A Sporting Analogy

Imagine a football team that chooses its players by having a huge fight before the games. Obviously, this is not the best way of picking a team because: a) you are likely to get the best fighters not the best players, b) the team will probably not work together effectively  and c) they will be exhausted before they start.

West Coast at Half time #2 by Michael_Spencer, on Flickr

Now this sounds ridiculous but it is exactly the process I see happening when large organisations try to do anything new.  In a corporate environment there are many people with overlapping roles and responsibilities which creates an atmosphere of intense competition around whose ideas see the light of day. The internal politics and manoeuvring that goes on soaks up the energy of those involved and tends to favour those adept at political warfare and debate rather than any inherent practical capability to do things. To me, this seems to explain why large organisations take so long to create new things and why the result are often so poor.

What we are seeing is the work of exhausted fighters.

Smaller organisations don’t have this problem because they are lucky if they have enough people for a team in the first place. You are much more likely to find someone covering two roles rather that competing for one which means that they can focus all their energy on the work itself. They don’t need to establish a mandate to do something new or convince anyone else that they are competent. Creating PowerPoint presentations with 50 slides are a distraction that they just don’t spend time on. Instead they are judged on real world results.

Small companies usually have the advantage of a leader who is close to the work and knows what roles need to be done and is able to spot duplication and inefficiency. I am sure most CEOs of big companies don’t really understand how their companies work and have to rely on what they hear which is usually managers big noting themselves or cutting others down. They spend most of their time dealing with the politics.

I need to be careful here and say that most of my comments relate to doing new things. There are large parts of organisations which don’t experience this and that’s because they do something that no one else wants to do. There is no competition for who is going to talk to customers on the phone.

Of course you are probably thinking that big corporates make big decisions about big things. Their actions affect large numbers of people and involve millions of dollars. They need to have all these check and balances. To which I reply “yes, thats true” but I am not seeing checks and balances, I am seeing chaotic in-fighting with little in the way of actual results.

So, here is the thing: Successful companies grow bigger and eventually get to a size where internal conflict arises about who is actually responsible for doing the interesting work. At this point a political environment is created where some people thrive and other people get pushed into corners. I am saying that the people adept creating and delivering good ideas are rarely the ones who are good at the politics. So what you end up with is a situation where everyone seems to be extremely busy but externally nothing appears to be happening.

For large organisations to succeed, every effort needs to be made to minimise the politics and make sure the best person for the job is actually doing “the job”.