Recycled Bullsh-IT

A few years ago you couldn’t endure a PissPoorPoint presentation without the obligatory fuzzy, unreadable Dilbert comic appearing either to badly illustrate a point, or to inject irrelevant humor, sorry humour, into a dull pitch from the unimaginative numpty in front of you. At times, reader, that numpty was me.

 Having just about weaned myself off this lazy habit, I thought I would instead steal one of Scott Adams’ book titles for this diatribe, which is all about the leadership of change. Or at least it started out that way. It struck me that if you separate leadership of change from the day to day running of a business you are missing what change is all about. In fact if you are not leading change all the time you’re screwed. Why? Let me start with Peter Drucker’s pat definition of the difference between a manager and a leader: A Manager “does the thing right” and a Leader “does the right thing.”  While a number of you may be stroking your lockdown beards and nodding sagely at this, let me just deconstruct this a bit.

 In traditional organisational structures managers did indeed (mis)manage, and bosses did lead (or at least bossed). But this is no longer good enough for the current state of What-The-Flux that most organisations are in now. Even the best leaders and managers will struggle to do the right thing right when there are no rules or clarity on what to do. However, what we are experiencing is just a more extreme example of the business shocks that happen every few years where the best (or luckiest) companies emerge strengthened and the unprepared and inflexible disappear. 

 Leadership of change should always be a full-time job, so don’t make the mistake of appointing Transformation Directors or Change Consultants as the owners of change. The only true leaders of change are the directors and line managers who work with their motivated teams to deliver real business value to your clients through customer-focussed processes. They need to:

• Be sharp enough to find the slightly whiter shade of pale in the options that present themselves fleetingly
• Bring their team along at pace in exploiting the current opportunity
• Meet the challenge for the short time it will be profitable or essential
• Be tough enough to stop when that window closes and a new one opens

The main reason most change programmes fail is that they address yesterday’s problems and cannot cope with today’s challenge and tomorrow’s needs. So ditch them, along with management consultants who don’t have a clue about your business, and make change the explicit responsibility of the directors and managers for that part of the organisation.

 As Paul Weller snarled: “This is the modern world, we don’t need no one to tell us what’s right or wrong”. Read the rest of the lyrics to this Jam song as it provides a much better life guide than any number of management books or consultants could.

John “Do as I Say, Not as I Doh!” Moe