Feeling a Little Behind?

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You need to replace your core administration system, but you think you need too much customization. You know you’ll fall behind competitively if you don’t replace your system, but you think the customizations you want will cost too much. Are you sure?

We’re not necessarily anti-customization. But we do think customizations — their perception of their benefits and advantages — may be matters of perspective. This may seem like an extreme example, but please consider the following exchange:

Ed: I’d like to put a manual transmission in my car.

Fred: But it has an automatic transmission.

Ed: Yeah. But I want it customized.

Fred: It’s going to cost a lot of money.

Ed: Never mind. I want to shift the way I want to shift. And your price is too high now anyway.

Speaking of Shifting …

What if Ed had taken a slightly more objective perspective? What if he’d been willing to take a look at the way he went about the business of driving? What if he’d realized he could decrease the cost of going about that business, get to his desired destination more efficiently, and save himself some time and effort if he’d been willing to drive the car the way it was intended to be driven? We may never know. Neither will Ed.

From his perspective, it was better to re-engineer the tool than to consider the reasons for which it was built the way it was and to use it the way it worked best. It was more important to Ed to turn his car into something it was never intended to be, rather than to accept it as it was, to understand its advantages, and to reap its benefits.

Another Interpretation

If you have the tendency to view software the way Ed viewed his car, we have a suggestion: As you head to NAMIC this year, try thinking about another interpretation of the acronym this way: Not All Methods Involve Customization.

If you do that, your experience at NAMIC might be more fruitful. You might find things you didn’t expect to find, including new perspectives. And you just might find yourself driving toward competitive success in a whole new vehicle.

At the very least, maybe you’ll be able to see the possibilities once you’re able to see out from behind the eight ball.

A Word About Culture: Part Five

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This is the fifth and final post in a series inspired by a Harvard Business Review (HBR) article, “The Hard Truth About Innovative Cultures”, that posited these five characteristics of effective corporate cultures:

  1. Tolerance for Failure but No Tolerance for Incompetence
  2. Willingness to Experiment but Highly Disciplined
  3. Psychologically Safe but Brutally Candid
  4. Collaboration but with Individual Accountability
  5. Flat but Strong Leadership.

In the prior post, which covered collaboration and accountability, we stressed the importance of giving people responsibility — plus authority — for their given tasks. As we wrap up this series, we address the subject of leadership and share our thoughts on the way our organization works best and why.

The Buck Stops Everywhere

To summarize the HBR article’s point #5, which is consistent with much of what we wrote in our last post:

In culturally flat organizations, people are given wide latitude to take actions, make decisions, and voice their opinions … [they] can typically respond more quickly to rapidly changing circumstances because decision making is decentralized and closer to the sources of relevant information … Lack of hierarchy, though, does not mean lack of leadership … For employees, flatness requires them to develop their own strong leadership capacities and be comfortable with taking action and being accountable for their decisions.

In all likelihood, there isn’t one person in our organization who’d say it lacks leadership. At the same time, most if not all of the people in the organization would say they’re comfortable with the extent to which they’re given rein to manage their responsibilities with authority, to call the appropriate shots, and to let their thoughts be known. While ownership is an overused term, all of our people are encouraged to own their jobs. And they’re recognized and rewarded for doing their jobs well.

Connecting the Dots

Logically, all five of the points in the HBR article are related. In this series of posts, we’ve suggested the ways in which those points are related sequentially (each point feeds off the previous point) and operationally (each point strengthens the functional interactions within the organization and of its people). Writing this series has given us the opportunity to grant ourselves some objective distance from the organization, to appreciate the things we’re doing well, and to connect the appropriate dots.

We hope you enjoyed reading this series as much as we enjoyed writing it.