ruhler

Most senior leaders I know consider themselves to be far more accessible than they really are. They believe attending events such as weekly office meetings, the annual Christmas party, offsite planning meetings, and various office mixers makes them accessible. However, the truth is, they continue to be surrounded by the same group of 15 to 25 people who dominate their attention and skew their information base, providing them with a false sense of “unbiased” knowledge.

A leader’s ability to know what is really going on in a company has much to do with the breadth of their information sources. If the sources are constantly the same, a leader could miss what is really happening at the different levels within the company. This often results in an issue escalating into a crisis before an executive can even realize there is a problem.

Leaders fool themselves by having “open door” policies. They assume their employees will feel comfortable enough to walk into their office with pertinent information. An “open door” policy is fine, but in a decentralized office environment, only the people at that location have access, and those employees most likely would not feel comfortable talking outside the normal chain of command.

Generally, because of rank and title, leaders are perceived to be intimidating, and oftentimes even aloof. In addition, subordinate leaders often give directives such as “don’t tell the boss,” and punish those who express their ideas to a “higher chain of command” without permission. These types of unspoken or unwritten rules exist often without a leader’s knowledge.

I found that in order to get more clear and unbiased information, I had to adjust my methods to actively seek it out. With that in mind, I used three techniques: […]

Enterprises evolve by being willing to fail on numerous initiatives in order to find the one or two that create competitive differentiation and transformation.
The job of an entrepreneurial leader is to improve their company’s value-added market position by creating superior competitive offerings for their firm. Succeeding in evolving successful initiatives with organic growth objectives is often the way you do that.

I have started 15 to 20 new initiatives throughout my career, in an effort to create new businesses or product lines. The success rate of those initiatives has only been about 30%, but thankfully; those few successes were triples or home runs that changed the competitive landscape.

If the probability for failure is so high, how could it be wise to pursue a new initiative? Is there anything that we could have done to increase the probability of success? Did we have a lot of bad ideas? This article is about what we learned.

Initiative failure is rarely about lack of quality of the idea or the dedication of the team. The reason for failure gravitates from too many, often uncontrollable, widely diverse issues. Some of these situations include:

Having the wrong leader
Losing the right potential leader due to early failure or disappointment
Investing too little money, time or energy
Having a non-supportive core business that protects the existing power structure
Wrong timing—either ‘before its time’ or during unexpected economic distraction
The wrong point of sale within the buyer’s organization
Conflicts with services of the existing brand in the eyes of the customers
Trying foolishly to get early synergy with the core business
Experiencing early quality control issues that were not expected or accepted
Possessing little ability to recruit the right supporting cast due to core business identity
Inappropriately trying to re-trend previously successful personnel to a […]