The business case for saying "no"

In a recent session I led with a colleague on “How to say no,” several attendees had assumed that saying no would somehow let their teammates, leaders, and company down. And even still, they were looking for guidance on how to stand their ground for their own personal well-being.

I was very happy to deliver the news that not only will saying “no” be good for their wellbeing, it is also necessary and the right thing to do for their business as well.

The business case for saying no

Every client we talk to is looking for ways to move faster and be a more productive enterprise.? It’s something IBM has been doing for a long time – looking at how we continue to raise the bar and do things more efficiently.? In the past, productivity has always been about doing more with less.

However, early last year, our CEO announced a bold vision during our earnings call stating that IBM would drive $2 Billion in productivity by the end of 2024.

This was then the new mission of my Senior Vice President and our team to lay out an activation plan that would empower our teams to not just make incremental productivity plays, but to fundamentally reimagine how we work across the entire enterprise.

Our strategy was summed up in three words: Eliminate. Simplify. Automate.

Eliminate is the most important one… and the toughest.? Before you can move forward with simplifying and automating your work, you must first make sure that it is a process or action that you should still be doing in the first place.

In short, don’t automate a bad process or one that shouldn’t even exist.

Successful teams who are able to drive this kind of extreme productivity, are the ones who are empowered to question everything.

• “Is this process or action really going to get us to the outcomes we need to deliver?”
• “Why are we working this way?”
• “Why do we need this application?”
• “How could we make this a seamless experience?”

Once these teams get the answers to those questions, they then have what they need to feel empowered to say “No.”? They understand that in order to move forward with work that matters, they must STOP everything that is no longer serving them.

Need an example?

Let’s say part of your job is creating and sending a report to a group of colleagues-- a report you’ve been sending every week for the past two years.? Have you ever confirmed who is using this report today, two years later?? Have you ever asked how they use it and what value they get from it?

If not, learn from one of my colleagues, who recently reached out to his stakeholders and found out that the report he was taking three hours each week to create was not actually being used by anyone to make any decisions or drive any real business value.

By asking the right questions, he then was empowered to say “no” by eliminating the report and getting that time back to do higher value work for his clients.

Saying no is contagious

What happens when teams start to say no? More people start to question and reimagine how they work.? By one person on a team having the courage to question the status quo, they are giving everyone else around them permission to do the same.?

That’s how you drive extreme productivity and how IBM announced in their 2023 full-year earnings report that we are ahead of schedule with our productivity results and increased our target to $3 Billion by the end of 2024.

There’s your business case for saying no. Your company, and team, will thank you.

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