personal. I could not bear the repetition. And I get god wheels out most of the time.

As Woody Allen said, showing up is 80% of  life. The bookshelves, digital or otherwise, are full of ‘How-To-Succeed-In’ stuff. Some of that advice can be classified as ‘The Mechanics from A to B’. It goes like this: have a vision, know where you are going (here is where usually people inject the famous ‘otherwise any road will get you there’) have a plan, execute the plan. Done.

Then there is the other lot of advice that focuses on Passion: ‘have passion, do something your are passionate about, without passion, forget it’.

The first type, the ‘vision + passion + do’,  is ridiculously obvious. But there is a caveat. The obvious comes from the mechanics. It’s the equivalent of ‘How to succeed in having breakfast’. It will read like this: make sure you have an alarm on, wake up, put your sleepers on, walk downstairs, open the fridge…’ etc.

So where is the caveat? Well, you actually have to do those things. Thinking of doing, planning for doing, writing the Strategic Plan for Doing, sometimes consumes 90% of the airtime. When you only get to the 10% for doing, you are already exhausted.

The second type of advise (‘have passion, be passionate, people who succeed do so because they have been passionate’)  is very attractive, very politically correct, and very, errr, passionate. Trouble is for every passionate people who succeeded there are tons of people who were equally passionate but didn’t. We don’t talk about the ones who didn’t, we write books about the ones who did succeed.

Be passionate, but actually, do something, work hard, don’t stop, be resilient and pray for luck. The question is whether passion is the engine, or a bonus. (PS: 99.99 % of my clients who are very successful, work extremely hard)

This is where the God’s joke comes in. Somebody goes to heaven looking very annoyed. Greeted by God, the man says: ‘All my life praying to you that I win the lottery, every day prayers, and here I am, done, I did not win anything!’. God, looking equally annoyed, says: ‘but you never bought a ticket!’

So, formula for success is, ‘Be passionate + Buy the ticket’. If you lack a bit of passion, buy the ticket anyway. Chances are, if you succeed, you’ll become passionate about what you do.

In any evolution of an organization from small to big, the list of challenges is never short.  I have written about this here.

A small company is not a big company in small. In the growth from small to big, the trouble is in the middle ^[2]

Every successful company’s growth contains seeds of failure. At some point, organizational complexity could outweigh the business benefits ^[3]

 Not only in the growth of the business itself, its operational aspect, but also in the organizational and human capital side, the world looks pretty different depending on your size. This may seems obvious, but people tend to look at this progression with uncritical eyes. In my consulting experience, people’s  thinking is often driven by events. Stuff happens, as Donald Rumsfeld would say. Then we think.

Sometimes business start with a few people. Success (or money) come in. Suddenly there are more people, then lots and lots more (how did that happen?). The next thing you see is an HR department.

Growth and increased complexity tend to point to the  direction of new support systems. The trouble is that all support (functional ) systems are meant to support something big, otherwise they will be small or non existing. So, if the model is ‘the big company’, then the ‘structure’ pops up: HR department, CFO, COO and other Cs, perhaps a Strategy Unit and a growing number of people with a title that starts with two letters: V.P. Companies with an overgrown population of Chiefs and rather invisible Indians are far from infrequent these days.

Managing complexity is not the same as managing a complicated business. A very conventional view, by no mans the only on this topic, is that complexity has to do with the number of components of the system, whilst complicated implies difficulty. It is a reasonable working differentiation. We can make something that is simple very complicated by applying solutions unfit for purpose. On the other hand, we can have something complex, well managed and not complicated.

Simplicity is not reduction to little bits. Reducing something complex to something simple is very politically and managerially correct, but it  adds more problems that it tries to solve. An elephant is an elephant, not a combination of legs, tusk and other parts that can be glued back together, once taken apart. What we need are Masters of Elephants, not Dissectors and Simplifiers unable to reconstruct the elephant but providing excellent knowledge of  those legs and tusk.

My intention is no to trigger a philosophical discussion about complex and complicated. My fear is that by putting a premium in simplification, we miss the elephant altogether.

At many points of this evolution towards organizational complexity, we should call time out and ask questions such as: do we really want to go that way? How can we be effective and successful without the traps of Big Company Structure? What are we making more complicated than it is? What’s is complex in itself that should not be reduced to pieces?  Who knows how to manage complexity? Has anybody seen the elephant?

It may be complex. It does not have to be complicated

Many people, and certainly many of my clients, would like to have, or not to lose, ‘the entrepreneurial spirit’. Some remember the days when the organization was very small and everybody talked to each other. A bit of reverent nostalgia of the type ‘I wish the children had not grown up so much’. Others have never seen ‘an entrepreneurial, start-up spirit’ in their lives, other than in the media, or a third party account. They have always worked, and work now, in a big enterprise, perhaps successful, but far from a start up, and little entrepreneurial. They dream of an ‘entrepreneurial, start-up spirit’ as something to be injected in the system. Even their CEO goes around saying that ‘we have to have one of these’.

So what is it? There is no universal answer to what ‘one of these look like’. It’s the classical Potter Stewart, USA Supreme Court judge, defining pornography: ‘I know when I see it’. Many ‘lists of entrepreneurial characteristics’ contain items such as having a vision, communicating well, being courageous etc. A great deal of these has little to do with the ‘entrepreneurial, start-up spirit, and more with a well run a successful company.

So here is my attempt based upon no research, but years of organizational consulting. This what ‘I recognised when I saw it!’

1. In front of barriers, people deal with them fast and with little fuss. They find ways around better than anybody else.
2. People are very conscious of resources, often limited. They are very mindful of ‘time’ (the downside is that many leaders in these set up spend a lot of time ‘chasing money’)
3. People seem to have 3 or 4 jobs ‘all in one’ and the sky does not seem to fall. And it’s not masochism. Not even ‘cost-consciousness’. It is what it is. People are their own ’corporate support’.
4. There is little or zero bullshit. And they are happy to pronounce this word without red face. Simply, they can’t afford it.
5. ‘Rapid reaction’ is in the genes. If needed, they change gears in one afternoon.
6. The decision making process is nimble. It does not mean less thoughtful or rigorous. It’s my ’3 people in 3 days instead of 30 people in 30 days’ model, that I have explained  before.
7. The personal relationship is high; people ‘know each other well’. (It does not always mean ‘collective social life’ and scheduled barbeques).There is a blurred personal-professional frontier in their relationship, and it’s healthy.
8. Transparency is in the air. They can’t afford not to have this. There is no need to say: ‘we will be open, transparent and candid’.
9. Despite what the business magazines say, and business gurus tell you, there is no free lunch. Life may be exciting but also hard. It’s hard work and lots of frustrations. Long hours or ‘extra miles’ do not mean being workaholic’.
10. Most employees, if not all, have ‘near-zero degree of separation’ with the leadership of the company. Also ‘near-zero degree of separation’ from ‘the action’, so making a contribution and seeing the impact is almost in real time.
11. Resilience is a shared component of the DNA. “Keep going’, learn fast, change gears, don’t give up. Stronger after crisis.
12. Passion. I am sceptical about this term that has been over-used so much. But, although passion is not exclusive of the ‘entrepreneurial, start-up set up’, you can’t be in one of them without it. Whether it is an idea, or a technology or a cause…

To have one of these ‘entrepreneurial, start up’ environments or cultures, pick most of the above, mix them up, and cook . Seriously, the Organizational Holy Grail is the mastering of this kind of behavioural DNA. For some, is not to lose it. For others, is to inject it. For mature organizations is how to use that maturity, history, knowledge, scale (and its economies), and keep, or create a behavioural fabric that qualifies as ‘entrepreneurial, start up spirit’.

Whether you agree with my list or no, what matters, in the first instance, is to define what this famous ‘entrepreneurial, start up spirit’ is, as opposed to simply use the terms because they have some sort of glorious halo.

‘Entrepreneurial, start up’ is a state of mind, a behavioural disposition, a view of the world, not a particular form of organization chart.