Industrial manufacturing leaders need to ask WHY...

Leaders of industrial manufacturing companies are up against it now. In the next few months, they will begin to make the hiring decisions they have been holding off on, and they will be challenged to align anew the people in their organizations around a shared mission and purpose.

You can bet that only a few of these companies will make the transition easily.

Industrial manufacturers that need to break new ground with an expanded management group and new hires on board will find that the first barrier is not out in the marketplace; it will be internal, in the form of dissonant beliefs regarding the right way forward. The problem will be to lead organizational alignment, and in this endeavor top management is challenged to understand a basic tenet of neuroscience itself.

Neuroscience, the scientific study of the nervous system, has discovered how regions of the human brain become activated as we go about editing our daily realities. In his book How We Decide, author Jonah Lehrer reported how even scientists must learn to overcome their preconceived beliefs before they can succeed in their missions. The research proved that beliefs are preserved in a region of the brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. The first step to solving a problem (in our case the need for internal alignment on purpose and value definition), we must recognize that the biological design of the human brain causes it to disregard divergent, contrary information as though it were never encountered. Here is a quote from the book:

“The lesson is that not all data is created equal in our mind’s eye: When it comes to interpreting our experiments, we see what we want to see and disregard the rest. Belief, in other words, is a kind of blindness.”

Despite the brain’s tendency to screen out new facts, thus preserving established beliefs, scientists nevertheless persist in making breakthrough discoveries. They are able to do this because they keep asking a simple question: Why? By examining failures, resisting conformity, and often by seeking a collaborative, outside-in level of objectivity, they do not allow false beliefs to deter them in their missions to become breakthrough winners in the scientific marketplace.

If you want to align organizational behavior, you need to introduce external realities – namely, the voice of customer, the ultimate authority, the only one who can tell you WHY. Which leads to the question: Who in your organization, if not the CEO, is asking why customers behave the way they do? Could it be because their beliefs, too, have yet to be changed in favor of your brand?

jb
www.centrifuge-now.com

For more on this subject, please see my firm's whitepaper series: "Overcoming Entropy" at this URL: http://gourl.gr/ibg

The connection between VPs and MVPs...

VPs of small and mid-size industrial manufacturing companies have long used sports metaphors to exhort their people to hustle and show team effort. Unfortunately, not many have known how to lead that effort. If they did, then such disciplines as funnel marketing and such tools as CRM would have been effectively in place years ago.

The failures of industrial marketing are often the failures of management, but nowadays we talk a lot about the need for leadership if American industrial manufacturing is to continue to compete, grow and dominate. This is why leadership profiling has become a major function of outside executive search firms and of inside HR departments.

Many years ago, Management textbooks taught that the functions of management were planning, organizing, directing, leading, and controlling; and of these, the role of leadership was indispensable. The role of leadership was stressed in the teachings of Peter Drucker, widely known as the father of modern management. During an interview with Bill Moyers in the late 80's, Moyers suggested that management and leadership were two different traits, that even American presidential administrations were often good at leadership, but bad at management. To this, Drucker replied: "No, they are bad at administration, because leadership is a part of management."

Many American industrial manufacturing companies are composed of coaches and players who have a good chance of winning, because they want to win. But in order to win, everyone needs to know what game they are playing and why. The answer has little to do with pushing a product line card, but with building a collective purpose and a process for getting there. If marketing and sales are not sharing the ball, there is no team; and it's probably because there is no shared purpose or process for winning.

Last summer, Derek Rose of the Chicago Bulls was still a college age kid making his way in the big league, practicing all day at the gym and trying to stay focused on his game. When asked by a reporter why he wasn't paying much attention to all the fuss about LeBron James and where the ego-driven James Gang would end up playing. Showing the kind of managerial wisdom and leadership that would make most any industrial manufacturing company a success, Rose answered: "Let's figure out who we are first. Let's control the things we can control."

And then, in an act that showed too, the importance of character, Rose sent a text message to LeBron James so as not to be unfriendly or unclear:

"I just want to win."

jb
www.centrifuge-now.com

Industrial manufacturing leaders: disenthrall yourselves...

The success of any industrial manufacturing company depends not on the quality of its manufacturing, its products or its sales efforts, but on whether there is a market that justifies the company's existence. If this seems an obvious reality, then why is it that so many small to mid size manufacturing organizations are unable to shed themselves of perennially deficient "marcom" practices?

When a CEO's core coalition is dominated by VPs who have little marketing experience, it should not be a surprise when the company defaults to predictable marcom expenditures, or that such expenditures continue to drive wedges between "marketing" and the rest of the organization, most especially the sales force.

In these uncertain times, it is up to the CEO to break the barriers that are keeping the company from achieving its greater potential in the marketplace. It is up to the CEO to expose false beliefs regarding customers and marketplace; to replace "how we do things here" with how we should do things here; and to raise everyone's expectations for a disciplined marketing process that replaces deficient "marcom" tactics.

In his 1862 presidential message to congress, at a time when the survival of our young country was uncertain, Abraham Lincoln presented such a leadership message:

"We can succeed only by concert. It is not 'can any of us imagine better?' but, 'can we all do better?' The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise -- with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."

Survival and growth in a changed marketplace are the challenges facing every industrial manufacturing CEO. If a disciplined marketing process is not central to your company's survival and growth, then now is the time to disenthrall your organization of its deficient marcom practices.

jb
www.centrifuge-now.com