When medieval doctors didn’t know what to do, they recommended bloodletting. Fever? Let some blood. Headache? Let some blood. Melancholy? Let more blood. Business has its own equivalents of bloodletting. A change in leadership, a new agency, yet another reorganization, a revision of the offering – invasive measures that give management a false sense of agency.
Techno-optimism follows a specific pattern. First, a new, miraculous tool appears. Then comes the buzz on social media; everyone wants it, budgets swell, and implementations get underway. Eventually, after a few months – or at most a dozen or so – it becomes clear that the team uses the purchased tool only on rare occasions, half the features are unknown to anyone, and the return on investment is hard to find even with a magnifying glass.
The Pentagon has contingency plans ready for every eventuality. Somewhere in the thick files gathering dust in Washington, there are plans for the collapse of NATO, a nuclear war with China, an alien invasion, and reportedly even a zombie apocalypse. Most companies operate exactly the opposite way. They don’t plan anything until something goes wrong, and then, on the fly, with trembling hands, they try to write out a plan of action.
At a certain stage of development, there’s a temptation to turn a company into a Swiss Army knife: complete with a blade, a corkscrew, a nail file, and eighteen other functions. To do everything for everyone. In reality, this is a shortcut, and today’s market rarely rewards generalism and even more rarely allows you to make good money from it.
Some people like to think of a successful sale as a debate they’ve won. In reality, however, it’s primarily a matter of accurate assessment and attentiveness.
Whenever the phrase “sales target” comes up at a company meeting, the entire room’s attention almost instinctively turns to the sales team. In theory, this makes sense, since the sales process revolves around the product-salesperson-customer triangle. In reality, however, this dynamic is intertwined with dozens of invisible interdependencies.
