Things to Know

An old client of Ideasphere Partners, and now a dear friend, asked me a couple of months back to spend a day with an executive team reviewing a project.  It was one that had gone horribly wrong in a small company he owns in his semi-retirement from executive life.  He was frustrated!  It was an important project with his full support, well planned , with good objectives, and managed by one of his young “Ivy league educated” stars.  A project “guaranteed” to succeed, that not only failed; it did so in a spectacular way.  It was something no one saw coming until it was too late.  After we worked through the project history, a pattern emerged that made it, in hindsight, obvious it was doomed to fail from the beginning.

“What went wrong in our project planning?” was the question my friend asked and the one got me started with this blog about a month ago (never enough time to write for fun these days).  As we worked through their project, and I thought more about projects I have seen fail over the years, including some of my own, the more interesting question became “why do perfect plans many times produce perfect failures?”. So here it goes:

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With the presidential election theater going on these days, it’s hard to avoid conversations about politics at the Ideasphere offices, even with some of our clients.   Even though I generally reserve conversations about personal, political, and religious beliefs for a very small group  of close friends, I got to thinking about similarities between politics in the public service arena and politics in the corporate world.  So, even though not my regular practical blog entry about operations or management, here are some thoughts to consider about politics in general and corporate politics in particular.   As always, I would love to hear from you and post your replies to this blog at c.papageorgiou@ideasphere.com.

I think most of us developed our political beliefs based on some initial ideas from our family and upbringing, and some from our cumulative life experiences.  We are what, and who, we are because of the ideas we collected and the choices we made at various point in our lives.   As one of my favored Zen saying goes:  Careful what you think; It becomes what you say.  Careful what you say; It becomes what you believe.  Careful what you believe; It becomes what you do.  Careful what you do; It becomes who you are.

What we think about inevitably shapes who we are.  Our political beliefs depend on the Thought-to-Action path we traveled and the path dependency is the same one that shapes our approach to corporate politics.  Just like our political beliefs, our view of corporate politics is either the result of a conscious process, or one of random occurrences and happenstance we have allowed to shape our thoughts and actions.  Depending on how we came to acquire our political beliefs, we either have an appreciation of the political theater going on in America today, can see the benefits of the ebb and flow of power – and appreciate the maneuvering – or we have a disdain for one party or another and all we want is for our candidate to win and our beliefs to prevail regardless of the process.  Politics; If we can objectively appreciate the process, it can be a great learning experience.  If not, what a shame to be part of such a great show and choose not to pay attention.

So here I go where angels fear to tread:  Corporate Politics, a necessary evil that if it did not exist we would have to invent it.

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Second in a series from Budgets, Models, Simulations, and Whirlybirds…

The Grass Growing Forever (GGF) trap is a classic case of forecasting gone wild.  It generally happens when a group of highly credentialed consultants, investment bankers, financial analysts, or maybe a couple of freshly minted MBA’s from the corporate development group, gather in a room to model an acquisition strategy, analyze the growth potential of a product, or assess the future value of an M&A transaction.  More often than not, with no operator in sight, they look at the last three years (or some other legitimate sample period), identify a few critical variables, and create a model extrapolating a baseline growth curve for the next set of years.  To make the model work, they include some “accelerator assumptions” that when manipulated produce the classic Hockey Stick Curve that extends upwards into infinity.  An Internal Rate of Return calculation is generated; a great PowerPoint presentation is made to the investment committee or budget review team by the most articulate of the group and, voila; a budget with positive earnings and stock price impact is calculated and the plan is approved. Soon enough some poor operator is handed a budget and assigned the task of “make it happen” and off he, or she, goes to deliver what the model promised. Unfortunately, a year or two later, real life does not match the predictions of the model and the search for a guilty party begins.

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As we get into budget season and budget models fly around wildly, and almost always out of control, a client asked me to write a column on the subject of models and simulations.  Since there are too many root causes for a bad model outcome to cover in a single entry, I thought I would start a series to share some common modeling traps operators should be aware of before accepting the output of any model.  That applies to accepting the budget model from finance, signing on to operating a new organization born through an efficiency model, launching a new product with a revenue forecast based on a marketing model, or taking on the P&L responsibility of a new merged or acquired entity that looks good on paper and in the models of the investment bankers. 

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Recently an acquaintance asked a question on the Linkedin.com website to find out if recruiters really use the website to find talented people.  I thought I would edit and repost my reply on my blog because finding talented people is one of the major responsibilities of good operators and I also recently had a funny experience with a recruiter who checked out my background on LinkedIn.  So here are some thoughts on using LinkedIn to find people, and for operators who are thinking of changing jobs and are wondering about recruiters in general and LinkedIn in particular.

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