Transformation—Hurry up, please, it’s time

By Geoffrey Moore

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

Business pundits love to talk about transformation, and consultants drool at the opportunity to tap into a limitless budget, but the truth is, transformations suck.

At minimum, transformation consists of reengineering your operating model while continuing to operate, with even greater disruption involved if you are revamping your business model at the same time.?Now, if you are a privately held enterprise, you might be able to sell this to your board as a “pivot,” and indeed, in the venture world, there is some accommodation built in for such moves.?Not so, however, for companies whose shares are publicly held.?If this describes you, fasten your seatbelt and read on.

Transformations come with “J curves”—financial projections that have you swimming underwater for some considerable period before you emerge reborn on the other side.?Public investors hate J curves.?They also worry prospective customers, as well as ecosystem partners, not to mention your own employees.?Only a VC loves a J curve, but their attention is on a younger generation.

Nonetheless, everyone understands there are situations where transformation is warranted.??For public companies, the most common cause is when the entire franchise is under existential threat.?A new technology paradigm is going to categorically obsolete the core franchise, as digital photography did to Kodak, as digital media did to BusinessWeek, as wireless telephony is doing to wireline.?It was an existential threat that caused Microsoft to displace its back office software business with Azure’s cloud services, even though the gross margins of the latter were negative while the net margins of the former were stupendous.?It was an existential threat that drove Lou Gerstner to reengineer IBM’s hardware-centric business model to focus on services and software.?Failure to transform means dissolution of the enterprise.?If you are to survive, there are times when you simply have to bite the bullet.?

That said, you still have to confront the issue of time.?Everyone understands that a transformation will take more than one year, but no one is willing to tolerate it taking three.?That is, by the end of the second year you have to be verifiably emerging from the J curve, head out of water, able to breathe positive cash flow, or else you are likely to be written off.?That means transformational initiatives should be planned to complete in seven quarters, plus or minus one.?That’s the amount of time you can be in the ICU before you risk getting transferred to hospice care.??

So, if a transformation is in your future, and you really cannot work around it, then start your planning with the end in mind and calendar that end for seven quarters out.?Now, work backward to determine where you will have to be by each of the intervening quarters in order to meet your completion date.?When you get back to the current quarter, expect to see you are already two or three quarters behind schedule (not fair, I know, but I already told you that transformations suck).?Suppress panic, conduct triage, and start both your engines and the clock.

Final point: given the lack of time and the amount of risk involved, there is only one sensible way to approach a transformation.?Prioritize it above everything else, and keep everyone focused on making the intermediate milestones until you are well and truly out of danger.?Transformations are no joking matter.?Most companies lose their way.?Don’t let that be true of you and yours.

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

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