Organizational change starts at the top.

As this is being written, the BP oil blowout in the golf is approaching 78 million gallons and former BP CEO Tony Hayward has his life back. He was off yacht racing over the weekend.

Meanwhile, we are learning that the failsafe “shear ram” function used by BP on this well was failing around 45% of the time in tests dating back to the year 2000. Add to this the revelation that BP has cut corners on its maintenance programs for many years, according to its own internal documents, including a 2007 internal report showing the same problems that had been documented in a 2001 internal report.

Which leads to the question, why? And which leads to the obvious answer, it was all in the name of stockholders. That is, unless you look further into the power of a corporate culture, and the fact that every organization emulates the people at the top – whether those people are managers of money or leaders of people.

It’s a distinction that matters, because leaders will always seek to employ and cultivate people who are motivated by excellence, who dare to ask questions, love dialogue and the exploration of better ideas and ways of doing things.

It’s a difference that begins with the presence or absence of intellectual honesty and separates from there. Like oil and water.

jb

The sin of certainty before insight…

Our marketing communications firm participates in RFPs from time to time, on the basis that we will not offer solutions until we conduct a discovery to understand the client’s business and marketing problem. Repeatedly, we find this is NOT the method of other firms participating in the RFP, as they continue to pitch a range of ideas along with an impressively presumptuous calendar of tactics.

This is a dangerous disservice to the prospective client.
So why does it keep happening?

It happens because people and companies don’t want to make decisions based on deep insight. They want instant expertise from instant experts who can boldly prescribe a new website, a new pdf brochure and an email campaign with social media thrown in. In other words, companies want certainty, and there are agencies still around that are willing to sell certainty in lieu of insight, planning and strategic execution.

Don’t believe this? It happens to be a neurological fact.

In his recent book How We Decide, author Jonah Lehrer documents the human brain’s capacity to short-circuit logic in favor of emotionally desired decisions. Among the many research and real-life examples cited is the inaccuracy of political pundits, quite possibly the most “confident” experts on the planet. In a study done by psychologist Philip Tetlock, 82,361 different predictions by political pundits were evaluated as to the accuracy of their outcomes. These pundits include the folks we watch Sunday mornings on the various political roundtables. On average, the pundits had predicted the correct historical outcome less than 33% of the time. In other words, a dart-throwing bubba could have beaten the majority of these overconfident prognosticators.

Why are so many “experts” so wrong? As Lehrer conveys, the central error diagnosed by the study was the sin of certainty: “Even though practically all of the professionals in Tetlock’s study claimed that they were dispassionately analyzing the evidence – everybody wanted to be rational – many of them were actually indulging in some conveniently cultivated ignorance.”

When agencies confidently present solutions to business problems they don’t yet understand, it is because they have learned that many clients would rather see the creative decision than the business understanding. When this happens, agency and client are both like political pundits whose thinking is short-circuited by their stubborn ideologies.

Except, in the case of many an RFP, the sin of certainty ends months later with the presumptuous agency moving on to the next RFP, and the client holding the agency's invoices.

jb

Has your company entered the summer recess-ion?

For many B2B companies, summer is a slower, even less decisive time of year. You may already be witnessing this perennial indecision in-action at your company.

Notice especially, how the sense of urgency is waning, as plans for competitive recovery are somehow being set aside. Like the many would-be leaders in congress, the C-level suites across B2B America are packing it in and packing up, eager to take the low road into a summer vacation state of mind.

What else explains such an exodus from leadership?

How about the fact that very few B2B top executives understand the transformational power of strategic marketing and branding. This is the real reason why so many potentially great companies will use the summer slowdown to snatch mediocrity from the jaws of success. They do not know how to break through the barriers they face: Including an absence of value recognition (your prospects don’t recognize the value you bring); organizational entropy (marketing indecision is preventing business momentum); and weak market insights (guessing only keeps your marketing in the dark).

Survival of the fittest. Bring it on. This summer, only a few B2B leaders will be keeping watch to make sure that their marketing and branding strategies break through the barriers to their companies’ greatness.

These are the kind of leaders and companies our firm loves to work with. As for the rest, see you in September.

jb

Don’t blame the BP blowout on the engineers

After 42 days of hand wringing at corporate BP, it’s pretty clear that the blowout now wrecking the world’s most fertile delta was not the fault of engineers. It was the fault of managerial titles, none of which included the title of safety, security, environment or brand.

A year ago, you can bet the view among BP’s top management was that they answer to nobody but the “shareholders” and the rest of us can all go jump in the lake, or the ocean. With no serious investments in deepwater backup, just surface skimming “technology” from the sixties, it’s clear now that BP’s management invested another year of risk, hoping to cash in on another $20 billion year in profits. But hey, in their defense, it was a calculated risk.

The shareholders would have approved, right?

Somewhere along the way, you can bet the would-be leaders at BP raised their voices in favor of safety, security, environment and brand; and among these were the engineering teams whose voices were politely heard…

Then buried by 5,280 feet of deep disregard.

jb