"Loved what you told us about treating employees better to capture
their discretionary effort. Promoting learning by building a
culture that tolerates mistakes? Great idea! Fixing root causes of
problems, in the process sometimes making things worse before they
get much better - makes a lot of sense. Trouble is, we can't do it.
The boss should have been here. Too much day-to-day stuff that
takes precedence. It takes too long to make these changes. Wish we
had the time, money, and the other resources to change the way we
do things, but you know how it goes."
It's as if a requirement for entering the ranks of senior
management today is the ability to make excuses for why it's
impossible to do things that most people agree are important. David
Russo, the former head of human resources at SAS Institute and at
Peopleclick, told me that when he gives speeches about how to build
employee loyalty and motivation, it rarely takes more than 20
minutes before someone raises a hand and begins to explain that
whatever Russo's saying can't be done in his organization. As he
says, why bother showing up to listen to what to do if you aren't
going to do it?
Excuses are also rampant in the public sector. Rudy Crew, head of
Florida's Miami - Dade County school system and the former
chancellor of New York City's schools, tells the following story
about an incident in New York. He visited a school that was not
doing well to meet with the principal and discuss necessary
changes. The principal told Crew that the school had done well in
the past, and then took the Chancellor into the schoolyard and
pointed to some nearby public housing towers. He complained that
many of the students who came from those projects had trouble
speaking English, and that some mothers came to PTA meetings in
house slippers. In other words, the school was failing because the
students were too difficult to teach and their parents weren't
helping with their education. Crew dismissed the principal that
day, noting that if he gave up on the students, they would give up
on themselves and that even though the task of educating
disadvantaged students was difficult, there could be no excuse for
not giving it every effort. As Crew told me, he couldn't be paying
principals to engage in preemptory surrender.
When companies allow excuses to impede efforts to change, they
don't merely fail to improve. The organizations risk losing out to
those who see challenges as obstacles to be surmounted by diligent
effort. After all, customers are happy to switch to competitors
that actually fix problems instead of making excuses about why
things can't be improved.
Consider the University of California at San Francisco's Carol
Franc Buck Breast Care Center. In 1997, Laura Esserman, an MD and
MBA graduate from Stanford, became its director. She had a vision:
a facility where a woman could arrive in the morning and, in one
location and in one day, receive an examination, a mammogram (if
needed), and a biopsy (should that be needed), and leave at the end
of the day with a diagnosis and a treatment plan - bypassing the
typical delays as people went from one specialist to another, often
having to carry their own medical records with them.
Although this new arrangement made complete sense for the patient
and even for the quality of medical care - after all, coordination
among medical specialists would be easier if they were co-located -
the obstacles were enormous. Each medical specialty - radiology,
surgery, pharmacology, and so forth - had its own department and
its own budget, and this was UCSF, a large, state-governed
bureaucracy burdened with budget and employment rules that seemed
to preclude any change.
Nonetheless, Esserman did not accept excuses as to why something
that made so much sense could not be done. With persistence and
political skill, she created a successful center that has drawn
national attention and where patient visits have increased from 175
a month in 1997 to 1,300 by 2003.
Breaking Through
So how do leaders break through the excuses that seem so common in
organizational life? The first and most basic principle is not to
accept reasons for why things that need to be done can't be. Carl
Spetzler, a founder and former CEO of the consulting firm Strategic
Decisions Group, told me that when he was still at SRI
International in the early 1970s, he made a presentation to Merrill
Lynch for a product that would become their cash management
account. At that time, interest rates were still regulated, the
discount brokerage business was just beginning, and the idea of
having one account that linked a credit card, check writing, money
market funds, and securities trading together was extremely novel.
After Spetzler's presentation, Donald Regan, the CEO at the time,
went around the room and asked for comments. The head of operations
noted that with the average securities commission at that time of
more than $100, the fact that it cost more than $10 to process a
transaction was not a problem - but Merrill would go broke with
that cost structure if it got into the business of processing
credit card receipts and checks. The head of marketing noted that
banks were among Merrill's most important customers, and by issuing
its own credit cards and processing checks, the company would be
going into competition with those banks. The corporate counsel
noted the many state and federal regulations that this new product
would run afoul of - this was, after all, before all the
deregulation in the 1980s. And so it went around the room.
Then Regan told his team that he had heard all of their issues, and
they were all both accurate and important. But it was also
important strategically for Merrill Lynch to be the first to come
to market with this innovative product. So he would now go back
around the room and let each person who had described a problem now
describe how he and his team might attack it. Of course, faced with
the need to not just identify some issues but to also actually fix
them, the executives were remarkably creative with proposed plans
and solutions. Merrill Lynch was the first major brokerage to
launch an integrated financial package like the cash management
account, and it gained enormous business and profits by doing so -
mostly because its CEO would not accept excuses for why things that
were important to business success couldn't be done.
The next thing to do in the process of getting people to go beyond
reasons why important things won't work or can't be accomplished is
to articulate a vision that can inspire the effort required to
overcome seemingly impossible obstacles. To Laura Esserman, that
involves keeping the patients in focus, because who can look a
breast cancer patient in the eye and tell that woman that she has
to "settle" for how things are currently being done? So Esserman
invariably invites patients or their loved ones to dinners and even
staff meetings to tell their stories, as a way of maintaining the
emphasis on the quality of care and the compassion with which
medical services are delivered.
Climb the Hill
For Rudy Crew, it is expending boundless energy in "giving voice"
to the issue of urban education in America and being an advocate
for the children who are left behind when and if it fails. One of
the powerful metaphors Crew frequently uses in his public
appearances is that urban education is America's hill to climb. And
while it might be interesting - and people have built quite
successful careers - describing the hill, measuring the hill,
walking around the hill, taking pictures of the hill, and so forth,
sooner or later, someone needs to actually climb the hill. It is
simply unacceptable to leave children not reading at grade level,
because if kids can't read, they can't learn other subjects. And
failure in school consigns them to failure in life, including in
many instances going to jail. Crew talks patiently and endlessly to
meetings of administrators, teachers, parents, the business
community, and school board members to explain what must be done to
provide opportunities for the children and how the school system
can tackle what looks like a set of insurmountable obstacles.
Crew has a final word of advice for overcoming excuses: lead by
example. Near the end of his time in New York, Crew, to keep
himself focused on the work of education as contrasted with the
endless politics that so frequently bedevil it, visited a
fourth-grade classroom. There he saw a boy struggling with his math
assignment, erasing his work, trying again, and erasing once more.
Crew spent time with the boy, encouraging him to not give up and
telling him that with persistence, he would eventually succeed.
"Keep at it, you'll get it," he said. When he went to leave the
room, the little boy came up to him and asked him who he was. When
Crew replied he was the chancellor of New York City's schools, the
boy was impressed. As only a young child could, he then asked Crew
if he was any good at his job. Crew replied, sometimes he felt like
was doing a good job but there were other days that he wasn't so
sure. The boy smiled and told him, "Just keep at it. You'll get
it."
Similarly, although it takes time away from her administrative and
research work, Laura Esserman continues to provide care to
patients. It not only keeps her connected to what she is trying to
do and lets her make a difference one person at a time on days when
the administrative obstacles seem insurmountable, her personal
involvement in patient care gives her credibility with others she
is trying to influence to change how that care is organized and
delivered.
As the saying goes, the definition of insanity is doing the same
thing over and over again while expecting different results. Many
organizations understand that they need to change, why they need to
change, and even how and in what direction they need to change. But
they have all the excuses in the world about why they can't really
do things differently. Excuses, therefore, drag organizations
toward failure and mediocrity - toward an insane pattern of
behavior in which the same mistakes get made again and again. As a
leader, your job is to counteract the tendency to let excuses
substitute for action. Or don't, and you and your team can trade
excuses about why your company failed.