Читать книгу The mind of a fox - Clem Sunter - Страница 7

As in golf, so in business there are plenty of hedgehog CEOs. Some achieve spectacular results in terms of earnings-per-share growth and capital appreciation for shareholders. But their companies have invariably been fortunate enough to experience business conditions in line with their own wishes or reflecting the assumptions contained in their strategic plans. It is only when the future branches off in an unexpected and undesired direction that the mettle of a CEO is tested and you can tell whether he is a fox or a hedgehog.

An obvious indicator of a hedgehog CEO is that he shoots the equivalent of a golf score in the upper 90s when he experiences the unexpected. Then he explains in the annual report and to members at the annual general meeting how the mess is due to adverse factors beyond his control; but the company is doing something about it! When things go badly on the golf course, cheating hedgehogs have been known to move their balls surreptitiously to better lies by employing the “foot wedge” – another name for an adroit little kick. The other tactic is to replace the ball nearer the hole on the green after cleaning it. In competition, hedgehog “ringers” might even enter a better score on their cards than they actually achieved; or bolster their handicaps beforehand by logging in artificially high scores. In business, the hedgehog equivalent is to use strong-arm tactics to retain market share, be unmerciful towards suppliers, bully the employees or subtly embroider the accounts. In the short term, hedgehogs have lots of ways of covering up bad track records! The amazing thing is that hedgehog CEOs can still come out smelling like roses and pay themselves huge bonuses with the full support of the board’s remuneration committee. A recent UK study showed that there is no correlation whatsoever between CEOs’ pay and performance.

On the other hand, Tiger Woods has to perform within the rules to be paid. If he didn’t regularly shoot rounds in the 60s, if his name wasn’t regularly at the top of the leader board, he wouldn’t get the sponsorship fees or prize money. Tiger cannot bamboozle anyone with fine statements of intent about strategic restructuring or repositioning. His clubs do the talking and the results speak for themselves!

The examples chosen from golf and business highlight how different a hedgehog is from a fox. Hedgehogs are inflexible and slow to move. However, once they start on a course, they don’t deviate. Inertia sets in. Because so many hedgehogs in the animal kingdom have been flattened by cars, they now have their own tunnels excavated for them under motorways by caring preservation societies. Colin Powell, the American secretary of state who was previously an army man, makes it clear in his autobiography that he despises military people in the hedgehog mould. They are immaculately dressed but make little practical contribution. According to Powell, all they do is “break starch”, namely put on trousers that have been starched to perfection. In other words, hedgehogs are conspicuous at military parades, bristling with importance and marching to the thump of the big bass drum. But they are seldom seen in the trenches doing the actual fighting and showing courage under fire.

By contrast, foxes are quick to make changes in their actual behaviour. Occasionally, these are large changes, as when Reynard the fox leaps out of the chicken coop when he sees Farmer Giles coming out of the farmhouse door with his shotgun! Their intuitive response is what allows them to survive in a changing environment. One point which is constantly missed by management text books and business school courses is that 80 per cent of the success of world-class companies is due to excellence in implementation and delivery under a variety of conditions. They are simply brilliant at reaching their goals even when things crop up which they were not registering on their radar screens. At the most, 20 per cent of their success is attributable to the quality of their original plans or the conceptual part of the management process that the majority of management gurus write big tomes about. In the real world, the adaptations along the way are the ones that count. The trick is not the inventive idea: discoveries which will set the world alight are a dime a dozen. The trick is co-ordinating the 101 little things that make the idea happen. Think of the percentage of boardroom decisions that never get further than the minute book.

World-class companies tend therefore to be run by foxy CEOs who are not obsessed with the “vision” thing. They are prepared to contemplate views that are contrary to their company’s conventional wisdom and “official future”. They seek to attract people who are lateral thinkers and who can negotiate the rapids if necessary. As one foxy CEO said: “It’s the bombshell you don’t expect that can do you in. The best protection is to have commanders under you who can make split-second decisions under enemy fire. Each decision may not be for the best, but the next one corrects what’s bad about the previous one. So the chain of decisions holds up in the end.” Clearly, this has not been the case with the way mad cow disease has been handled in Europe. Ministers have had to resign because at first they didn’t take the issue seriously enough and responded with denials that there was a problem. Now the pendulum has swung the other way, and governments are trying to make up lost ground with draconian laws which could jeopardise the beef industry. As if that is not enough, European farmers’ misery has been compounded by the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. The latter is so contagious that strong measures are a necessity to halt it. All in all, a cool, foxy head is required to steer any country affected through these shoals of uncertainty.

Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart Stores, which is now the largest retailer in the world with over one million employees, was a fox. He spent most of his time away from his office visiting the stores, checking standards and more importantly inspiring his staff to think of ways of doing things differently and better. He walked the walk. He had a good nose for business and was forever sniffing out promising innovations developed at store level which could be applied throughout the group. This is in marked contrast to hedgehog leaders who hibernate in their penthouse suites surrounded by their equally aloof, hedgehog-like assistants. They seldom venture out of the cloistered calm of their offices to meet real people in the real world – but then they feel it is unnecessary to do so since they’ve already worked out the grand solution. To all intents and purposes, hedgehog leaders are invisible except for the odd photograph and ceremonial function. They rule by remote control.

Have you seen the movie Brassed Off? It’s about a brass band from a Yorkshire colliery winning the national championships against the background of the closure of the colliery. In one scene, a young female executive asks the managing director whether he has read her viability study into ways of keeping the pit open. He says no, the decision to close was taken two years ago and coal is history. Her retort is that clearly reports have to be seen to be written rather than written to be seen. That’s the way sleek head-office hedgehogs like it!

The unnatural, inward-looking and incestuous atmosphere of a hedgehog lair resembles that of a royal court of old plagued by intrigue and infighting among the courtiers. The only measure of success is how favourable a courtier’s standing is with the king or queen. In the resulting competition in which each courtier is vying for the eye of the monarch, the hedgehog species show their expertise at stabbing their rivals in the back. They have so many spikes to do it with! Conspiracy theories abound, and any questioning of the party line laid down by the ruler is viewed as treachery. Niccolò Machiavelli, the sixteenth-century Florentine philosopher who promoted the use of unscrupulous statecraft to preserve power, would have been quite at home in the company of modern, smooth-talking hedgehogs. The only thing he would find unfamiliar in today’s world is the speed of travel and communication which has reduced us to a global village. Unfortunately, it has also produced a superclass of globe-trotting hedgehogs with no fixed abode and no fixed commitments to any community or country. Their entire time is spent chasing the bucks across national boundaries, cooped up in the intensive care of a 747’s first-class cabin. You can be sure that if Machiavelli had been alive at the beginning of the 21st century, he would have had multiple passports, several aliases and would be clocking up millions of air miles. Even as the prince of hedgehogs, he had respect for the fox. He had this to say about his rival: “As a prince must be able to act just like a beast, he should learn from the fox and the lion; because the lion does not defend himself against traps, and the fox does not defend himself against wolves. So one has to be a fox in order to recognise traps, and a lion to frighten off wolves.”

It goes without saying that hedgehogs are natural centralisers who want to achieve change from the top down. They are conceited enough to think they have all the answers for the working classes. Development – with a capital “D” – should radiate out from the centre. Foxy executives, on the other hand, support the idea of change from the bottom up. Decentralisation, without losing all control, is the name of the game for the business fox. On a slightly different note but in the same context, foxy monarchs in the old days used to employ court jesters with the aim of the latter bending the royal ear with unorthodox opinions on matters of state. As they say, there’s many a truth that lies in jest. Nevertheless, the court jester had to invest considerable humour in putting across his contrarian views in order to make the sovereign laugh and thus minimise his chances of being beheaded! We naturally choose friends that we agree with, but we learn something new from people with whom we don’t. An old Spanish adage goes as follows: “He who advises is not the traitor.” So, in plain English, don’t shoot the messenger.