The Operator's Blog

Early in my career, I thought Demdey was a rare disease and I would never catch it.  But like cholesterol, I have come to realize it is unfortunately all too common, no one is immune from it, and it is the root cause of many other symptoms that appear when an organization, or an executive reaches maturity and the stakes are high.

Fortunately, once you recognize it, there is a cure for the dreaded Demdey.  The Imyprob pill activates the “I am responsible” and the “It’s My Problem” antigens in the body.  Even though it often has to be administered by a board, a supervisor or a trained professional, Imyprob suppresses the Demdey virus and allows the executive’s system to receive a solid dose of reality.  This pill helps you understand you are ultimately responsible for the success or failure of all your management initiatives, regardless of outside influences.  Just like my cholesterol pill, I take my Imyprob dose daily and prescribe it to my clients frequently.

This is the story of Julie; A Chief Executive Officer who genuinely wanted to change the way her company did business. Julie is very smart and has a great amount of energy.  She worked at the company her father founded since she was a teenager and after finishing her MBA, from a very prestigious Ivy League school, she took over as the CEO.  July’s passion and mission was to "blow the doors off the competition."  She had fresh ideas, and wrote lots of memos about the new management paradigms, and how to make her vision come true.  She was a strategic thinker, had a solid financial background, and knew how to put a strategy together.  She was determined to change the company and even attended seminars along with her staff to spread the knowledge about change management.  Her enthusiasm was contagious. Unfortunately, things did not quite work out.

I was a consultant to her father, and a mentor to her, so we talked often.  A year after the new initiatives went live and nothing happened, she was very surprised. Determined to make her mark, she launched a couple of new management initiatives.  But another year went by and the improvements were still meager.  When we talked, she complained that they did not listen.  At first it was her peers in the industry; she thought it was because of her gender and age. My response, with apologies to Henry Ford, was: “Whether you think it is, or you think it isn’t, either way you are right.”  Then it was her staff.  She thought they were not engaged or cared enough.  The funny thing was that when I asked her to engage her staff and ask them to help look around for reasons they collectively pointed fingers at India, their workforce, the global economy and, even the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. It was always them.  Finally after a tough board meeting she felt was the lowest point in her career, she asked me to actively help her and her company. 

I had a feeling Demdey was a root cause, but needed confirmation.   I only had to spend three days probing inside the company to finalize a diagnosis of a wide spreading epidemic of the Demdey virus.  And she was patient zero!  As Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf noted in an article some time ago, the shadow a leader casts is much longer and has larger impact than they think.

On a crisp fall day, Julie and I took a long walk around a local park and had a long private conversation away from the noise in her office. I had many questions about the real-world causes of her problems: How are your strategies better than the competition's? How are those strategies being implemented?  How much better, or cheaper, are your products? What are you doing differently than before?  Why do you think the new initiatives are not taking hold?  Julie had many answers to the questions, but had such a bad Demdey infection she could not bring herself to start any answer with “I” or “We.”  Almost every answer started with “They…”

And so it went like that for a while, making it a difficult day for both of us. I felt bad for her.  She really cared and wanted to do the right things.  She was torn because her company had to lay off people.  She talked about how hard it was to let them go, but she could not help it because they did not understand what competition was doing to them.  When I asked her how she communicated the impact of competition to her workforce and what part of her hiring and staffing plan took into account a downturn in the market, she had a classic Demdey answer.  They should have known about the competition and worked better with her to be more efficient.  When her father started the company, he believed the business would continue growing with the market and they never planned for a downturn.

When we talked about her management team, her biggest complaint was that her Chief Operating Office, who’d been with the company since her father founded it, was not supporting her strategies and still did things the old way.  It was them who were the biggest problem in her operation.  So I asked her if she had a crucial conversation with her COO about this.  They never listen, she said.  When I proposed finding another COO, she cringed.  She could not bring herself to even consider the possibility: My father hired him, he is not my problem.

It was not a pleasant day for either of us, but she wanted things to work, and I wanted to help so I continued to increase the Imyprob dosage. Over the course of a couple of weeks, she started looking at things differently.  She realized that as the CEO, she had no choice but to take responsibility for her changes and their outcomes.  The Imyprob pill, bitter as it was, was working.

Over the course of the next couple of months, things changed.  Julie rolled up her sleeves and actively engaged in operating her business.  When things went wrong, she started with “What could I have done better”, and then “What could we have done better?”  I helped her put together a dashboard of metrics that were important to the company, and she took responsibility for their direction, while assigning clear responsibilities to her management team for specific components. 

Every week she would ask her staff to tell her what she was doing to help the metrics move and what she did that got in the way.  She also became very clear of her expectations from her management team and the accountability that comes from being an executive.  Oh, and after her COO failed to meet his commitments for a couple of months, I helped her find a new COO who brought a great attitude and wide experience to the table, and is now her trusted partner.  Things changed and after my work was done, I went back to being a mentor.  We still talk about that day in the park, and even though the Demdey disease flares up every now and then, the Imyprob keeps things under control.

Over the years, I have seen the Demdey virus spread to all kinds of companies.  Imyprob is the most effective cure, but a bitter pill for many managers to take. Some agree to take it but hide it under their tongues. They go back to their business, spit it out and take responsibility for nothing.  These are the managers who make my work challenging; they bring in a consultant, or an interim executive, to help them change their worlds, only to lay the blame on the consultant if the plan doesn't succeed.  Advisors, Consultants, Interim Executives and mentors (me included) are not always all-knowing, wise, fountains of useful information. Sometimes, we make mistakes and operate under the wrong assumptions.  But here again, listening to bad advice without challenging it is a symptom of the Demdey virus. Good operators argue every point with their consultants and advisors, debate every idea, challenge every assumption, reach their own conclusions, and take responsibility for the final outcome.  They take the Imyprob pill every day and get checked for the virus frequently by engaging mentors, consultants, trusted friends, and even people that work for them.

So the next time you look around your company and see problems, ask the questions: Am I or my company suffering from Demdey? Are we blaming them for our problems?  Are we hiring consultants only to blame them when things don't work out? Is the Imyprob pill missing from our first aid kit?

If the answer to these questions is yes, be prepared to administer the Imyprob pill. Take responsibility for your success, as well as your failures, and make it clear that you will accept no excuses for poor results.