And Vijay Says…

Once upon a time – when I was a young consultant – there was this thing my friends did called “change management”. I must have known more than a 100 change management consultants in my career – but I can count on one hand the number that stayed throughout the projects . Most were let go half way through by the customers .

If change is hard , change Management is harder . When a project has a budget cut – usually the axe fell on a change management consultant first . At one point in my career – I knew many consulting sales people who would add change management to a proposal , strictly as a way to take it off and make the deal look palatable to a customer !

If any term needed a rebranding – Change management was the one to beat . I have seen tens of CIOs roll their eyes if a vendor mentioned “change management” even in passing . And it became rebranded to “transformation” . The same people , the same methodology , more or less the same slides – but with a new name . It worked for a while before losing steam .

I – and customers – have asked the transformation experts on what is the difference between transformation and change management . The usual answer was along the lines of “it’s more strategic and modern” , or a smirk with “you don’t get it” .

Along the way came Hammer and Champy with Re-engineering . To match the theory to practice – ERP vendors and consulting companies started talking about “technology enabled transformation” as a new thing . Billions of dollars changed hands doing “as is” and “to be” analysis of businesses . And when that got ridiculous , some consulting companies and ERP vendors took a stance that “as is” didn’t matter any more and only “to be” mattered . This is the genesis of “best practices” and it’s CYA cousin “leading practices”.
Needless to say – I have hardly met a customer in three continents I worked in that was happy with “best practices”.

And off late , I started seeing a lot of buzz on “digital transformation” – and a bunch of repurposed power points . Sure there is a liberal dose of social, big data , predictive etc in the repurposed version , just like ERP and CRM were sprinkled on to all “technology enabled transformation” messages . I asked my old change management friends the “what is new” question – and they dutifully played back to me the “it’s more strategic and modern” line . I nodded and went my way .

And few minutes ago – my pal Jon Reed mentioned digital transformation on twitter and I had a snarky response . This post is just an extension of that . it’s all Jon’s fault 🙂

PS : I actually do think change management is a good thing and the rebranded naming is probably a minor issue that bothers only a few like me . Vast majority of projects fail – and I have seen it first hand – because customers don’t want to invest in it . And I have seen some top notch change management stuff helping customers enjoy big success .

Since it is a competitive market – vendors don’t push back on it when customers choose to ignore change management , even if they know customer will probably fail .

What is lacking in my opinion is good articulation to customers on why they should invest in it . Lofty messages doesn’t help once you pass senior leadership at CXO level . Would it be too recursive to say change management needs some change management ?

I use three social media networks – Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin. I blog too – so maybe that is a fourth channel. 

Facebook is primarily for personal interests – keeping in touch with family in India and elsewhere, keeping track of what is happening in the world of dog shows and keeping in touch with friends from school. I have a handful of work peeps there, but that is just coincidence. 

Linkedin is my address book for the most part – and for the most part, I use it to get a curated list of good reading material.

Twitter falls in between – I have no intentional personal/professional divide there. But if I am forced to categorize, it is skewed more towards work than personal. 

For the most part – being active in social media has only been helpful to me both on work front and personal front. I used to think that they have very little in common though. Facebook keeps a conversation in one place, which is hard to do in twitter despite hashtags etc. Linkedin has been the least engaging for me – but that is because I don’t get into groups all that much despite signing up for a few. And twitter has been awesome for me despite all its flaws – except for a few people who just incessantly post famous(?) quotes, forcing me to unfollow them.

But as time progresses – I have realized that I was rather wrong in thinking they have not much in common. I think there are three common characteristics in social media irrespective of the specific channel .

1. “The last word is mine and mine alone” syndrome

There is an undeniable urge people have to always be the one who gets the last word in. It gets downright silly – and at least in my circles it is the same whichever way you segment (age, gender, education, country, or pretty much any thing you can use to divide a group into two). There is no denying that I have done it too.

In real life, more people try to make a point and walk away gracefully when they are heard. That is not “a thing” in social media. In social media –  a good majority stay and fight every nitty gritty endlessly and ensure that the whole conversation goes south and all relationships sour. And then they rinse and repeat. It does not matter what the topic is – if they don’t get the last word, they will keep at it with absolute tenacity. 

2. “I hate the current president” syndrome

It does not matter whether the president got elected democratically just like your guy did the last time – in social media, hate for the current president is perpetually a hot topic. While the tempo increases at election time (which is expected), it does not exactly go away after elections. Granted there is some election or other at any point .

If anyone had any doubts on whether the country is divided at a random point in time – just logon to FB and read for an hour. People – including some analysts that I think have the most balanced views on enterprise – have no sense of balance in their political beliefs. 

Now I have lists of such people that I just mute for a few months around election time .

3. “God and Bill Gates loves or hates you depending on what you share” syndrome

About a fifth of all posts on my feeds in facebook are from people who share something saying god will punish you if you don’t share in next five minutes, or from people who are convinced that Bill Gates is going to send them a big fat check for sharing something about his software or his foundation. In fact – I think there is way more of these folks than there are Nigerians promising to make me rich via email. If you don’t believe that a sucker is born every minute – check face book. You can thank me later 🙂

 

 

Earnings season arrived and I am wondering how long big companies can keep their current structures and business models . Size is not always an advantage – it can actually destroy the value of a company .

Big companies try to attack this problem by firing a lot of people . But I have hardly known a company that has succeeded much that way – only very few pull that off .

The problem with firing enmasse is that you have to use broad policies to determine who needs to go . When you fire 1000s of people – not only do you end up firing people who could have done wonders , you lose other good people who will leave because they feel they can do better elsewhere . Firing people lower down in the hierarchy rarely does any company any good. Those are the peeps who do actual work – and they are not usually the ones who made the decisions that turned bad and led to management needing to fire people . Micro corrections throughout the year are a whole lot better in my opinion than mass firing . But at large size and matrix organizations – you cannot optimize . I know that first hand – I have tried and failed , repeatedly .

Large IT companies that have HW and SW have a problem – HW becomes a leading indicator for software , when investors look at the whole company . So if HW declines now , market assumes software will suck pretty soon too . The worst part is if you also have services in the mix . Services trail both HW and SW . So for such companies – if they don’t stop bleeding for HW, market will probably punish them for a long time in future .

The move to cloud is what seem to screw up the larger companies . Cloud is a low margin business – which a large company doesn’t really want to be in . If they don’t do it – they will become obsolete . If they do it – it takes a large amount of time for market to absorb the shock of lesser top and bottom lines . Damned if you do and damned if you don’t . Essentially cloud economics seem to work only for companies who don’t do anything else but cloud business .

When companies solely depend on EPS as a way to set goals for investors – they just lock themselves in jail and throw the key away . To beef up EPS, you can only do three things . Make more revenue , spend less cost and buy back shares . You can’t make more money in cloud – it’s commodity business compared to legacy revenue streams . Your marketing and data center and retraining costs will make sure you can’t spend less . So the only way they can survive is by buying back shares aggressively . That is money they can’t invest back in business. As soon as investors see it – they punish the stock . It’s kind of funny in a sad and weird way how this tactic seems to boomerang

So how exactly do they come out of this vicious cycle ?

I think the sustainable way is to sell off low margin businesses as stand alone entities and double down on what you know best . And if that doesn’t work – then split the company into smaller entities that don’t have to bear huge over heads because of checkers and double checkers . I don’t think any big IT company board is ready to do anything that drastic . They can try to innovate their way to glory – except it is very rare for innovations to scale to an extent that it compensates for the drag caused by deteriorating legacy businesses .

So I guess I will just keep wondering what will happen to all these goliaths . Is there a silver bullet somewhere ? A lot of people I care for work in those places and for their sake , I hope good things happen to those companies