Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

Here’s a recipe for the idea of Phase A and Phase B:

Step 1. Start with this post from Jack Trout:

Beware: Tinkering Marketers

. . . Nestle faces a predicament that haunts many companies that have acquired other companies to a point that its subsidiaries are almost impossible to manage. When you’re into dog food, chocolate, baby food, ice cream, coffee and on and on, you can easily see the problem.

But what’s even worse is that these mega-companies end up with hundreds of marketing people sitting around cooking up new ideas that aren’t very good ideas. Or they sit around and try to figure out how to improve things. They just can’t stop tinkering. What top management fails to understand is that the road to chaos is paved with improvements.

In all my years in the business, I’ve never seen a marketing person come into a new assignment, look around, and say, “Things look pretty good. Let’s not touch a thing.”

To the contrary, all red-blooded marketing people want to get in there and start improving things. They want to make their mark. Just sitting there wouldn’t feel right. . . .

Trout goes on to give several examples of how marketers’ meddling have hurt their companies.

Step 2. Cross Trout’s observations with the exchange of comments that Tom Peters and I had last month about this blog post of his:

TW: Tom, I appreciate your admiration for [Carly] Fiorina’s role at HP. She *did* shake it up and she *did* stake out the ground for a much larger company. But she failed, didn’t she?, to execute on her own vision. Apparently she *could not* implement that vision. It took a blocking-and-tackling, back-to-basics, Buffett-style leader to achieve that.

Do we consign Fiorina to some circle of Hell for her failures? Of course not. But I’m not ready to build a monument to her just because she had a (good) big idea that it took *others* to implement. The difference between her and Gerstner & Welch is profound, because they had the vision AND they implemented it.

Peters: Tim, yes and no. She sure as hell “executed” the Compaq deal, “against all odds.” (And it is the bedrock here.) And she did execute a change of culture “against all odds.” (Believe me, as a consultant-trainer to HP since 1980, the culture she inherited from my great friend, the late Lew Platt, was not the culture she left behind.) She did not finish the job–but to say she failed to execute against vision is nuts. Re Welch and Gerstner, my point is that neither of them did a culture change; both did culture resurrections–GE and IBM had let good cultures atrophy. Carly actually altered the genetic makeup of HP.

Back to you …

TW: Interesting points, Tom — and I defer to your knowledge of the innards & culture of HP.

No doubt I’m bringing my own ax to grind into this: I tend to be overly vision-oriented, to the expense of execution, so it peeves me the worst when I see my own flaws replicated in a company or its leadership. (In other words, if I want these flaws, I can just fumble along by myself, *without* the help of a corporate superstructure.) So maybe I over-esteem the Mark Hurds who make the trains run on time — because that’s not my gift.

Another note: it’s hardly a bad thing to carry off half of a revolution. I’ve seen many organizations that needed Leader A to start the revolution, storm the Bastille, etc., and then needed Leader B to realize the full promise of the revolution. It’s hardly a small achievement if Fiorina was “only” Leader A for HP.

Peters: Tim, re Leader A and Leader B: Amen!!!!!!!!! It’s just that when the revisionist HP history is written, I think Ms Fiorina will get a fairer shake by far than she has in recent times. She was at the least one helluva “Leader A.”

(Please allow me a moment of pride for eliciting nine exclamation points from Tom Peters.) Notwithstanding that this upends my skeptical take on Fiorina, I think the concept is very important. Many companies ramp up with a Leader A who can instill a vision and get the enterprise off the ground, but then switch to a Leader B who can keep the trains running and maintain disciplined growth once the company has achieved a certain scale.

The same thing happens, I notice, in many other domains — e.g. some sports coaches are known for turning around losing teams, while others are known for their ability to take a pretty-good team to greatness.

In Chuck Prince’s last months at Citigroup, a number of folks pointed out that he was the right Leader A for Citi when Sandy Weill retired (back around the time of the Enron collapse and related crises of confidence in big business, you’ll recall). Prince did seem to the be the right (read: incorruptible) type for that moment — but apparently he wasn’t the Leader B who could carry Citi to a new level of greatness.

There are great marketers out there who are perfect for Phase A: they’ll devise and execute all kinds of great ideas to build their brands. But as Trout points out, they can’t leave well enough alone when the brands are up and running right — a period that requires Phase B skills.

Maybe this is another variant on the Peter Principle: you rise to your level of incompetence. Only in this case, the process relates to the timeline rather than the org-chart: you stick around long enough to outlive your usefulness, not because your own skills have dulled, but because the environment changed around you.

The very best performers, of course, bridge Phase A and Phase B, as Jeff Bezos has done for Amazon. (A possible historical analogue for this: Franklin Roosevelt, who famously transformed himself from “Mr. New Deal” to “Mr. Win the War.”) But for the rest of us, it’s vital to understand where we fit into the timeline of a company or a brand: are we the Phase A innovators? Or the Phase B operations experts?