No Excuses -- You HAVE to "Get to Yes"
The Digital Leader Newsletter— Strategies and Techniques for Change Agents, Strategists, and Innovators.
He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else
— Ben Franklin
I was in Houston this past week to give a keynote on “Leadership for Growth and Innovation” for the marketing leadership teams of a giant international energy company. They were a fantastic host and came equipped with questions indicating they were really trying to figure out how to apply the concepts and mechanisms discussed.
One question was, “we have so many other teams which have to weigh in, sign off, or we are dependent upon to launch anything. But they move slowly and have a fixed approach. How do we work with them? Corporate IT is a good example.”
How do we “Think Big — but bet small” if there are always significant blockers? How do we create a separate “high-speed” traffic lane for our experiments?
With a “no excuses” mindset, here are three moves — one tactical, one technical, and one culture change, to avoid the blockers which always arise in our efforts to develop, test, and iterate concepts.
A Dedicated Stack for Innovation
Corporate IT is in a really difficult situation. They have to simultaneously provide a stable, secure, and auditable “system of record” and current business transaction and collaboration environment, create incremental improvements in capabilities in this environment, AND enable new idea experimentation. Many of these new ideas will not scale and do not have a defensible business case — yet. What these new ideas need is speed —>speed to testing, market feedback, and learning. Corporate IT is in a brutal situation.
For a large company and function, perhaps a large marketing or go-to-market function, wanting to lead customer experience and business model innovation, to expect the corporate IT organization ever to come close to matching the needs of an innovation machine is crazy.
The road is permanently blocked. Don’t keep attempting to go through the tree; go around (or over) the tree. Construct a software (and partner) stack purpose-built to go from “concept” to “beta tested.” I’ve done this before with a large enterprise client. While it was a sizeable startup cost for the innovation function, it was a significant un-lock enabling our mission.
The stack needs to include all the typical types of data, transaction, and customer engagement functions typical for your business, plus a way to plug-in new capabilities powering the innovation. Perhaps it’s a computer vision technology, a data source, or the ability to connect to an edge device, among many potential integrations.
An important company you should know about is Iterate.ai. Co-founder Jon Nordmark was the co-founder of eBags, and we worked together in the early launch of the Amazon marketplace. Jon and his co-founder Brian Sathianathan have created an incredible accelerator for building software capabilities. Iterate.ai Interplay is a low-code environment for powerful technology prototyping, testing, and scaling to production. But it’s not just “product”— it is also expertise provided. They provide the engineering skills to demonstrate what’s possible and then figure out to onramp your team. This combination accelerates software product development by a factor of 10x to 17x. It might be a critical component of your “innovation stack.” Connect with them if you’d like an Iterate.ai Interplay demo.
Effective Partnership
It’s easy to put the accountability of “moving too slow” or “creating barriers to innovation” at the feet of internal functional teams like legal, IT, tax, HR, or any other corporate function. Sometimes it’s true — they tend just to say “No” — and we will get to that. But more often than not, the real issue is that we, as the “agent of change,” have not engaged early and effectively with them.
Engaging early with your stakeholders and including them in a multi-disciplinary team approach brings two huge advantages. First, your stakeholders will feel like they are “heard” and have a sense of ownership. Second, these tend to be tricky situations and problems to address. Engaging early and consistently puts them in the position to research, discuss, persuade, and problem-solve in a paced manner. When we ask for a nuanced approach to our data management policy two weeks before the alpha test is to start, we put them on the defensive. As they say, this is a “you problem”.
Create a standard partnership operating model outlining how to engage with critical stakeholders early and consistently. You will get the best out of them.
But sometimes, the reality is, despite creating your separate innovation stack and effectively integrating your partners, you continue just to hear “no”. This is where a new culture and expectation need to be created. You need to “get to yes.”
Get to Yes
In 2019, I released a book titled Think Like Amazon: 50 1/2 Ideas to Become a Digital Leader. These are durable leadership, culture, leadership, and execution techniques to compete in the digital era.
(available in hardcover, Kindle, and Audible versions)
Idea 12 is titled “GET TO YES: Finance, Tax, Legal and HR Teams that Matter”.
GET TO YES: Finance, Tax, Legal, and HR Teams That Matter
Within most traditional organizations, a topic or project, or function is “owned” by a core business team. In this model, the core group receives support from functional teams such as finance, legal, and human resources.
Organizationally marginalized and narrowly defined, these support teams are often considered experts only in their specific discipline. Naturally, these functions come to see themselves the way they are seen, and they decline to contribute much beyond the constraints of their job description.
Often, these are the people who will give the core business team reasons a goal can’t be reached, or they will give very specific requirements to achieve the goal. In other words, they tend to be gatekeepers and represent just another hurdle for your core business team.
How many times has negotiating within your own company felt like the most daunting part of a project? At prior firms, many of my colleagues referred to our legal team as the “deal avoidance team.” While managing legal risk is part of the job, the safest course of action is no action. As a result, no becomes the legal team’s default answer to any problem if the terms are not the preferred or default terms. Similarly, when faced with a challenge, I’ve also heard a lot of technology leaders or CIOs say, “It’s the business’s decision,” as if the business were an entirely separate entity. “Guess what, Sparky?” I want to tell them. “You are the business as much anyone else.”
THERE IS NO “NO”
When Kimberly Jones joined Amazon, she was an international logistics and compliance expert with more than 15 years of experience at leading freight forward companies. Because of this expertise, Amazon tapped Reuter to dramatically expand Amazon’s cross-border business for customers and third-party sellers. At the time, Reuter saw customs and compliance as a transactional system of prescribed procedures and regulations. However, in her new role as Amazon’s director of global supply chain and compliance, these processes and procedures were expected to scale. Radically. The model she brought with her to Amazon was suddenly far too slow and unwieldy.
“It was really disorienting. I spent the first few months saying, ‘No, that’s not possible” a lot. I was really frustrated when I first joined, and no one was listening to my decisions,” said Reuter. “My mentor sat me down and informed me that there is no ‘No’ at Amazon. If I was going to be successful, I had to figure out solutions, no matter how complicated—and I needed to do it quickly.”1
Her mentor told Kim that if she was going to innovate, she had to be able to present options, choices, trade-offs, and opportunities. The bottom line is that, at Amazon, no one defers responsibility. Everyone works to get to yes. Amazon requires the mindset that “we” must get to yes. All of us. It’s everyone’s job to get to yes. It was Reuter’s job just as it was the job of HR or legal or finance. Everyone has the same amount of ownership and accountability about getting to yes as the core business team.
REFRAME THE ISSUE
How do you get your team to yes? Finding solutions isn’t always the obstacle. Frequently, it is in truly understanding the situation, problem, or requirements. Is the issue, “Why did this fail?” or “How do we design something that allows that component to fail?” Is the right question, “How do we avoid this risk?” or “How do we accept and mitigate this risk?” These slight tweaks in the problem statement make all the difference in how you find solutions. What steps do you take to get to yes more effectively? Here are some suggestions:
1. Reframe the issue, and ask more questions about the situation and objectives.
2. Dive deep into the real root-cause factors versus symptoms. Ask the five whys (see Idea 5).
3. Outline and challenge your assumptions in a very deliberate way.
4. Articulate and quantify the real risks. Often the perceived risks can be mitigated, making the hurdle a minimal factor.
5. Bring in external, unbiased, cross-domain expertise to complement the expert mindset in the room.
6. Create a contest or hackathon for developing alternatives and solutions.
There are many obstacles to creating a yes culture. First and foremost, it requires direct and honest communication within an organization and viewing yourself as a co-owner of the business result. You have to get to yes. What is the mortal enemy of direct communication? Bureaucracy.
What’s Your Excuse???
I knowwww. BUT… while these are good ideas, YOUR situation is more difficult, unique, and unsolvable. Waaaaaah!
Connect with me if you need help getting around YOUR blockers. There is “no excuse.”
Onward!
John
About The Digital Leader Newsletter
This is a newsletter for change agents, strategists, and innovators. The Digital Leader Newsletter is a weekly coaching session with a focus on customer-centricity, innovation, and strategy. We deliver practical theory, examples, tools, and techniques to help you build better strategies, plans, and solutions — but most of all, to think and communicate better.