#103: Effort and Results gap

Efforts and results are connected in the following way:

• Results typically require effort, sometimes in quantity and sometimes qualitatively.
• Efforts and results are separated by time. Sometimes they happen close together and sometimes they are separated by several years or even longer.

This gap is important to understand for a few reasons. For one thing, everyone's comfort level varies. Some like instant gratification and hence the time between effort and result has to be very short. Which also means such people are limited to small tasks and to small impact.

Others may have a higher tolerance for gaps between effort and result. At the extreme, they may not care about the result and indulge in the effort for its own sake. Such people will typically take on big, hairy problems.

Sometimes execution efforts begin thinking the gap is small enough to work on (anywhere from 1 week to 2 years) and when this gap begins to widen, commitment and interest begins to decrease.

If the desired result is 'too far away', build coalitions by breaking it down and defining intermediate results (milestones). Then sell the intermediate milestones as a way to mitigate risk.

There is no right or wrong or good or bad. Understand your comfort level with the gap will help you understand your motives and the capabilities you need to build. What matters is that once you commit to working towards a result, you treat it as a business decision when defining your effort. If you treat it as an emotional decision, then you are at risk of making poor investment decisions and depending too much on luck.

#102: Dialtone

When you pick up the phone you expect to hear a dialtone. (There was a time that in some parts of the world you didn't, I don't know if that is true anymore!)

Think of a 'dialtone' as something people expect to be there. No 'ifs' and 'buts', if its not there, frustration and annoyance are bound to follow. The most common examples refer to product and service features: you expect a car to be sold with floor mats, you expect a meal to be tasty and not give you a bad stomach and when you flip the switch, you expect the light to come on.

There are some other not so obvious 'dialtone' expectations:

• Communication styles: Clients, bosses and dates who expect you to talk to them a certain way otherwise they will not want to work with you.
  
• Cultural protocols: These are strongly held beliefs of how individual and group interactions need to take place at various occasions, public and private.
  
• Normal and customary: These are the business protocols and rules of engagement between buyer and seller.
  

The above are tough, but you can train people to create a dialtone for them. The hardest part of creating a dialtone are:

• Assumtions: Yours and Theirs. This is the equivalent of a hidden land mine. People act, say and expect things and they have no idea why.
• Inflexibility: Once you know that a dialtone is expected and know how to create one, overcoming your inertia and weaknesses is the hard part (i.e. converting knowing into doing).
  

So how to create a 'dialtone'? Start with audience reality. Do your research. Find the sweet spot where they will say 'wow'. Find where it itches and scratch it. Sometimes physically and mostly emotionally and always take permission before scratching the itch.

#101: Getting to market

There are a few different starting points in executing your strategy. This is where the 'universe is created' and you discover or invent 'why it is created':

• Build a business from ground up. If you live in Silicon Valley, CA, you may well start in your garage. This may also be done occasionally by established companies that incubate new businesses. Sometimes this is done part time by people who work in a day job, but want to transition to doing something different.
  
• Buy (acquire) a business, but keep it separate from you other businesses. This is done when you want to broaden your portfolio and diversify risks.
  
• Buy a business and integrate (merge) it with your current businesses. This is done when you want to get bigger and stronger to increase your competitiveness, market share and profits. This is the 'buy' not 'buid' approach.
  
• Launch a new product that is evolutionary or revolutionary in your current business. Same as the previous point, this is 'build' not 'buy' approach.
  
• Create a new business model and spin it off as a subsidiary.
• Create a joint venture and a business model to support it, spin it off as a separate company.
• Create a new business model that will leverage and even transform your current businesses. This is the hardest of them all, like changing or replacing your engines while in flight.
  

Each scenario calls for a different set of capabilities. Break it down to get it done using one of the above scenarios as a starting point.

#100: '=' versus '=='

If only strategy execution could be reduced to a series of equations! Alas, no. There is a staggering amount of qualitative decision making that has to happen in order to get things done. It is a natural of being in an imperfect world, with humans involved!

However, its important to understand the qualitative meaning behind '=' and '==' in portfolio management. Briefly, it is this:

• Work = Resources
• Work == Resources

The first equation assigns 'resources' to 'work'. If resources are greater than work, it reduces gross margins by raising expenses. It also fosters a culture of wastefulness and entitlement. If work is greater than resources, you run the risk of things not getting done and employee burnout and attrition.

The second equation checks for 'equality'. It is another way of asking, "Do we have a balance between the work and resources?" This requires a focus on the people competencies needed and bridging the skill gap via training or hiring. It also requires understanding of current versus needed capabilities.

Computer programmers will recognize this concept right away as being two fundamentally different actions. Program and project portfolio managers have to work both equations constantly to ensure their execution is set up for success.

#99: Photograph versus Movie

A photograph is a snapshot in time. A movie shows events as they unfold over time.

During strategy execution, in telling your story, you often have to provide snapshots:

• A portfolio readout is a photograph. It will change quickly as the organization adapts and evolves. New work is introduced, old work is de-prioritized, so if you want to know the latest status, you have to collect it and present it. In dynamic environments, its probably obsolete the moment it is presented, but a snapshot is probably the only way to present this info.
• Graphs showing market share is another example of a 'snapshot'.
  

In other situations you have to describe how things are unfolding, past present and future:

• A strategy planning session to understand how the organization will gain a competitive advantage requires a description of a flow of events. A non-linear explanation has to be provided for how the environment, regulation, competition, supply-chain, innovation etc. interact to create opportunities and threats. Given the dizzying complexity of the pieces, its easy to see how movie-like storytelling is critical to convey the key points.
• Describing scenarios to understand investment options also are best told as stories. These are the '-if-then' scenarios that take the myriad options and play out the critical few for the audience to understand, adopt and fund.
  

There is the combo option! Use photographs to make a movie. (This is also called a 'slideshow'...)

In telling your story during strategy execution, be careful to understand whether the story is better told using a photograph or a movie. Movies are more 'interesting' but more expensive. Photographs may be less 'dynamic' but if composed well, they can get the point across very quickly.

Philosophy versus Sophistry

This is an age old conflict, first documented by the Greek philosophers.

Simply put, philosophers are searching for the 'truth'. They don't care if your point of view is 'better' or 'superior'. They will embrace it if it is closer to the 'truth'. They are not out to gain glory for themselves. Philosophers can be maddening because they seem to ask the tough questions that have no answers and seem to have no interest in the practical realities that making the search so difficult. Above all, they are dismissed because of their lack of interest in incremental improvement, its all or nothing!

In the corporate world, the further away you are from the customer, the more inclined you may be to search for 'truth' as an end in itself. Hence, sometimes, technical staff and corporate planners are looked upon as 'ivory tower thinkers'.

Sophists on the other hand are more interested in convincing the audience about a point of view. To them success is if the audience buys into their arguments. Proximity to the truth seems less interesting to them. For this reason, the sophists have been viewed with suspicion as they seem to have no hesitation in manipulating the facts to suit their purpose. Sophists do not necessarily succeed all the time, but they are viewed as energetic, go-getters, preferring to act rather than think. These are the 'smart talkers' in the corporate environment, high on confidence, low on substance.

The closer you are to the customer, the more flexible you need to be, hence the tendency to talk fast and distract the audience while looking for an answer that will work for both parties.

Obviously these are very broad generalizations. But the point is to warn against getting caught in either extreme. There are times when being at one extreme may be a practical necessary, watch out for when that happens and move to a more balanced thought process.

"It's fuzzy"

When asked about the line of sight from cause to effect, sometimes the answer is:

• "It's fuzzy", or
  
• "I can't tell" or
  
• "I have no idea"

This is not necessarily bad news. For one thing, the listener now knows that he or she may be asked to quantify the line of sight and will consciously or unconsciously start to think about it. Second, in the early stages of strategy execution its more important to be directionally correct than be mathematically accurate.

Many new endeavors start with hunches, data is collected to validate hypotheses and results are more probabilistic than deterministic. The fog begins to lift with experience. If this is a first time experience, then you will have to learn about line of sight from cause to effect the hard way!

To protect your investment and stop good money from chasing the bad, put in gates and check points with clear guidelines. Adjust the gates and guidelines based on experience.

Broad or deep?

Obviously... it depends.

Go 'broad' when:

• You don't have time to go deep.
• You don't know what you don't know.
• It is premature to commit.
• Your role requires you to be a 'connector', not a subject matter expert.
• (Your reason here)
  

Go 'deep' when:

• You have enough knowledge to 'pull the trigger'.
• You are satisfied that you can defend the decision.
• You have the resources and momentum to see it through.
• It is the most obvious thing to do.
• (Your reason here)
  

Where to look?

In addressing a situation, people usually look at 2 places:

• The past: "What happened?" This usually gives clues to root causes and triggers.
  
• The future: "What will happen?" This will help define outcomes and scenarios for the purpose of goal setting and risk management.
  

There is another important place to look:

• The present: Being in the present drives action and decision making.

Being conscious of where you are versus where your audience is will help address communication gaps. Obviously, if I am talking about the future and you are talking about the past, we are not going to connect...

An inability or unwillingness to be in the present will lead to the question, "What do I do NOW?", left unanswered. Next time you are caught in analysis-paralysis or meandering discussions, this is one of of the points to consider when looking to take action.

An argument for indecision may be, "I am not ready." This may be financial, emotional, physical or psychological readiness. Even if you are "not ready", you can still answer the question on what to do NOW. If the answer is "nothing" and the consequences are acceptable, then that is the reality to be dealt with.