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The NEW HOW: Nilofer Merchant shapes a NEW Reality |
| By:deepika bajaj on Wed 17 Mar 2010 9:39 PM under Business, Career and Money, Corporate culture, Entrepreneurship, Management, balance |
Recently, I met up with Nilofer Merchant, author of the book, The NEW HOW. 
Curious by nature, I wanted to find out more about the book since the title resonated with my belief to shape the NEW Reality in the world of business – collaborative work. Intrigued, I sat down for an interview to get her thoughts on how to transform traditional, top-down approach to strategy planning and execution into collaborative “stratecution” that has proven to be significantly more effective…
Thrilled to bring it our readers who are change agents in their special way.
DB: Nilofer, please tell us more about your recent book –“The NEW HOW”
NM: New How is a book about collaborative work. In this day and age, we need for all companies to act flat, much like a Google or FaceBook, but most companies don’t know how to collaborate with one another across silos and functional divides. This book is the “how” of how to do that.
DB: Why is this book important than ever before?
NM: Companies are faced with changing markets where they need to move quicker, compete more intensely, act more globally, and make decisions that have game changing effects on their future. Companies that know how to take in new insights, to work across their own silos and to make decisions close to the point of customer interaction – are those companies that will succeed year after year. Companies will continue to work in this more permeable way with customers because it benefit the bottom line. Companies that collaborate among all sectors of its business will be more open to the next winning idea, more nimble in responding to market moves, more innovative to figure out what to create next.
DB: What’s the biggest challenge for organizations or businesses you found while writing this book?
NM: Our work at Rubicon has brought us in touch with great products and teams at companies like HP, Symantec, Adobe and so on. We worked with them to create the right strategy but we never actually told them what we were doing in terms of approach. We never said “we will build an engaged team of people who will co-create the solution and therefore make it real”. No executive I know would have hired us if we had focused on the how! We focused on the outcomes and our how was our secret sauce. But what I realized is that after we left, as all consultants should do, those teams sometimes kept using our approach and some reverted back to siloed, adversarial approaches. Knowing that our entire economy could improve if we could just get people to work more effectively on figuring out the right problems, and then solving them, I wrote this book. In some ways, I’ve “outed” myself as someone who knows that how things get formulated with and (gasp!) by people, leads to the final outstanding outcomes. Most executives would rather believe it’s about hiring smart people and strong vision rather than a repeatable process.
DB: At Invincibelle , we stand for women to help them in their professional development, how can women be more collaborative?
NM: Collaboration is a skill set that says you have to come with a considered opinion, ready to step into debate and ready to work for the right solution for the company. It’s not about waiting to be asked to join in discussion. It’s about stepping up. Women can be more collaborative just by raising their hands and saying “I have a point of view that matters” and then coming forward with their intelligence and contribution to shape the dialogue. If I offer any broad generalization to any gender, it’s that we need more people solving more problems, and not waiting to be invited to the party. Find a way to play a role. In terms of specifics, I do recommend reading Chapter 2, about how each of us can be better collaborators. A great excerpt is here: http://www.sandhill.com/opinion/editorial.php?id=289
DB: What does ” The Air Sandwitch” mean?
NM: I’ve come to characterize traditional strategy creation as one that guarantees an “Air Sandwich.” This is where the company’s new direction is delivered from an 80,000-foot perspective to the folks holding a 20,000-foot view, who in turn then try to coordinate the people working on the ground—producing a big “Air Sandwich” of strategy. It would be like having a PB*J sandwich with no PB&J — the good stuff that is incredibly necessary is missing.
An Air Sandwich is, in effect, a strategy that has clear vision and future direction on the top layer, day-to-day action on the bottom, and virtually nothing in the middle—no meaty key decisions that connect the two layers, no rich chewy center filling to align the new direction with new actions within the company. By doing strategy the old way, we’re missing the substance of the business—the debate of options, the understanding of capabilities, sharing of the underlying assumptions, the identification of risks, issues that need to be tracked, and all of the rest of the things that need to be managed. The middle is missing a set of shared understandings that would connect the vision to the direction to the reality.
When a company has an Air Sandwich, the most valuable details and decisions that enable a strategy to succeed simply are left out of the strategy creation process. And, as a result, they are missing from the implementation plans and the execution itself.
DB: What are some ways we can move from Directed to Engaged organization?
NM: Directed organizations are ones where one group tells another what to do. Engaged organizations are ones where we included employees at all levels to let us create better solutions, better outcomes. Notice I didn’t say all employees or some kind of kumbaya kind of approach. We need to figure out how to involve the people who know the problem, who can solve the problem and then DEMAND people engage the process of figuring out what should “we” do to win. The bottom line is we don’t have the time in this economy to have a smallish group of people setting strategy or innovating or leading. Instead, that old approach means we’ve created a bottleneck in a business where a few people are responsible for making decisions. That’s not flexible, complete, or nimble enough. So we’ve gotta figure out how to have as much distributed decision-making as possible with many employees sharing that onus and responsibility.
“Engaged” is really the way in which we do work going forward. It starts with each of us, involves a change in leadership approach away from the Chief of Answers, and a different approach in our work processes (what is described in the book in the QUEST process). When we have a engaged organization, we would have a culture able to create momentum, on how to create action. It acts more like a living, breathing organism that can take in information from the market, knows what questions to ask and answer, can envision many options to success, can decide amongst all those option quickly and can take the vision into reality. Momentum then keeps up with or sets the pace for the competition.
When we are engaged, this allows organizations to act flat rather than wait to pass information up and down the hierarchy of an organization. What this feels like inside the organization is a move from “I think, You do” to “We think, we win”. It allows people to contribute their ideas, to debate options, to be co-creators in a shared outcome. And work becomes a place where every light, of every person, shines more brightly because we’re engaged.
DB: I am intrigued by the word “MurderBoarding”, what does this mean?
NM: Let’s acknowledge this: we’re all very good at whiteboarding or brainstorming — we all thrive on coming up with brilliant new ideas. But no company I know of — from start-up to a big global titan — is failing because of a lack of ideas. What companies are struggling with is knowing which of these many things we could do, what should we do?
And that’s where MurderBoarding comes in. We need a set way of picking from many options to “the one” that makes most sense; we need to go from whiteboarding or generating options to picking the right option for us — at this time, in this market.
I created MurderBoarding when I had a CEO and his team in our offices to help them define direction as they went for a new round of capital. The CEO kept going to the whiteboard like a jack rabbit adding more and more options for what this $100M company could do. And the group kept giving me that look, like — make him stop. I came up with the word MurderBoarding to captivate his attention. The methodology is really an integration of best practices for making tough qualitative decisions.
MurderBoarding is a common framework for a group to make tough choices and walk away being able to tell anyone, which idea matters most to us and why. This allows companies to create alignment and velocity because they are no longer mired in confusion (“why didn’t we pick that road”) or diluting resources (“let’s pick 3 things just in case…”) or a political quagmire (maybe we’re doing this because Bob wants it for political gain rather than what we need to do). When a group can have a shared approach to making a tough set of calls, they can actually make forward motion on making those BIG ideas real. Which is the real point of business, isn’t it?
DB: What motivated you to write this book?
NM:You know, I’m a big believer in passing along what you know. I could have saved 10 years of agony in my career if I had this roadmap to set direction and how to create more value with others. As readers of the book can attest, I’ve had plenty of failures along the way and I’m really just sharing the lessons learned and best practices to help someone accelerate their career and contributions to their companies.
Buy a copy of the Book: The NEW HOW
