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In my last blog post, I stated that mid-level managers (managers who manage other managers but are below the company’s C-suite of officers) have a critical role to play in a company’s success. It’s a subject I cover in my forthcoming book, Winning Through Innovation: The Essential Guide for Frontline Managers. While C-suite officers can set an overall vision for the company, they must depend on the multitude of mid-level managers across the company to turn that vision into reality. One factor in a company’s success is whether those managers feel empowered to make important decisions without waiting for CEO approval.


Here’s a story I tell in the book. During the Great Recession of 2007-2008, I served as business general manager of Agilent’s digital sampling oscilloscope division. Business results throughout Agilent plummeted, and CEO Bill Sullivan took bold steps to curtail losses. One was an edict to “stop all travel.” I dutifully canceled several trips my marketing department had scheduled and stopped my own travel plans. But we soon got word from our sales team in Japan that several customers were unhappy with the performance of a product we had recently introduced. They were threatening to cancel all future orders.


Relationships are especially important to the Japanese, and I didn’t feel we could solve the problem through emails and phone calls. Previously, I would have sent two people—a marketing engineer and an R&D engineer—to visit the customers, understand the problem, and offer appropriate apologies. I still felt a live visit was essential, but given the travel restrictions I sent only one person, the senior R&D engineer who knew the product better than anyone. The trip was a success, and he solved the customers’ problems. The customers were impressed that I had considered them important enough to send an expert to visit them in person during a worldwide recession.


A few weeks later, Bill Sullivan came through on a routine visit and stopped by to see me. After giving him an update on the state of our business, I shared the story with him and apologized for sending an engineer to Japan in the face of a travel freeze. I explained I felt it was a critical step to save the business. Bill’s response was what I would expect from a good CEO. “No need to apologize. I have to make a firm black-and-white statement because the board would have my neck if our expenses didn’t show a substantial reduction from last quarter. But I expect my senior leaders be sensible enough to do what is right for their business while staying within the spirit of the objective.”


The higher you go in management, the more this kind of black-and-white thinking is necessary. You need to set a clear tone for expectations—stop all hiring; stop all travel; stop all purchasing. Then you have to depend on the managers of all the individual businesses to implement things sensibly.


I know not every CEO would have taken the same position as Bill did, and not every CEO would have let me remain in my position. But I’m convinced Bill’s philosophy is one reason why Agilent Technologies emerged from that recession in a strong position, with revenues that grew from $4.5 billion in 2008 to $7.0 billion in 2012.

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Updated: Aug 9


I’m hard at work on my latest book for the business community, tentatively titled Winning Through Innovation: The Essential Guide for Frontline Managers. One of my premises is that mid-level managers play a key role not only for innovation, but also for a company’s overall success. In my research, I came across an excellent book from Harvard Business Review Press titled, Power to the Middle: Why Managers Hold the Keys to the Future of Work. Its authors are from McKinsey & Company.  They have a similar premise, and while the book is not specific to innovation, it presents a compelling case for the importance of those managers.  Here’s a link to a podcast I’d encourage everyone to review:

 

 

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Updated: Aug 9

While reading about a recent challenge in the IT industry, I came across a newspaper article in which a public official who should know better was quoted as saying “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.” In all my years as an executive in the high tech industry, I've had to deal at least once a week with someone (usually an engineer) who comes over and offers a pithy maxim as advice for how to run the company. The “definition of insanity” maxim is particularly popular. I have heard it many times from many people, as if it were somehow true. I usually listen politely, but if the person is being particularly tiresome I might respond with, “Ah, but practice makes perfect.”


The problem with trying to lead a company by way of pithy maxims is that maxims are simplistic. Life (and management) isn’t. For example, take the old homily, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Would you really want to fly an airline that practiced that philosophy? No matter what trite maxim you quote, someone can always come up with another that espouses an opposing view. You say, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it;” I respond with “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”


Engineers in particular seem enamored with the simplicity of maxims. (Being an engineer myself, I can say that with some level of authority.) It has to do with their technical backgrounds. The laws of physics are immutable. Why shouldn’t the laws of management be the same? But the problem isn’t limited to engineers. In today’s social-media-dominated, soundbite driven world, devoting more than a sentence or two to a problem is an anachronism. When it comes to management, everyone seems to remember only the first sentence in Einstein’s famous maxim, “Everything should be made as simple as possible. But no simpler.”


Engineers are also prone to what I might call “Management by Comic Strip.” Walk through any engineering department and you’ll see a wealth of strips (often Dilbert, before it went on the chopping block), cut out and pasted prolifically around the cubicle walls, ready to be waved in front of any hapless manager who walks by. Now I have to admit cartoonists like fellow Santa Rosan Stephan Pastis have a knack for extracting humor from situations straight out of today’s management headlines. But I never confuse a good chuckle with good management. Laugh at the joke and then move on to solve real problems with real thought, not throwaway comedy lines.


Unfortunately, many people with no management experience don’t think that way. To them, truth is staring them right in the face directly from the pages of the funny papers. Sadly, Dilbert did more to set back the practice of management than Theranos, Enron, and Lehman Brothers combined. I’ve actually seen people with excellent potential decline management positions because they didn’t want to be the butt of Dilbert jokes. Get real, folks. Dilbert was an amusing cartoon, but that’s all. It’s no substitute for sound judgment, and those who wave it around as the answer to your company’s problems do you no favor. When a company starts basing its decisions on comic strip wisdom, it’s time to join a new company.


Cartoonists have the luxury of creating humor in three panels without having to worry about long-term impact; real managers don’t have that luxury. But to the non-manager, answers are simple. To coin my own maxim, “No decision is ever too difficult for the person who doesn’t have to make it.” (To which the astute reader could counter with General George Patton’s maxim, “Any decision today is better than the perfect decision next week.”)


Of course managers haven’t helped their cause by creating their own litany of maxims. “Innovate or die.” “Only the paranoid survive.” “Work smarter, not harder.” In my experience, a manager who cites such drivel too often does so because he doesn’t have any real insight on how to manage. But since management maxims are lampooned everywhere from Pearls before Swine to The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, there’s no need for me to dwell on that topic today.


For your amusement and enjoyment, here are a few trite maxims along with their equally trite counter-maxims. Next time someone spouts one of these as if it were an indisputable truth, feel free to respond in turn with your rebuttal. And if you have others, feel free to post.


1. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

 but

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.


2. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

but

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

or

Practice makes perfect.


3. The early bird catches the worm.

but

The second mouse gets the cheese.


4. Haste makes waste.

but

He who hesitates is lost.


5. All good things come to those who wait.

but

Time and tide wait for no man.


6. Take care of the pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves.

but

Penny wise, pound foolish.


7. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

but

To err is human, to forgive is divine.


Don’t be afraid to push back on the maxim moralists. Declare a moratorium on maxims or a maxim-free work environment. When someone touts a maxim as the answer, don’t let them get away with it. Take the time to probe what they really think. You’ll both get much more useful insight into an issue by having an intelligent discussion about it rather than relegating it to a duel of maxims. And above all, remember that managing by maxims will doom you to failure. After all, let’s not forget that if the early bird gets the worm, then the early worm gets eaten.

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STEPHEN W. HINCH

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