Strategy Meets Reality

The real problem in my company is the fact that it's a highly political organization, but it thinks that it's a learning organization. The only real factor in my success at the company is my relationship with key people - people with prestige. So, for example, when my team tries to create better processes and systems in order to better serve our customers and plan ahead for growth and expansion, we are stymied by the fact that other groups, such as the content group who brokers the individual jobs with product managers, have stronger loyalties to their internal clients than they do to us, or even to the customer.

In a political organization, the customer is really last on the list of people being served. Fundamentally, the only motivating factor is personal power, prestige, and visibility. It's pretty much a popularity contest, and it's played day to day, not over the cycle of the business, the product, or the economy.

This is what keeps necessary change from happening fast enough to serve technological and international markets, and it also keeps people from using their real strengths, unless their primary strength is garnering political support and pushing through their own personal agenda - one that promotes personal prestige.

There is no loyalty - not to the company, the product, co-workers, managers, or employees. Each person/factor is just another potential tool to be used, or obstacle to overcome or remove. Political alliances form and dissolve sometimes during the same day - the needs of the customer cannot compete when individual survival is the game being played. Neither can any kind of employee morale, development or motivation - other than that which comes naturally to people who gravitate towards this type of environment.

My team has tried several times during my tenure at the company to institute standards that will allow us to better serve the needs of our customers, clients, and quickly growing international consumers. Because we execute, rather than broker these projects, we feel more loyalty to our customers than to our internal clients. But the projects themselves are brokered by a content/project management team, who's relationship to internal clients is crucial to their survival within the company individually and as a group. They will always choose the client over our standards, the system does not allow for it to be otherwise. The problem is that no one is talking about the fact that this is the case, and every time talks break down, fingers get pointed and another one of my team takes the fall. Funny, that the only team that is more concerned with the consumer than the politics, is the one that bears the brunt of most communicator breakdowns. It's a perfect example of the organizational dissonance that results when espouse values and values in practice are vastly different, and the differences are so undisguised as to be almost completely unconscious.

Two down, four to go

Semesters, that is.

I enjoyed Leading Strategy quite a bit. Turns out to be another thing I never would have guessed I have an affinity for in a million years. Ironically, in preparation for my review at work, I looked up my "strengths finder" scores and Strategist is one of them. Funny.

The main book we read for class "20/20 foresight" was pretty helpful. Dense, very business school-y, but not too hard for me to adapt to different situations. I think what I like about strategy is it's about the business of marrying ideals and vision to execution and operations. Visionaries can drive me nuts because they often don't want to deal with mundane things like reality and ambiguity. But get too caught up in execution, and you get blindness to what's screaming down the highway at you. So, since I've been discovering that I myself am someone kind of in between the visionary and the executor, strategy fits me. Cool.

I'm loath to post much about what I've disliked about the program so far, but I did have a really unpleasant time in the previous class. The style of teaching was very much a do as I say, not as I do kind of paradigm, which I find fairly limiting. I was confused, after spending fourteen weeks of encouragement to think critically, challenge perceptions and authority, and openly disagree, to find myself being penalized, judged, and eventually verbally abused for exercising those skills. It was not a fun experience. Hopefully the other classes will more fully align with the mission of the school, which includes creating critical thinkers.

My next class is Foundations of Ethics, a topic I am very much looking forward to. I'm also looking forward to being back with my cohort, we have our own unique style, and I enjoy it very much.