When the answers (or best practices) you followed don’t work, there’s always someone waiting in the wings to give you even more answers (or best practices).
At Harvard Business Review, Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind offer just that to Microsoft.
The gist
Microsoft lost a decade.
Groysberg and Slind says it’s because they use practices such as stacked-ranking to evaluate employees.
This, they explain, give employees an incentive to compete with each other rather than collaborate.
Also, it reinforces top-down communication.
They propose a solution they call … etc., etc., etc
Why it’s painful to watch
Why not solve the problem at its roots?
Microsoft’s big and deep problem is they’ve become followers. They follow answers and best practices (in the case of stacked-ranking, they followed GE, which started this best practice, then chucked it). And, they follow product innovations.
What they
need is to do a complete about-turn with how they do business. In the words of their arch enemy Steve Jobs, what theyneed is to be “willing to ask questions and think about things.”
The leading cause of mistakes in business is the emphasis on finding the right answers — or the best answers others are using — rather than the right questions.
More answers at Microsoft will only yield more lost years.
One day, they’ll wake up and realize, “We should’ve known better.” Until then … more lost years.
The genesis of Painful to Watch
When Steve Jobs was asked about innovation, he responded — “We don’t think, ‘Let’s be innovative! Let’s take a class! Here are the five rules of innovation, let’s put them up all over the company!’ When told most people do just that, he retorted, “It’s
painful to watch .”
Most businesses today don’t bother with mastering the art of considering the right questions. That’s because it’s “easier” to just follow answers from others.
And also because those in the business of dispensing answers will never tell you the right questions are far more important than any answers they give you.
Related: Intuit’s ‘We Should’ve Known Better’ moment
Time for you to have your “We should’ve known better” moment, don’t you think?
[…] Related: ‘We Should’ve Known Better’ moments at Microsoft […]