in 1990, give or take, steve ballmer and i had breakfast at a hotel in new york, when i was a reporter on the technology beat at the wall street journal. steve, whose weight tended to bounce all over the place, was on one of his periodic diets and ordered a bowl of rice. the waiter said that wasn’t on the menu. we were at a japanese hotel, so steve, politely but insistently, said he imagined rice was served with lunch. it was, the waiter said. steve asked for a lunch menu and ordered something that came with rice, then told the waiter to hold everything but the rice.

ah, i thought, ballmer’s attitude is why microsoft will beat ibm.

Ok. I will bite. I will agree and disagree (to a point).

If a boss’s boss cannot point to a specific organizational problem or opportunity, it makes them a bad leader or a bad communicator. It does not make them irrelevant. They get paid (and fired) for their vision – and their brainfarts. Project teams get paid (and fired) for their delivery against whatever the boss’s boss say.

Some observations:

- What seems like a brainfart may be, in fact, part of a high-caliber plan. The boss’s boss is hopefully advantaged by a broader and more strategic perspective. What is obvious to him or her may not be obvious to others. A person’s decision to not support the plan because it is “chasing your tail and wasting resources” is actually harming the organization.

- There are valid reasons to create a change and not disclose specific organizational problems or opportunities. I may choose to manage the communication of that problem or opportunity on a different timeline than the leadtime on the project. (Granted, this is frequently an excuse for not communicating however.)

- I see a whole lot more people that think the executive’s idea is a brainfart than I see actual brainfarts. People, by nature, are comfortable with the status quo. Why else would the world need change management consultants.

- Sure brainfarts exist. In the words of Tennyson in The Charge of the Light Brigade however:

Some one had blunder’d:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die,

The greater context of the poem is an actual battle that was based on a bad plan. Tennyson points out, however, that the odds of dying in the battle increased if you stood around thinking about how bad the plan was.

How depressing is that for a Monday morning?

Stephen Rock
http://www.thebrooksidegroup.com
http://www.orgreadiness.com

Thanks for the comment…great stuff. You’ve got a great point…it is necessary to find out the real objective from the main source (e.g., your bosses boss).

You’ve got a great blog going at http://orgreadiness.com/…I‘ll be adding your feed to my daily reading.

I find the key question to ask is, “what is the boss’s boss’s objective?” Instead of playing the game of telephone and trying to guess the objective based on second or third-hand information, go to the source.

Let me give an example. We were involved with a project to make an Accounts Payable organization more efficient. There was plenty of opportunities to change processes within Accounts Payable, but addressing these issues would not come close to satisfying the CFO’s needs.

He wanted an organization that provided great service to suppliers at the lowest possible cost. To provide great service, it would be necessary to change processes in the purchasing department (the source of many issues) and re-train the employee base on their role in paying suppliers. To truly lower costs it would be necessary to move the function to a new location. Any increase in productivity would pale in comparison to the potential for reducing salaries.

In short, find out the real objective from the source, then be prepared to identify and address root cause issues other than process. You might need to address training, communication, staffing, organization design, systems, controls, or incentives.