Think Small: How to Get That Quick Win
It is very hard, some would say torturous, to get decisions made in large companies. Part of the reason for this is the decision-making process is complicated, unwieldy and generally risk-averse. Most organizational structures have numerous layers just within the division or group that is responsible for selling products. In addition, the support functions--like finance, technology, marketing, etc.--essentially have parallel multilayered structures.
Some organization charts are so complicated that they can look like a subway map of New York City. The senior leadership of the company must sign off on any important decision or any decision that involves substantial sums of money. Typically, if the recommendation originates at three or four levels below the CEO, it requires discussion and approval at each level before it can move up the chain of command.
Every organization has its own mechanism for making decisions, but in larger organizations decision-making is quite time-consuming, sometimes taking months. (Nobody sets it up to take this long; it happens for a variety of reasons, including the fact that meetings in general are undisciplined, as discussed in Chapter Two.) Not all companies are the same, but the traditional approach involves extensive analysis, often very clinical analysis—usually put together by a team and presented in various meetings. PowerPoint presentations have become increasingly more sophisticated; the information is often presented with complex, carefully-constructed charts, tables, and graphs—often with multiples of these elements on a single slide. Some of these slides can take over an hour to create. The intent of the analysis is to boil down the significant facts, issues and concerns as it relates to the subject matter being reviewed. Typically, the information is historically-based, and a majority of the presentation consists of financial estimates. It tends to reflect incremental thinking which, while it is less risky, may not sufficiently address the issue at hand. Unfortunately, much of the information represents a summarization of the current situation, rather than creative alternatives to really attack the problem.
After the extensive analysis has been done, a detailed plan is formulated and recommendations made. While there is always a person who has to ultimately sign off on the plan, you first need to get feedback from a lot of people. In the lexicon of current business practice, you need to “socialize it.”
What does this mean? Others have to be involved or feel as though they have some say in this plan. Often you need the support of other departments to even hope to get the plan through, and you need to find out if anyone has any issues with your proposal; after all, you are not operating in a vacuum. This “consensus-seeking” could be done well and quickly. But most of the time these days it’s not. There are often side and hidden agendas; various leaders may weigh in on issues that may be tangentially related but are not really on topic. Emotions can be involved; people have history with each other, both good and bad. It can be similar to the way Congress operates.
Reviews begin with your peers, the people on your level, then move up to leaders on the next level. It’s like an upward spiral which gets smaller at the top, and it’s a slow and sometimes painful process. At the end of the process, the person who has to sign off gets a finished product that is highly polished and sanitized. He never sees what it took to get the recommendation into that form. No one ever gets to see how the sausage was made.
Everyone believes (whether valid or invalid) they can derail or veto the proposal, but very few have the power to sign off on it. If you are the sponsor of the proposal you can feel almost as like a pi?ata hanging from the ceiling--where everyone is going to step up and give you a whack, one by one.
Sometimes, one of the consequences of this process is that the proponent waters down the request before he even presents, to eliminate the “pi?ata effect.” The problem is that the new proposal hardly resembles the bold, imaginative and impactful plan he envisioned at the beginning.
This is related to another detrimental and unconscious element of the standard decision-making process—what I call “Settling for Less.” What this means is that instead of asking for a decision based on what would be great for the company, many managers are merely seeking to get “something” approved, and to maintain the approval of their superiors above all else. They may rationalize the dumbing down of their original idea by saying to themselves: Well, at least we are sort of moving in the right direction. Or they might be thinking: What can we get senior management to sign-off on without too much fuss, conflict or uncomfortable discussions? They may really want the big win, the “ten,” but they feel pretty sure you can’t get it, so they don’t ask for it. Instead they scale it back and go for a “five,” which they believe they can “sell.” There is a strong element of fear-of-rejection in this system which is obviously unproductive. It’s telling people only what they want to hear and it does not allow for a real dialogue and change to occur. You ask for enough to matter, but not so much that it will raise too many issues and concerns.
Between the senior leaders not seeing the original proposal before it went through the “sausage maker”—the numerous rounds of meetings, discussions and compromises--and the initiator fearing the rejection of his project, proposals are often substantially weaker and any original boldness or innovative idea may have been lost. The recommendation may be a step in the right direction, but it is not what the initiator wanted or conceived--or what the CEO was hoping for. The typical corporate structure can sometimes act like a giant sponge that unwittingly drains all the juice out of innovative impulses. In the end, no one really wins.
But there is a positive, productive way to “stay small” and still get large or ambitious projects approved, and it’s not about compromising, or watering down anything. It’s about simplifying what you ask for, by separating what you need into separate components. I call this going for the “Quick Win.”
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