The Story Matters

At one point in my life, I was had dinner often with a colleague whose favorite restaurant game was what what-are-they-talking-about-at-the-next-table?  He was particularly fond of the game when the people at the next table looked excruciatingly intense and were speaking in hushed tones that allowed only snippets of their conversation to drift our way.  His contention was that, if we played the game well, we could enjoy their conversation much more than they were.  He was a much better story teller than I, and often had me howling with laughter at the expense of the much less happy diners at the next table.

Although it may seem far-fetched, the STORY matters in strategy as well.

What do I mean?  First let me say what I do not mean: I do not mean that the strategy for your organization should be made up out of thin air.  Facts matter.  Knowing how your organization works matters.  Knowing who your competitors are matters.  Understanding what your costs are and what makes up your earnings matters.  Each piece of that is necessary; but even all of it together is not sufficient.

In my experience, most successful people – be they leaders of organizations, captains of stand-out teams, or those in pursuit of individual endeavors – have both imagination about the possibilities engendered by their activities and passion for those possibilities.  They also understand how their current activities are linked to, and are intended to achieve, what they imagine.

Neither imagination nor passion derives logically and deductively from data!  To think that it might is analogous to thinking that you can create a great painting if you buy the right kind and color of paints, or that you can write a great novel because you know the English language and its grammar.

Even if your strategy is demonstrably correct in terms of your organization’s operations and environment, to create a strategy that engenders enough enthusiasm to do the work that is inevitably required to execute it requires being able to know and understand and tell its story: What matters? Why does it matter? How do you get from here to there?  Why should the people you need to rely on to get there be sufficiently interested or care enough to help you get there?

Perhaps in the abstract, these points seem trivial or obvious.  However, they are neither.  Change is always hard; it may involve new priorities, new skills, new relationships, or all of those.  To make any of those things happen requires commitment and, often, resilience.  Particularly when execution of a strategy is going to require the work and commitment of a group or groups of people, the strategy needs to have enough tangible reality for all participants to experience for themselves why it’s important, why it’s worth the trouble and resources it’s going to take; its excitement.  And whether it’s your bankers, your customer service reps, or your designers, they all need to be focusing on and supporting the same change.

They also need to be able to experience what may be an entirely new context for their work, even if it feels like an old or familiar context.  A few years ago, an airline I use often changed its policy for using frequent flier miles; as a customer, I didn’t love the change, but I was very impressed – and grateful – when the agent reminded me that the new policy allowed me to think differently about when to use the miles, and how to schedule trips for which I wanted to use them.  Similarly, not long ago, the The New York Times published an article about how the big high tech companies look at potential mergers differently than do traditional investment bankers.  The big task – using miles or buying companies – may look the same, but the criteria that go into making choices may be entirely different.  To understand how to apply the new criteria effectively, everyone has to understand the STORY of what the strategy it how it works, and what it is intended to achieve, not just the traditional rules. 

Historically, the creation of this story has been assigned to the leader.  Perhaps shockingly, many senior executives have actually left the task to subordinates and advisors.  But the job is too important to be delegated, and too important for the senior executive to do in isolation: the strategy, and especially its story, has to be created and managed in such a way that everyone who needs to be involved in executing it in any capacity recognizes it, understands why it matters, and feels its meaning seep through daily activities. 

As with my friend’s dining-out game, unless the key strategic story is told well enough and loudly enough to be absorbed throughout the organization, there are likely to be a myriad of stories made up from snippets overheard – directly and second- and third-hand – from the leadership team.  It is hard enough to move an organization in a new direction; it is impossible when different parts of the organization are trying to move in different new directions! 

You do not want to leave your competitors to enjoy the strategy you intended, at your expense.

Catching Up

We will be re-starting active blogging shortly.  In the meantime, view our latest piece in the
Family Office Review.

Now, maybe more than ever

Most people think about strategic planning as a way to plot growth. It certainly can be that: When you know your business well, your market, and your competitors, you are in a good position to make the growth choices that move you most effectively toward your aspirations.

But rigorous strategic planning is also a critically important tool in helping you to survive in tough times. When resources are scarce, choices matter more than ever. When you know your business well, understand what is going on in your markets, and are aware of what your competitors are doing, you can make the choices that will allow you to use the resources you do have to meet needs that continue to exist as other also make tough choices.

In taking this position, we are not advocating cock-eyed optimism. Instead, we are suggesting that rigorous strategic planning can help you take a good hard look at your business and begin to think about it differently. For example, think about what machinery you have among your assets instead of what the machinery usually does; think about what your various personnel know, not what they usually do. If you think about your current resources as inputs with flexible uses, you may be able to redeploy them to create new outputs.

For example, consider the nightmare that is the current mortgage market. If you are a mortgage broker, the credit freeze may have idled your usual business. On the other hand, the various federal rescue plans call for a lot of work relating to re-underwriting and re-negotiating a lot of mortgages. Although there may be little opportunity for “brokering” as part of this activity, chances are good there are people on your staff who are very knowledgeable about mortgages and their documentation. If a lending institution has to re-work a lot of loans in a short period, they may not have enough trained staff to do it. Perhaps you can provide an outsourcing service or create an employee leasing program to help them meet their needs.

Or perhaps you are a car dealer. An analyst was quoted Friday as wondering “how many people are just going to hold on to their vehicles until they fall apart.” All those vehicles will have to be taken care of if they are going to last that long. Although owners of older cars often go to local mechanics, they don’t have to. If a car dealer can re-orient its thinking and make servicing cars over long periods a real priority, it might be able to generate revenue, while also retaining both customers and staff. Some re-training to focus on the problems that affect older cars might be required. Management might have to learn how to outsource some aspects of the business if they don’t have staff trained do some of the more complex kinds of repairs for older cars. These relatively small changes may, however, create a loyal customer base that will be useful to have when the economy turns around. It may also create a staff business process that is ready to support continuing customer relationships as owners generally begin to purchase new cars expecting to drive them for long periods instead of leasing them, expecting to give them back in 3 years.

We do not pretend that these are tried-and-successful strategies. Very few new strategic directions are. But these ideas are reasonable things to think about. Negotiating new arrangements might take some time; some new skills may have to be added to your organization; and new ways of business might also require giving up some aspects of your business’s self image. But new approaches might also forestall some firings and bankruptcies.

What are you thinking about? Do you know enough about your business – your customers’ current needs, potential customers you have ignored or under-served, your competitors, your vendors, your employees’ skill sets – to know what you might have to sell in this environment and where your natural buyers may be? If you don’t, now is the time to learn. You have a history; you have hard assets and skills. These are your inputs. By letting go of the habits you usually take to thinking about them – and about the outputs you expect them to produce – you may fine novel ways to use them that could save your business for the long run.

Teach Your Children Well

A number of colleagues have commented over the past several weeks about the ways in which raising children has suddenly changed. A headline on the New York Times website several weekends ago captured the issue in a nutshell: Cutting back on expenses, parents say “no” and children say, "Huh?”. Perhaps even most startling, especially among families who thought they were immune to economic shifts, were reports that the Sumner Redstone family, large owners of two very large and historically successful businesses, had to sell 20% of their holdings in the midst of last week’s market slide to meet debt covenants.

The current state of the economy has created a wonderful opportunity – and a need – to address with our children the realities of economic limits. For many of them, that has been little but a vague abstraction until now.

For most of our children’s lifetimes, our culture has been filled with pictures of celebrity and great wealth. Even for those who are a little more intellectually or financially inclined, lessons have often focused on the value of debt and its importance in building wealth.

The lessons suddenly being taught to all of us by the current economic situation are decidedly more punitive.

Unfortunately, the harsh realities of the moment are likely lead more to resentment than to learning unless we take proactive steps to help our children develop a better understanding of practical economics.

Talk about budgets. Whether they are going to run a business in the future, or simply manage their lives on some finite amount of income, your children will at some point to have to understand one important issue: To sustain any given set of expenditures, income from some source is going to have to equal or exceed them.

Give them a fixed allowance to manage. If your resources have been reduced in this environment, you may have to – or decide you want to – reduce your children’s income proportionately. They probably won’t like it; but they will learn more if you take the time to explain to them why you are making the changes, and help them think through their own new budgets.

Find a few items in your budget that will have particular meaning to your children, and discuss them: Which of your costs (like housing) are fixed? Which (like vacations) can be adjusted as circumstances change? What does their schooling cost? How much income does the family have to have to pay for big items like tuition with after-tax dollars?

Do not ignore debt – its uses, its costs, and the fact that it almost always carries real (contractual) conditions. Where do loans come from? Why do some loans cost more than other loans? What kind of rules come with the money when it is loaned to the borrower? Why do almost all vendors charge interest if bills are not paid within a certain amount of time?

It’s hard. Much of your energy is probably going to figuring out how to adjust to all of the changes and impending changes in the world. You probably want to try to protect your children from them. You can’t. But you can involve them and help them learn what they need to know to be wiser stewards of all that you have tried to create for them.

The art and science of business decision making

As is perhaps obvious to our regular readers, we have recently been spending a lot of time thinking about intergenerational issues. Among the issues that have demanded our attention is the management of a business when more than one generation is involved.

The assumption of power by one generation from its predecessor is the stuff of Sophocles, Freud, and the family across the street. It is also one of the most critical transition issues that faces any business which hopes to succeed beyond the life of its founder. If the transition is managed well, the business can thrive through it and into the future. If it is not managed well, both the transition period and the future can be extremely difficult.

The transition comes to every business, but it can be especially complex in a successful family business, where parent-child issues may mix with educational issues to make decision making, and all of the communications surrounding it, more than a little tumultuous.

As we have mentioned before, one of the best things a successful family business can do to support its future is to insist that the children who want to be involved in the business get outside training and experience. Not only does this approach encourage the development of real competencies, but the perspective it provides on the greater economic environment can be invaluable to the business as it moves into an ever-changing future.

However, this same education and other outside experience can create, or exacerbate, tensions between the generations. Not only are the two generations likely to have different perspectives based in their different experiences – for example, the older may value the importance of face-to-face network building for marketing purposes, while the younger may be more interested in internet-based viral marketing – but these perspectives may also be accompanied by fundamental differences in the ways the two generations approach decision making.

The founder has probably been very successful making pragmatic decisions, based on his or her own perceptions and a nearly intuitive assessment process. The younger generation, on the other hand, has probably learned analytical tools based on theories that are completely unfamiliar to the entrepreneur.

Conversations in which one party argues from experience and instinct while the other argues from analysis based in assumptions and relationships that may be counter-intuitive can be frustrating. However, well conducted, these conversations can be among the most creative and productive that any business has.

The great motivating process in science has long been the inductive development of theories that can then be deductively tested and refined. The same can be done in business: an idea that “feels” like a good one to the intuitive participants can be tested and re-worked so that implementation can be more successful than anyone might have imagined. Careful discussion and testing can also avert an implementation that might be less effective than hoped.

The critical issue in these discussions is to remember that intuition and reason, experience and analysis should be viewed as additive, not mutually exclusive. While we could argue that the onus for ensuring this kind of productive discussion falls on the younger generation as a simple matter of respect, we could equally argue that the greater experience of the older generation makes it their responsibility.

However, our own experience suggests that these conversations are most useful when all parties take seriously their responsibility to contribute, understand, and appreciate all perspectives in the decision making process. When everyone remembers that both generations are able to focus on the shared goal of the long-term good of the business, the process of testing intuition with analysis, and theory with practical reality, the conclusions can be far more robust and chances of success, much higher.

Letting children fail

The very funny pilot of ABC’s new dramedy “Dirty Sexy Money” was chock full of storylines to be but had a single triumphal moment: the pink suitcase parade of the patriarch’s younger daughter as she defiantly set off on her own. She was depressed by the knowledge that her father had bought her yet one more illusory success, and she believed she could not have a life unless her successes and failures were her own.

Early into the second episode of the season, we learned that she aspires to a freedom she doesn’t really understand. As her avowedly self-indulgent twin reminded her, she may have run away from home, but she was living in an expensive hotel suite financed by her father.

How does a successful parent help his or her children not only aspire to successful independence, but also to understand what that means?

In our last post we talked about helping children identify and develop the skills they will need to success. The program we suggested was hardly simple, but it lacked one crucial element: creating the opportunity for each child to succeed also means allowing each child to fail.

Let’s clarify a little: We are not suggesting that failure is inherently good. Successes –particularly successes that are acknowledged and applauded – are necessary for the development of self-confidence and independence.

But children who come from successful families often think success is a given, and are like the small child who hears the word “hot” and thinks it means ‘hot like a summer day when you can go swimming.’ Not until she puts her finger on the stove and discovers the real pain of that kind of heat does she understand that “hot” is something different from a general atmosphere.

Worse, children who grow up in very successful families may not understand that the way they behave has real impact on the people and world around them. If they are treated by others simply because of who they are, they learn very little about the effect they can have, and how manage their relationships to achieve positive results.

But perhaps most importantly, since we all do fail at something eventually, none of us can really develop self confidence until we have also experienced a failure and both survived and recovered from it. Choices made to avoid failure are very different from choices made to achieve success – and very few of us learn to do the latter until we have proven to ourselves that we can, indeed, ‘pick ourselves up, wipe ourselves off, and start all over again.’

The failures don’t have to be big or dire. But they do have to be real.

We have one client who gave each of his children an annual sum to pay for their college years. When one son ran out of money before paying his third quarter tuition, he had to get a job and make weekly payments on the market-rate loan his father offered as an alternative to dropping out. He paid off the outstanding loan when he got the next year’s allowance, and developed a budget that ensured he could pay all of the year’s expenses. This son had a much different relationship with money from then on and, interestingly, so did his brothers.

To have impact, not all failures have to happen. But they have to be really possible – and to matter to the child.

Another client was most concerned that her children learn about the effort that goes into achievement and the relationship between accomplishment and rewards. Her youngest child was a good but lazy swimmer, preferring to play in the pool to actual swimming. The child also wanted to go on a special outing with her scout troop at the end of the summer. Our client promised her daughter that she could go on the outing if she had been able to swim an entire mile by the end of the first session of her swimming camp. The child was a determined little girl and by the end of the camp session had not only completed the mile but was invited to join the swim team. She never became a star athlete, but she did go on her coveted outing, and she always remembered that she had earned her place on the camp’s team.

No parent can make any child succeed. At best, parents’ efforts, money, reputation can help. At worst, though, those same things can deprive the child of any real desire or drive. By allowing the child both to savor the rewards of achievement and to experience and survive failure, a parent can help a child to learn to move through the world with confidence and independence.

It’s not in the genes

Family traditions are not passed on genetically. Some kinds of motor skills and information processing are affected by biology, but whether and how a child develops them and learns to apply them are very much affected by the factors of upbringing. Too often families with successful elders limit the development of the children by assuming that they will follow the “family path” and that the children will have both the necessary skills and the necessary interest to do so successfully.

Nature does not always respond as we might hope to our assumptions. Therefore, the long-term success of any family enterprise is better served if each child is allowed to – perhaps even required to – discover his or her own skills and interests. Each can then get the training and the experience needed to develop those skills. The child can then work at the family’s business if and when qualified, or be provided assistance in finding productive ways to use other skills and interests.

This proposal is importantly two sided: If a child is interested in the business in which the family is involved, the family must set an early expectation that the development of those skills necessary to be successful in the business is the investment the child must make before getting help into the business. If the child does not have an interest in the business, there must be a similarly clear expectation that the child is required to identify other interests and will be supported in developing skills relevant to competently pursuing those interests.

The kinds of help and support parents may provide a child who wants to pursue a new path are likely to be different from the help they can offer a child who follows the family traditions. Nevertheless, this help and support can be crucial if the child is to pursue new interests seriously. They should also carry the same requirement of investment from the child as does help with an enterprise the family knows.

The children of successful parents who share their parents’ interests and skills have ready role models for their pursuits, and a strong mentor relationship may even develop between the generations. However, children of successful and often busy parents who do not share the parents’ interests and skills may have neither role models nor the bases for commanding the parents’ attention.

It is, therefore, the parents’ active participation in helping the child whose interest differ from family traditions that allows such a child to value those talents and develop them successfully. All too often a child who is not thus encouraged by family elders will try to build a life on imitating whatever parental characteristics are most visible to him or her – even when they are stepping stones to self-destruction.

In our experience, it is as big a mistake not to attend closely to the development of a child who is not suited to following the family path as it is to demand that such a child pursue the family’s traditional ventures. We have seen as many family disasters arise from the underdevelopment of children not actively involved in the family enterprise as we have seen business disasters from the involvement of insufficiently trained children in the business – and family disasters are ultimately as bad for business as business disasters are for the welfare of the family.