Lester Bangs as management guru.
If you recognize the name of Lester Bangs — outsider rock-music critic par excellence — it should be jarring to think of him as having anything to say about management wisdom. And in truth I’m borrowing a concept that Bangs applied to music and importing it to the world of business.* But read on, because I think it’s a business test that’s all too often overlooked.
Here’s the relevant source article from the American Journalism Review:
And here’s the money quote:
Bangs worked from a simple critical framework: “If the main reason we listen to music in the first place is to hear passion expressed — as I’ve believed all my life — then what good is this music going to prove to be?”
That question, if applied rigorously, demolishes the pretensions of many, many, many musical acts — including some that are incredibly popular. (Mariah Carey, anyone?) But if you tweak it just slightly, it also demolishes the pretensions of many business activities as well:
“If the main reason we engage in business in the first place is to make money — as I’ve believed all my life — then what good is this project going to prove to be?”
Mind you, you can substitute something else for “make money” if your organization is in some other line of business — promoting better health, saving souls, increasing appreciation of the arts, curbing traffic in your neighborhood, or whatever. Basically, choose what I call your own Utilitarian Unit of Goodness (UUG, pronounced “oog,” for short) and run the equation from there.
Over the past 20 years I’ve sat in countless well-intentioned meetings run by smart people that could have been adjourned on the spot by applying this question. As an analyst I’ve seen countless corporate initiatives that would have benefited from the same summary treatment. And most of us as individuals waste time on endeavors that don’t yield any progress on our personal UUGs.
What gets in the way? Well, where should we even start?
- Personal hangups — e.g. egomania or an aversion to making decisions.
- Personal agendas — e.g. turf protection or the need to be seen to be doing something, even if it’s counterproductive.
- Historical silos — i.e. all the water that hasn’t been allowed to just pass under the bridge.
- Miscommunication — e.g. when Department A and Department B might as well be shouting at each other in different languages, accompanied by occasional gunfire, across a canyon.
- Lack of skill.
- Lack of focus / alignment, either personally or organizationally.
- Parkinson’s Law in all its forms.
Feel free to log other factors in the comments.
The point is that we can waste all sorts of time on efforts that, even at best, will have only a tangential or ancillary effect on our success in terms of piling up UUGs. Meanwhile, we miss countless opportunities to plow ahead on the main purpose — the central passion, the beating heart — of our personal and collective enterprises.
It’s nothing to cry about. It happens because we’re human. But it is a habit worth reviling and opposing — as Lester Bangs reviled and opposed music without passion.
~
* Full credit where it’s due: my Hoover’s colleague Russ Somers tipped me off to this, and this whole chain of thought comes out of a long discussion we had sitting in the office a few weeks ago. (It’s a great blessing to sit among my cube-mates: the smarts-per-square-foot meter at Hoover’s Galactic HQ runs high.)
Category: Management
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Great post, Tim. Many brilliant people lack the ability to articulate simple business objectives before diving into a project. Projects often lack a driver or team who has the correct elicitation skills, corporate-wide strategy insight and/or authority to tell a CEO that their pet project isn’t viable. Too often, we back into financial models and back into market research “justifying” a new project, then point fingers when it unravels.
To many UUGs in 2008!
Yes, Sharon, yes. Confirmation bias runs rampant in corporate management. The Big Boss wants it — so we justify it. The Team would be disappointed if we don’t maintain the tradition, so we maintain the tradition — even though it loses some money. Far better is for the Boss and the Team and everybody else to agree to tell the truth even when it hurts, and *especially* when telling the truth means pointing out “Every one of these meetings costs us time and money we could be using better elsewhere” or “This project can’t make us enough money to justify itself even under rosy scenarios.”
Tim - excellent post and good points. This one and the prior one make a matched pair, intended or not. Allow me to suggest that the key focal question is not “make money” it’s deliver value to the customer and market. The money follows. Having received my early religious indoctrination at Fedex that “People, Service, Profit” mantra makes more and more sense to me the more I stir around.
To put some points on it most (all) of the dysfunctions you list out are cases of internal agendii and self-serving trumping a focus on value-delivery. Narrow politics in other words - the DLS of corporate America. While good people can overcome this the greatest key is strong leadership who’ll walk the talk and encourage the right kinds of behavior. As conditions deteriorate in an accelerated fashion of the next quarters the difference between survivors and not, IMHO, will lie in the abilities of the enterprise to deliver value.
dblwyo has good points. There’s an inherent paradox: companies that focus on delivering value make more money (Fedex, Apple, many others).
Firms that focus strictly on making money may be short-term successful but find it hard to maintain. Nickel-and-diming customers becomes easier to justify, as does lowering product and service quality.
Dave and Russ — Excellent points. I’m a BIG believer in value — the need to create something via your business that’s special to the customer. It’s the same whether you’re running FedEx or a taco stand.
So, yes, “creating value” could be the UUG for businesses. The problem is that (too) many business people are deaf to the language of value, but they DO understand the language of MONEY. Thus my original formulation.
Let me reiterate, also, that you can substitute ANY desired end — value, money, passion, awesomeness, fame, whatever — into this formula.
Tim, take your points. How many margin points can dance on the bottomline ? In other words we’re all converging on the same argument but from different points of emphasis. The resolution to me is to understand that to make money you start with value and service and it’s the result. If you look at the great companies they’ve built cultures that understand this deep in their bones. The WSJ had a recent article in it’s special online section on business on a major re-thinking of EVA to focus on differentiating long-term value from short-term. The creators did a study and found that a large proportion of stock value was in fact based on l.t. value. I excerpted and analyzed it in my approach at this post if anyone cares to take a look: http://tinyurl.com/2jqud9
dblwyo: Does “EVA” mean “enterprise value added”? Something else?
The Journal’s findings sound heartening, since (in my view) a VERY large proportion of stock price should come from long-term enterprise value.