Kobayashi Maru

"I'm not a magician, I'm just an old country doctor." Leonard McCoy

I wrote a coule of weeks ago a blog titled “Things you can learn from the sports page” where I made the statement that in business you should probably take the decisions made by professional sports owners and do the opposite.

This led a buddy to write me asking, then, how would I handle a Bret Favre situation in the business world. A well-loved but totally self-centered star performer who left on his own terms, you’ve replaced him with someone that you believe has talent but certainly can’t immediately fill the shoes and now the departed star wants to come back as if nothing happened or be blessed to go to a competitor.

My answer: Kobayashi Maru, the “No Win Scenario”.

The only way the Packers make out on this deal is if they trade Favre, get some value for him and then he suffers a career-ending injury during training camp with the new team. Or, they bring him back and he takes them to the Super Bowl. With one of these the Packers brass look like geniuses. Almost any other scenario is bad for them.

No win scenarios happen in business all the time. It can be with key employees, with customers, with competitors, with market conditions, with partners and on particularly bad days all of them at the same time.

A case in point: I was talking with a guy the other day whose company had committed to a specific Business Intelligence provider (and their strategy) two years ago. Now, however, one of their most important business partners had acquired a BI company competitive to the one being used, and to no great surprise, had convinced the owners that a change in BI direction was critical to the relationship. This guy was given 2 months to make the change and report to the board a successful transition. Kobayashi Maru.

I was once given the assignment relocate an entire development team from California to Michigan with no interruption in release schedules and no unhappy customers. Given how many of these Silicon Valley folks were jumping to relocate to Michigan...in January...Kobayashi Muru.

To beat the No Win Scenario you have to be strong of will, decisive of actions, flexible of thinking, and damned lucky. I was lucky, I had an incredible team of people who essentially brute-forced the transition to happen successfully.

Or take the Kirk way and cheat…..

Do you have a room for me and my monkey?

“Just cause you got the monkey off your back doesn’t mean the circus has left town” George Carlin

My son recently told me about a book it was suggested he read by his company called “The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey”.

“The One Minute Manager” was required reading back when I was at about the same stage of my career as he is now. I liked it because it was short and the relevant points were easy to follow. I hated it because it was my first exposure to lunatic managers who couldn’t speak or hold a meeting without referencing the damned book. See my blog from February on the subject A Book I'll Read.

So, I get TOMM but what would monkeys have to do with it? Thus I was compelled to read it.

Now, let me digress. I love monkeys. I love monkeys in jokes (http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=RIY_MQ5x4G4), I love monkeys on television http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancelot_Link,_Secret_Chimp) and I especially love monkeys in advertising http://www.trunkmonkeyad.com/). So it only made sense that monkeys would work in How To books.

Not so fast, my friend. These weren’t monkeys like chimps, these were monkeys like Reefer Madness. When you got a room with this monkey you were still by yourself. The essence – so you won’t have to take an hour to read the book yourself - is delegating a task to someone is “giving them the monkey” to take care of as opposed to you taking the money from them and having yet another monkey on your back. There’s a lot of good, sound management stuff like clearly assigning the monkey and following up on the monkey but there’s things like “insuring” the monkey that I’m not so sure about.

Like all How To books this one is based on nice, sound, common sense principles that only have the flaw that all these books have which is that people in the corporate environment never follow nice, sound, common sense principles. However, it is apparent that like it's predicessor it's going to be waved around with great zeal and discussed incessently in meetings.

I guess I’ll now have to rename my fictional book The Seven Flat One Minute Long Tailed Monkeys Who Stole My Cheese.

Things you can learn from the sports page

“We learn something every day, and lots of times it's that what we learned the day before was wrong”. Bill Vaughan

I love reading the sports pages – well, to be accurate the sports web pages. Reading about the trauma and drama of players, teams, coaches, fans and owners offers a great microcosm into life in general and business specifically. When you watch these ultra wealthy pro franchise owners, who became wealthy by being successful business people, make some of the most lame-brain decisions and do things they would NEVER do with their companies its great entertainment in a head scratching way.

What I’ve been watching recently involves the ongoing saga of my alma mater Indiana University. I’ve written some past blogs on some of it and it appears to be about to come to a sad close and maybe, just maybe, they can get back on the road to not being embarrassing again.

The final chapter in this mess involves the resignation of Rick Greenspan the Athletic Director. Under Greenspan the University hired and subsequently fired a known rules violator in Kelvin Sampson. Because he repeated his bad behavior IU is being penalized. Because no one monitored Sampson’s behavior Greenspan has been forced to resign. The big debate is did the former IU President force Greenspan to hire Sampson. Rumor suggests this to be the case. That President, however, is gone and not talking. So was Greenspan the fall guy?

Many moons ago I got my first promotion to “Vice President”. The title came with a relo to a new region with lots of problems. The new General Manager recruited me to come in and “fix things”. What I learned was that his idea of fixing was essentially getting rid of the entire existing management team. This became my duty. Greg Strouse, Ax Man. He ID’d them, I whacked them. I thought some of them were pretty decent employees and certainly had a ton of experience. But, I was told to whack, so I whacked. Once all the cleansing was done and new people hired the performance of the place went even deeper into the hole. Too many new people and morale was terrible. I was unceremoniously fired. After all, everyone hated me and blamed me for the problems.

Now my story has a happy ending that I’ll tell you someday but here’s what I learned.

If you are an executive level performer with a large budget, lots of employees and the responsibility of running a successful operation it is your duty to assess the entire landscape and if need be go to battle with your boss on the proper path. You may lose. Actually, you’ll probably lose. But personal accountability and professional honor should win out.

Read the sports pages, see how it’s usually done these days in the world of sports…and do the opposite.