Needed: EVPs of Common Sense.
It’s time for the business world at large to steal an idea from ESPN columnist Bill Simmons: the EVP of Common Sense.
Simmons has argued that pro sports franchises need such a person to review potential trades and draft choices. Ideally, it would be someone who knows the sport and commands total respect from the team owners and front-office personnel . . . but who is not beholden to the inbreeding or groupthink that often infects organizations.
This guy — let’s say he was the college roommate/teammate of Mr. Team Owner and is now a retired CEO from an unrelated industry — would take a look at big decisions, like which college player to draft in the first round, and apply common sense to them. He’d be in a position to say, “Okay, walk me through this one, because I don’t see why Player X is a great idea when it seems like everybody else thinks Player Y projects better as an NFL starter.”
In the corporate world, this person’s job would be to say something like, oh, I dunno, “Why wouldn’t we take IBM’s offer? Do we really think we can go it alone? Or force them to give us a better offer? What’s our leverage?”
Or, pursuant to what I said about Bob Sutton’s thoughts about the U.S. auto industry from last week, “Shouldn’t we simplify our product lines and make sure we’re making vehicles that more Americans want to drive?”
To put it another way, the EVP of Common Sense would be charged with asking naive questions about where the company and the industry is heading, and he or she would have a mandate from the board of directors to insist on straight answers to these questions from everyone, including — especially — the CEO.
Or would that make too much sense?
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Related:
- Steve Tobak at BNET’s Corner Office blog: We’re Still Making Excuses for Weak Leadership
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Image via the Library of Congress.
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OORAH ! I love this notion. That said let me play devil’s advocate on a couple of counter/complementary arguments.
1) A separate position – everybody should have common sense and the company should be run that way (your implicit argument is that it’s scarce, rate and x-grain to the decision-making processes)
2) Ostensibly the SVP of strategic planning should be this person. Of course in fact and practice the planning guy is usually some clever non-entity who owns the admin of the planning paperwork but is only slightly more respected than the SVP of HR :) !
3)What’re the chances – either formally or otherwise of actually embuing the corporate culture with common senses ?
If you look back thru business and organizational history this is THE position/attitude/process that made the great ones great. And the one that’s been so missing in the last two+ decades, e.g. Finance (btw watch Blankfein on CSpan) Autos (obviously) but also Tech, Pharma, Retail, etc. etc.
The Blankfein video is the closing argument of this post btw:
http://llinlithgow.com/bizzX/2009/04/firestorms_finance_futures_fro.html
Dave, I agree that common sense should be, uh, common across the enterprise. But it’s also human nature to lose perspective about our “babies” — our pet projects, ideas, departments, etc. I guess what I’m calling for is a big, high-level dose of perspective.
Thanks for the great feedback and elaborations.
What you need is the corporate equivalent of a beta reader! :-) My “baby” is my book, and I get so close to it that I can’t see it anymore. I need someone with common sense on my team, who’s not afraid to tell me, “Pseudo-sunshine is not a word.” (It made perfect sense to me.)
With a non-writer beta reader, you get someone who’s disconnected from the writing process, and sees the book as an audience. I may go on about the benefits of writing dialogue in strong character voices, so that one can tell who is speaking simply from the words. A beta reader tells me, “Yeah, whatever, just put ‘he said’ and ‘she said’ more often.”
Following that theme, what if the EVP of Common Sense were someone *out* of the industry? Someone who’s successful in other areas, but knows nothing of the (for example) pro sports franchise? An accountant; a semi-retired architect; a mom. Someone who can look at a business proposition and say, “Yeah, that doesn’t make sense. Change it.”
Precisely! That’s why I suggest someone who commands respect, but isn’t bought into the culture of the particular front office.
And the parallel to editors/beta-readers is perfect. Good journalists and book writers *welcome* good editors (even when it’s emotionally painful), because they know that a good editor will help improve the work. Bad writers, in my experience, are those who bristle too much — and unjustifiably — at being edited by a sensible editor.
So true. And like writers, the front office will need to swallow the fact that, if they respect the “editor,” they must trust them, whether it hurts or not. Because believe me–it’ll hurt. ;-)