This sponsored blog entry was submitted by T.C. Doyle of Channel Partners.
What do Scotchgard, Super Glue and Saccharin have in common? They were all invented by accident. That’s right. The people behind these modern marvels were actually trying to invent something else, but instead stumbled across these now well-known products. Thankfully, they were not deflated by their failed experiments. Instead, they looked at things with a fresh perspective and helped bring these innovations to market.
Would your business do the same?
It’s a question worth asking, especially since so many executives working in technology have embraced a measured management model.
Measured Management Model
The measured management model business philosophy emphasizes analysis and metrics, and puts them at the center of critical decision making. Born of the wisdom of thought leaders like author and management consultant Peter Drucker, who popularized the concept of management by objectives in the 1950s, the philosophy has helped millions of entrepreneurs better manage their organizations. This includes many channel companies.
If you listen carefully at industry events and gatherings, you’ll hear more than a few business leaders say, “If you can’t measure it, you cannot manage it.” I did at one recent channel conference, where the idea of running a business strictly by the numbers was debated.
Here’s a funny thing about the maxim, however. It’s often attributed to postwar industrial management guru W. Edwards Deming. Deming, of course, is famous for his belief that variance creates inefficiency and waste. When Japan’s electronics manufacturers and car makers applied his ideas for improving consistency to their businesses, they ushered in a revolution in quality and transformed themselves into world leaders in their industries.
Despite Deming’s fondness for process excellence, he never said, “If you can’t measure it, you cannot manage it.” (Neither did Drucker, for that matter.) Instead, Deming labeled “running a company on visible figures alone” as one of his “Seven Deadly Diseases” of business management. Sometime in the last few decades, the wisdom of this thinking has been lost, like a dog-eared copy of Deming’s 1982 best-seller, “Out of the Crisis,” one of Time magazine’s 25 Most Influential Business Management Books.
Metrics Gone Too Far
In the vacuum of thinking left behind, many well-intended organizations have “over-rotated” on reducing variance and stamping out inefficiency. Leaders now run their companies with the unshakable belief that numbers and analysis alone will guide them to where they want to go. What these leaders fail to recognize is that eliminating nonstandard thinking through Total Quality Management (TQM), Six Sigma and other efficiency endeavors can reduce organizational creativity.
I’m hardly the first to make the point. To wit, if you have a moment, please read “Measurement Myopia,” a blog by Paul Zak, director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University, where The Drucker Institute is based, or Liz Ryan’s hilarious “If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Manage It’: Not True” column for Forbes. Both make the case that management by numbers alone can limit an organization as much as inefficiency and waste.
As you enter information into Salesforce.com or pore over a new batch of Excel spreadsheets, you may want to ask yourself if everything you need to make a critical decision can be boiled down to a number or finding. My experience says it cannot.
How do you measure, for example, the tirelessness of an athlete, the faith of a child or the determination of an inventor? You can’t. Nor can you scientifically determine the best candidate for a job, the cleverest marketing slogan or the optimum time to launch a new product. Sometimes you have to go with your gut.
The view is somewhat contrarian in the post-“Moneyball” world of today, where every answer to life’s pressing questions can surely be found in some tranche of Big Data. But it’s true just the same.
Yes, you can improve your business by investing metrics and analysis. Yes, big data represents a revolution in advanced thinking — an enormous one. Yes, information will absolutely lend credibility to your thinking and inspire confidence in your decisions.
But it won’t replace the intuition or the imagination you developed over a lifetime.
It’s thanks to intuition and imagination that we can enjoy stain-free carpets, super-hold adhesives, zero-calorie beverages and a million other ideas and innovations that were born of divergent thinking — the kind that numbers just can’t explain.
T.C. Doyle is the executive editor of information technology and cloud computing at Channel Partners. A longtime industry journalist, he can be reached at tcdoyle@vpico.com.
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