This post was inspired by Jim Collins’ “Good To Great,” and includes excerpts from the book. Please don’t confuse his content with mine. I don’t want to claim rights to this excellent material.
I was going through Good To Great the other day when I hit this section. It popped out at me, so I thought I would share the clip and a couple other points. Collins talks about the tension between having a group of self-starting leaders who can make things happen and the lower-capacity leaders who are used to bureaucracy and limiting systems (which slow the self-starters down). How do you manage this tension? He cites an example from George Rathhmann of Amgen.
“The professional managers finally rein in the mess. they create order out of chaos, but they also kill the entrepreneurial spirit. Members of the founding team begin to grumble. ‘I used to be able to just get things done…’
The exciting start-up transforms into just another company, with nothing special to recommend it. The cancer of mediocrity begins to grow in earnest.
George Rathmann avoided this entrepreneurial death spiral. He understood that purpose of bureaucracyis to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline–a problem that largely goes away if you have the right people in the first place. Most companies build their bureaucratic rules to manage the small percentage of wrong people on the bus, which in turn drives away the right people on the bus, which then increases the percentage of wrong people on the bus, which increases the need for more bureaucracy to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline, which further drives the right people away, and so forth.”
Dang. If that’s not slightly scary to you, maybe you need to read it again. One wrong hire can bring a need for over-management, which drives your true leaders away. This next line drops the hammer.
“Rathmann also understood an alternative exists: Avoid bureaucracy and hierarchy and instead create a culture of discipline. When you put these two complementary forces together–a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship–you get a magical alchemy of superior performance and sustained results.”
1. If you haven’t read “Good To Great,” what the heck are you doing on my blog? Go get it.
2. Who you surround yourself with is so much more important than what you decide to do. If you surround yourself with people who need to be tightly managed, you won’t make a great impact.
3. Do you over-manage your leaders? You’re not allowed to answer that until you ask them. They may hold back until you give them the opportunity for healthy debate.