Friends,
I hope that all is well with you and yours, and that this e-mail finds you on a boat with shoddy connection, in the tropics, three months after I sent it.
Now accepting keynotes for 24Q1-24Q3
Every year, I create three main presentations. For 2024, they are:
What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do: How to thrive in an uncertain world.
Regression Toward the Meme: Why modern leadership falls into old traps - and what to do about it.
The Efficiency Illusion: Uncovering the hidden costs of digital commerce.
If you want to book me for your event, workshop, or corporate speaking slot, just send me an email. To make sure I am available, however, please do so at your earliest convenience; my schedule is filling up fast - and I will be raising my prices on January 1.
All presentations are adapted to fit the event. Entirely customized presentations, including topic, are available upon request at an additional cost. More information can be found here.
A couple of updates before we go-go
Given how often she was ill during the first half of the year, my daughter has been remarkably healthy in the second; she has in total missed one day of kindergarten. This week, however, she streak snapped.
Kids are amazing though. Even with a head full of snot and a cough the sound of which could be used in historically accurate dramas about the toils of 18th century coal mine workers, she is (more often than not) happy as ever, smiling, laughing, singing, and dancing.
Having said that, the wife and I are both very much feeling like Marshall Eriksen after two bowls of soup. The odds of us avoiding a bad cold just before Christmas are not in our favor, shall we say.
Moving on.
Subscriber book recommendations
Many of you have emailed in to provide suggestions for Christmas reads, which has been lovely to see (and, wow, you are a clever bunch). Unfortunately, due to a lack of space, I will not be able to include all of them. However, rest assured that I have put each and every one of your suggestions on my own to-read list.
Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them by Dan Saladino.
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu.
Stop Talking, Start Influencing: 12 Insights From Brain Science to Make Your Message Stick by Dr. Jared Horvath.
The City by Park, Burgess, and Sampson.
If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor by Bruce Campbell.
A Childhood by Harry Crews.
Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science by Philip Mirowski.
Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age by Paul Graham.
Marketing Metaphoria: What Deep Metaphors Reveal About the Minds of Consumers by Gerald and Lindsay Zaltman.
Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays by Joel Waldfogel.
Perspective matters
Where you sit often defines what you can see
As previously discussed in this space, one of the phenomena that came out of the early-to-mid 20th century strategic management school of thought was a separation between thinkers and doers. Managers so enjoyed their newfound status that they have done their best to protect it ever since.
It is easy to understand why. The original distinction between planners and executors, as proposed by Frederick Winslow Taylor and his scientific management acolytes, was by design one that established who the smart people in the factory were. The trick worked. The managers were understandably flattered. The workers were not, but they were never going to be in a position to hire a management consultant to implement the new system anyway. Today, large consultancies have turned the morally dubious sales technique into an art form. In the world according to legend, nobody has ever gotten fired for hiring McKinsey. In the real world, some undoubtedly have - and many have personally benefitted more than their companies have from bringing the consultants onboard.
But the problems go beyond incentive displacements on an individual level (and any financial implications that may follow). In particular, the distancing between the people who decide and the people who have to do their job in accordance with the decisions has not only created two classes of corporate citizens, but also led to an increasing managerial ignorance of operational practicalities and customer needs. While employees may fail to see the forest for the trees, managers and executives often fail to see the trees for the forest.
The consequences manifest in familiar ways. Those responsible for formulating the strategy outline what the company (humbly embodied by themselves) intends to do in order to win against the opposition, typically via the medium of PowerPoint presentations. Those responsible for executing the strategy look at each other in confusion and, more often than not, ill-concealed boredom.
But, crucially, it is not for lack of intelligence. It is for a lack of information.
Strategic plans of the kind discussed here habitually come with detailed instruction on what to do in the next three-to-five years, but little guidance on how to do it in the next three-to-five-weeks. This would not be as much of an issue if the employees were left to their own devices, but they are not - and so, they are not allowed to come up with their own solutions. Over time, they come to rely for instruction on those who know less about their job than they do themselves, thereby somewhat perversely fulfilling Taylor’s prophecy. In an attempt to achieve efficiency, the firm loses effectiveness.
To make matters worse still, most strategic plans are inherently non-fractal. That is to say, as premium subscribers may remember from a newsletter four weeks ago, that what is true on one scale is not true on another. This is a major reason why so many business strategies fail to translate: they have little meaning to those who have to execute them. In turn, this habitually leads to situation similar to that which we saw with Peter Drucker’s MBO: employees are forced to set their own goals in accordance with managerial instruction whether applicable to their scale or not, and accept full responsibility for any failure that follows as a result.
So, what is the solution? As ever, there is no easy, context-agnostic answer. Nevertheless, I shall endeavor to finish the point.
When using the ABCDE framework (which is fractal), we begin by establishing the company aspiration (A) - its shared understanding of success. This provides the true north, if you will. The boundaries (B) define the outer limits of what is acceptable action. Employees are then allowed to act as they deem contextually appropriate within the boundaries, provided that their decisions are coherent to constraints (C) and move the company in the right direction at the right speed. Management, in our approach to strategy, is therefore not in place to manage people, but to manage connections between people. From this follows that their main task is not to control, but to enable and support, much like how any asset and company system should act to support the strategy.
That is not to say that there are not, in lack of better terms, failsafes designed into the approach (such as monitoring of said direction and speed relative to the shared understanding of success), but unlike traditional strategy, adaptive strategy has no final end-point; it is all about continuous movement. As a result, the organization cannot push off to tomorrow what could, indeed should, be done today under the “we have got time” mantra. It emphasizes getting things done, and the best people to do that are those that are already doing it.
Management still has a crucial role to play - in fact, their roles expand in adaptive strategy - but where we sit largely determines what we can see. We need both eyes on the ground and in the sky, and the only way to get a full view is to combine them.
Until next time, have the loveliest of weekends.
Onwards and upwards,
JP
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