Two takes on cluelessness.
Two of the most provocative posts I read this week share a common theme: corporate workers who have lost sight of the goal.
1. Back in November, business professor Bob Sutton wrote this long, pointed post about his experiences dealing with General Motors executives:
I missed it at the time, but Sutton pointed to it this week as he discussed the departure from GM of longtime chief Rick Wagoner. The key point: that GM created a culture that guaranteed it would remain clueless and directionless in terms of what its customers thought and wanted.
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2. Corporate recruiter Nick Corcodilos thinks that “[hiring] companies demand salary information because they don’t know how to run their business for profit”:
The real reason employers want your salary history: Hiring is a crapshoot
As he puts it, “Employers want your salary history because they need to start somewhere.” They don’t know how much a job is actually worth — what it brings to the bottom line of the business — and so they scrabble around for any old number that will put them in the ballpark . . . or let them claim they’re in the ballpark.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve known many cases where two people of the same title had radically different impacts on the performance of their organizations, but without even modest differences in their compensation, or even any way to build an argument for such differences.
What every company needs is to take examples like these, then use them to build tough processes that will prevent these kinds of cluelessness.
Now, how would you suggest they go about that?
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Good to see others building on Bob’s always useful insights. Seth Godin has a related post on why big salaries are management failures as well:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/03/the-myth-of-big-salaries-its-all-marketing.html
And Bob’s recent post on “Simple Competence” plays well with your fundamental point. But where people really ought to be investigating is Drucker’s “Management: Tasks, Responsibilities & Practices”. He argues that the three primary duties of mgt are 1) deliver value, 2)make work efficient and effective and 3)meet social responsibilities. On #2 he spends considerable time on re-thinking and re-designing work to make it socially satisfying. Unfortunately he wrote it in 1973 and it’s been ignored ever since. My own take on the bigger picture of cluelessness among businesses facing a perfect firestorm that’s going to sweep thru the economic forest and change everything is here:
http://llinlithgow.com/bizzX/2009/04/firestorms_and_rethinkings_bus.html
[...] pursuant to what I said about Bob Sutton’s thoughts about the U.S. auto industry from last week, [...]