MAY 2007 - From Where I'm Standing
by Keith Norris
As published in 2007 March/April issue of DLB
Management by committee – the malaise of corporate New Zealand.
If you’ve come from a small dynamic organisation, but because you’re obviously talented, bright and dedicated, you’ve been snapped up by a large corporate, you’ll have experienced first-hand the radical difference in the communications culture.
In a small business you often have to think on your feet, make decisions and act on them all by yourself. In the large corporate environment, the same decisions can impact on your colleagues in marketing, PR, production, distribution etc. etc. so you have to learn to involve other people. That’s where the problem starts. The more people you have involved in a decision-making process, the more complex and - dare I say it - the more inefficient it becomes.
So what’s got me thinking down this path? After all, I’m a marketer, not a management consultant. Well, I’ve recently been fortunate to hear two of the world’s great thinkers in the field of management and decision-making. Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point and Blink, and Ricardo Semmler, author of Maverick. Gladwell was recently the keynote speaker of the Global Leaders Forum which was jointly promoted by the Marketing Association. If you haven’t read The Tipping Point, go and buy it now. It may change the way you think about decision-making.
One of his theories is that the more information you have at your fingertips, the more complex the decision-making process becomes. He cites the example of the Emergency Department Registrar when faced with a heart attack victim. He/she has minimal time to assess the symptoms and to determine the best immediate treatment. Research has proven that the best decisions are made with no more than four pieces of information. That’s right….just four! Why? Because the human brain is a wonderfully intuitive mechanism, drawing on all its previous experience, learned wisdom – yes, and past mistakes. More information just clogs up the decision-making process
Ricardo Semmler is the Brazilian entrepreneur who advises businesses on how they can significantly improve performance by restructuring relationships with their people. On his first day as CEO of Semco, he fired 60% of managers and set out to transform the organisation. He turned it on its head by “destructuring” every department and empowering individual employees to set their own work hours, their own salaries, their own objectives and even their own KPIs. Result – at a time when the Brazilian economy was in severe decline, Semmler’s company went ahead in leaps and bounds. You can learn more about Semmler by visiting www.users.on.net/~pottertim/semmler.htm - Ricardo Semmler’s guide to stress management.
And the key messages I got from hearing these two visionaries? Trust your intuition – you’ll be right more often than not. Think about the way you run your business or department….. or even yourself. And stop making decisions by committee!
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