It’s a Bum Job

My recent experience in a second global 100,000+ person company plus the unfolding Euro/financial crisis got me thinking. I look at some of the brilliant people across the world and I wonder how we got into such a mess – why do countries such as Germany not act more decisively, why can't the US push through a plan to raise their debt ceiling or a plan to sort out the medium term fiscal situation? One of the key conclusions that I have drawn is that at an atomic level, you can be as brilliant as you want, however in large organisations there are always multiple centres of power and decision makers. Unfortunately you can only move as quickly as the slowest one of these it seems. No doubt the most experienced people will factor this into the original decision making process (thus possibly serving to slow down the whole process even further).

This thought led me to the conclusion that being able to move a large group of people quickly really is a very rare skill. You could argue that we witnessed it during a few key weekends during the financial crisis e.g. decisions to bail out some or let other companies such as Lehman Brothers go to the wall, but I would contend that the industry was lucky enough to have a relatively small number of really key decision makers.

The other thing which struck me is that the larger the group of people you have to move, the simpler your vision and clearer your communication needs to be. Larger groups mean that you can’t have direct contact with every individual. As a result your message will inevitably be passed orally by other people on your behalf. The more complicated the message the greater the chance it will be distorted. It’s a shame then that for the Euro zone there are so many people who take it upon themselves to communicate in slightly different ways depending on their own agendas.

The final thing that struck me during this particular mental ramble was that moving people quickly and providing clear communication is already difficult enough (especially when there is no formal hierarchy to guide people's behaviour). The whole process is completely undermined if you haven’t genuinely thought through all the key ramifications and implications of your plan – now that is difficult and takes a good deal of experience. The best example of that from my own personal experience is that of the recent CEO change at Wipro. The new guy is meant to be very gifted in terms of clearly communicating a vision, and also experienced in moving large groups of people quickly. Where he seems to be stumbling now is that he has left too much underlying detail to be worked out in an off the cuff manner.

All in all, whether you’re Christine Lagarde, TK Kurien or Angela Merkel, the job’s not an easy one. Thankfully the one I’ve got on my hands at EMC is a good few notches down from what those guys need to do!