Hard vs. Soft? It's both!

As a writer, I am biased.

Hard digits and spreadsheets are not my forte. Instead, personal perspectives and trends get my blood pumping. But there's no denying you need a data-driven view of... everything.

How do you marry these two opposing forces inside of your company? Rich Karlgaard has, of course, an intriguing sports analogy to get to the crux of the matter.

The time to start is now. Enjoy.

By Elke Boogert, Mach49 Managing Editor

Hard vs. Soft? It’s Both!

By Rich Karlgaard , Forbes Editor-at-Large and Futurist

Last week I drove through rain and cold to North Dakota, to watch a state high school track meet. A former two-miler, my idea of a high school reunion is a track meet. Trip bonus: My alma mater, Bismarck High, won the Boys and Girls team titles.

Again, they won. It’s been quite a streak, going back to the late 1990s. The secret is two coaches, now retired but still consulting, who set this long-run success in motion. The two are polar opposites in their approach to coaching. Dave and Darrell.

Dave is a hard numbers guy. If Dave reads about new training trends from Kenya or Finland, he will try them. He will note in his logs what works and doesn’t, all in detail.

Darrell is not a hard quant. He’s an intuitive empath, a softie. Like Dave, Darrell harbours bitter feelings about his own high school coaches.

Those old-school men confused toughness with ignorance. They denied warning signs of injury and mental burnout in their runners. Darrell recalls a young talent who developed shin splints that led to repeated tibial fractures.

As a pair, Dave and Darrell proved to be the best high school running coaches North Dakota had ever seen. Dave was obsessively nerdy about track numbers. “Dave doesn’t date,” Darrell observed, “because he spends Friday night studying weather, competitive matchups” and the like.

Dave is a realist. He snorts at motivational aphorisms. He hates unwarranted hopes and dreams. “Your training logs will tell you what you can do, period,” he says. Darrell, the empath, likes to walk the high school halls and check in with his runners. If a boy or girl is in a running slump, Darrell asks about their home life. If a runner shows the slightest hitch in her stride, Darrell gets her to the physical therapist. Off season, Darrell set up a donor fund so that poorer kids can have proper shoes and nutrition.

Dave and Darrell together, turned Bismarck public high schools into a state juggernaut. They are alike in only in one way: their own high school frustrations motivated them to learn. Dave scoured the world for training tips. Darrell became an expert at motivating runners, not just for a race but throughout a high-school career.

Together they grew runners into their full potential. Dave and Darrell are a 360-team.

What doesn’t show up on spreadsheets

Business innovation and success are very much like that. The best teams have a 360-view of technology, talent, opportunity, and markets.

They are obsessed about growth (personal, team and company).

During Starbucks’s rapid expansion years in the 1990s and early 2000s, chairman and CEO Howard Schultz had a brilliant number two executive named Howard Behar. Both were singularly dedicated to the success of Starbucks.

But they were opposites in temperament and methods. Schultz is like Dave, the coach. Extremely competitive and quantitative. Cool, not warm.

Schultz hates to lose. But when Starbucks began its U.S. expansion from its base in greater Seattle, the results were initially poor. The expansion into Chicago was slow. Schultz was obsessed about righting the Chicago ship. He told everyone that “somewhere in the numbers, is the clue” about what’s not working.

Howard Behar, who never went to college, the amiable son of grocers, begged to differ. Schultz never liked to be confronted, but Behar had an intuitive genius about Schultz and knew how to pull his strings. For his part, Schultz was smart enough to have Behar as the Starbucks number two.

Behar recalls the Chicago problem. “Howard, while you dive into the numbers, let me go to Chicago and talk to the store managers.” Behar did that. He toured the lackluster Chicago Starbucks coffee bars and talked to the managers and employers. He discovered a few facts and a trend that wasn’t showing up in the spreadsheets. It was simple, but consequential.

Behar told Schultz, “They don’t know how to sell because they don’t know what Starbucks stands for.”

After Behar returned from his Chicago fact-finding mission, Starbucks came up with a new slogan: It’s not about the coffee. Rather, Starbucks is a gathering place. Not the home. Not the office. A third place.

The ticket out of Commodityville

The battle for resources boiling inside most companies and among most managers, is a battle between hard and soft. Both are needed. Which should get the most money and attention? There is a right answer for every company and it will vary from year to year. But from my perch at Forbes, far too many companies invest too little time and money in their soft-side excellence.

For one, it’s easier to defend the hard side. Shareholders want hard results. CEOs, CFOs, COOs, Boards of Directors, and shareholders speak the language of hard finance.

It’s almost like Mars versus Venus.

Does the hard side, therefore, have the more convincing case for time and money? No – just the easier case.

Here’s the case for investing time and money in your company’s soft side.

Soft-side excellence leads to greater brand recognition, higher profit margins, more loyal customers, and more committed employees. Soft-side excellence is the ticket out of Commodityville.

Companies strong in the soft side can often survive a big strategic mistake or cataclysmic disruption that would sink companies without soft skills. Loyalty, passion, and commitment are the dividends of a strong soft side.?

Hard-side strength provides a perishable advantage. The hard side is easier to clone than the soft side, especially as technologies like AI become cheaper and more widely accessible.

Hard or soft? False dichotomy! Pursue both for long-term success.

Rich Karlgaard was the Forbes publisher from 1998 to 2018. He is now the publication’s editor-at-large, global futurist, and columnist for Forbes Asia.