The Productivity Zone—A Tale of Two Cities

By Geoffrey Moore

Author – The Infinite Staircase: What the Universe Tells Us About Life, Ethics, and Mortality

You know about twin cities—Dallas & Fort Worth, Minneapolis & St. Paul, San Francisco & Oakland.?One gets to be the headliner, the other works behind the scenes, but both are key to the region’s success.?Well, it turns out the same thing goes on inside the Productivity Zone.?Here’s how it plays out.

The Twin Cities

The twin cities might be named Systems Springs and Programs Place.?The former works mostly behind the scenes, the latter out in front of the stage lights.?More specifically, here is what the enterprise is buying from each one:

Systems Springs

• Enterprise-funded ways of working that are standard for all.?Examples include accounting, order-to-cash, purchasing, compensation, benefits, diversity & inclusion, cybersecurity, legal, and facilities.

Programs Place

• Interventions, funded by a sponsoring organization, that are customized for a specific purpose.?Examples include product launches, market entry, sales enablement, platform rationalization, M&A integration, crisis management, and marketing campaigns.

Organizations in the Productivity Zones are typically funded and organized around their systems’ responsibilities, with many of them then asked to also take on programs assignments as well.?Although their funding comes in one lump sum, the differences between the two workloads are so great they need to be managed separately, as you can see from the table below:

Implications for Governance

• Budgeting.?When setting the budgets for Productivity Zone organizations, most enterprises pool systems and programs funding and let the org leader sort things out as the year unfolds.?This is a mistake.?These are two very different endeavors with distinct ROIs that do not blend.?Enterprises need to ring-fence each budget so they can see what is working well and creating good returns, and what isn’t.
• Management.?Systems are in it for the long haul.?Taking extra time to do things right, as opposed to doing them over, is the winning path.?Not so with programs.?They are all about making an impact at a given point in time, and thus they reward being in the moment with timely course corrections and creative interventions.?Given such radically different management cadences, systems and programs need to be managed separately.
• Talent.?It is a rare individual who is equally talented at systems and programs delivery.?The former is essentially an analytical undertaking that rewards disciplined execution and resists making exceptions.?The latter is a diagnostic undertaking, rewarding empathetic delivery that accommodates individual circumstances.?Leaders in the Productivity Zone are well served if they identify which of these two plays best to their strengths and then recruit a lieutenant who is really strong in the other.
• Process.?The Productivity Zone is all about process, but here too we see two different flavors.?Systems are like water mains.?They are a shared utility designed to operate reliably at scale.?Programs are like garden hoses.?They are a flexible delivery mechanism designed to operate locally with precision.?Both follow process but to very different ends.

Failure to acknowledge the twin cities’ nature of the Productivity Zone is a major source of enterprise frustration and waste.?Systems that are run like programs allow too many exceptions and thus over time become increasingly hard to change and expensive to maintain.?Programs that are run like systems deliver the services they promise, but are not held accountable for actually changing state, and thus end up getting dismissed as a form of corporate entertainment.?This is not OK.?In an age of disruption, one of the major advantages an established enterprise has is to support its Performance Zone by deploying Productivity Zone functions at scale.?If we do not capitalize on this advantage, we should not be surprised when some upstart start-up passes us by.

That’s what I think.?What do you think?

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