Get in the Boat
Page 16
John: “George, I’m not sure how much longer we could have gone without change, but we read a few of the right books, started to research our business and others in our industry, and worked closely as a team to align our efforts with the functional leaders of our business. It wasn’t one of us – it was all of us.”
George: “Are you and some of your valuable team members available to go to an offsite executive council meeting next week? We are making some business decisions that are too critical to make without your team’s insight.” [In the Boat]
Meaningful Communication
If you consistently understand your audience, their gains, pains and job roles, and target your words to them in a way that they understand, you will reduce friction. If you can target your solution to your audience’s specific needs and message that solution to them in a way that is easily digestible, you will reduce friction and they will appreciate you. If your story is full of context, humor, tension and emotion, it will not only provide you with an extremely useful pattern interrupt, but also dramatically reduce the friction in your organization. In fact, an incredibly talented tactician that can connect the dots between the business need and the technology requirement in a way that is interesting and compelling will always be invited to be in the boat.
Chapter 22.
Conclusion
I first started this journey because during the course of my interactions with businesses and business leaders, I couldn’t help from noticing a disturbing paradox: Technology is more important than it has ever been, yet technologists are still divorced from the business. The solution? Technologists need to get in the boat!
Throughout this book, we’ve used a narrow lens to look at these disconnects. Some of them have taken years to form and others are structural, some are psychological and sociological, some of these are due to our training and our job roles. While all of these reasons must be understood, they should not prevent us from success. What’s made us successful in the past is not guaranteed to even sustain us in the future. The rate of change has accelerated to an extreme pace and there is no end in sight. We now need everyone to see the challenges and risks simultaneously. The business cannot afford disconnects any longer. Our IMPACT framework is designed to address this head-on.
When you are looking to change, I have found it best to think of the Pareto Rule, more commonly known as the 80/20 rule. The daily activities that you must do, the tactical work that consumes most of your time, should still represent at least 80% of your time. Those are the table stakes required for you to not only keep your job but keep the lights on. Even though this 80% is required, it will generate you the least amount of return; people assume that your tactical work will be done and there are no congratulations for what is expected. That said, the other 20% or less of your time will be the time spent on being strategic and challenging yourself and your organization to have material IMPACT. In fact, that strategic 20% will generate over 80% of your success, rewards, and return.
This strategic component is what we’ve been talking about for this entire book:
How do you connect more effectively with business leaders that often perceive the world differently than you?
How do we ask questions that can really go deep, probing the actual problem to determine root cause?
Where do our business goals and initiatives come from?
How do we connect the dots from what we do to what the business actually needs?
That is what we have learned and much more throughout this book.
The IMPACT framework is straightforward; however, it still may not be clear where to start. There is a reason for this! We intentionally designed our framework to be useful to a wide spectrum of people. Some have been at this for a very long time and others not so long, some have been working for incredibly large organizations that may have major silos and others may employed at smaller organizations that often work in the same room with others in their business. We are not in the same place. There are over 20 tools that are presented in this book, but where should you start? Here is the secret: you are already great at what you do! Our goal is to improve your communications, improve your business acumen, and ultimately earn you the right to be in the boat.
One of the common mistakes that is often made is trying to apply all the new tools into our work life simultaneously. That is difficult and quite frankly impossible for most of us to achieve. Most critically, however, we won’t have any insight into the IMPACT of each of the individual changes. It is best to baseline our current situation through metrics; how many “kudos” do we get from the business today, or conversely, how often are we or our organization complained about, etc. Decide what you are going to change – call your shot! Then we can apply a single change, such as implementing value chaining in our workflow. We realize that the tangible things we do have little importance in themselves and we must connect the dots to what our business leaders are trying to achieve, such as customer happiness. We realize that we can use technology through the process, like the customer service process, to directly impact a key indicator, such as customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction directly relates to our customer’s happiness with our product or service. Our flawless execution in using technology to IMPACT this process, hitting the mark, is required for the business to trust us. After successful implementation, you measure what matters and compare that to the original baseline, asking yourself, “Did we move the needle?” Once it is clear that you had IMPACT, do it again with even more clarity. Once you have gained proficiency at value chaining, you can move on the next area of interest, such as color coding your colleagues so that you know where their interests lie. Rinse and repeat.
Once, Robert presented concepts from this book to a group of system integrators in Indonesia. The group consisted of about half salespeople and half solution engineers. Interestingly, in countries like Indonesia, salespeople see themselves as relationship owners—they are primarily focused on the relationship with the customer and not the solutions that they sell. They often think that this relationship is enough, that knowing more about their customer’s business or their own solutions is for others to worry about. Their idea of selling is, “I know someone and that’s why I am important.” The solution engineers, who are much more technically minded, do the heavy lifting.
A few hours into the seminar, we began working on business models from the top down. We asked, “What do these specific customers care about?” The audience became very engaged.
In Indonesia, people usually arrive late because of traffic and want to leave early because of traffic. These people arrived late, but once they began working on their customers’ business models, they didn’t want to leave. At 8:00 p.m. they were still discussing their customers with Robert and his team, drilling down into use cases and processes.
They felt like Robert had given them a crystal ball! Finally, they understood what their customers actually cared about. They had conversation points for their next meeting. Better yet, the salespeople and solution engineers were working together to understand their customers – they were in the same boat. Both halves of the audience understood that they needed each other to capitalize on this tremendous opportunity they had never discovered before!
That’s a small example with a big point: The concepts in this book work anywhere in the world. Sure, you can adjust details because of culture and language. But apply the main concepts around the globe and you will succeed.
My goal in this book has been to show IT tacticians a way to become relevant, impactful enablers. I want IT tacticians across the world to partner with Green strategists and fellow Blue enablers from other departments. I want technologists to tremendously impact the results of their organization.
I want you to speak Blue.
I want you to be interested, not interesting.
I want you to get in the boat. We need you there.
Get in the Boat Whiteboard
Reference
Remember
Read
Time to pick up some reading! Here are the most significant books that have influenced how I think about getting in the boat.
• The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford
• Start with Why by Simon Sinek
• The Three Signs of a Miserable Job by Patrick Lencioni (recently reprinted under the title The Truth About Employee Engagement)
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
• Competitive Advantage by Michael Porter
• Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder
• Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne
• The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
• The Story Factor by Annette Simmons
• The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
Reach Out
If you want to go deeper with us, we have a number of ways to do that globally in a number of languages. The key to finding us is our website: www.intheboat.com. Here are our offerings:
• KEYNOTE: compelling stories and anecdotes that excite and motive your organization to change. We can conduct these sessions in large conventions or more intimate gatherings. The focus is always giving your team food for thought.
• IMPACT: collaborative workshop focused on the IMPACT framework to give your team a common language to systematically IMPACT your organization and to be relevant with your business leaders.
• INTUITION: coaching workshop using Six Sigma and Lean methods to align your projects to your customer’s or your own business goals and initiatives. This workshop is project-focused using value chaining as a key tool for alignment.
• RETOOL: coaching workshop using Lean methods to understand your processes in a way that will allow your technology projects to have material IMPACT. This workshop is process-focused using value streaming as a key tool for digital transformation.
Acknowledgments
This book has been a journey, a labor. Many people along the way have helped us gain new insight and perspective that has made this book possible.
In order to get these concepts on paper, Robert and I enlisted the support of some extremely talented editors and writers to allow our concepts to be clear and digestible. Chrissy Bodin, Jae Harrison, and Caleb DeLon all did a fantastic job. I am deeply appreciative and especially thankful for Chrissy, whose many hours of patience, editing, re-reading, pushing me to clarify my thoughts, and refining my words, made this book possible. Dave Yeary, Justin Brady, and Alexander Bauman, thank you for sharing your stories and allowing our book to ring true.
I’m grateful for my colleagues Robert Schaffner and Michael Pohl who have been on this journey with me the past five years. We created the IMPACT framework together.
Many thanks go out to the individuals who added important elements and influenced our understanding: Paul Teel, Dave Liebman, Chris Neill, Kraig Schripsema, Terry Jenkins, JB Feeney, Bentley Curran, Jeff Klaubert, and Alexander Bauman.
We are very grateful to NetApp who provided the initial platform to discuss our program, Elevate. I would like to specifically thank the individuals who have helped us directly: Peter Howard, Dave Yeary, Deb Sperling, and Pete Friedman.
Thank you to Cisco’s Channel organization and their leader for the Americas, Rick Snyder, who provided a wonderful conduit to grow these concepts through our IMPACT program. We appreciate all of the great Cisco partner resellers, partner account managers, and channel engineers who have been a part of the IMPACT success.
Cisco’s technology (IT) organization and one of their leaders, Lance Perry, have given us good outlook into how our methodology impacts end user organizations. Special thanks to Lance, Mandy Knotts, Katty Coulson, Colin Seward, and Bram Van Spaendonk. It’s been a pleasure to work with such a talented team who are so closely aligned with their business leaders.
We had some incredibly dedicated reviewers who provided much-needed perspective and great insight. Their feedback was invaluable and the changes we made based off of their suggestions have improved this work. Thank you to Dave Yeary for your encouragement and your detailed edits – it really helped that your mother was an English teacher! Thank you George Curtis, Justin Brady, and Paul Flig for being part of my Olympians program and for your thoughts and suggestions. Adam Braunstein and Cal Braunstein, I really appreciate your approach to putting business into technology. Jim French and Frank D’Agostino, we’ve been on similar journeys for many years – thank you for your encouragement and support throughout this project. Katty Coulson, your perceptive understanding of the many different types of people in IT has really added great value. Bill Bell, I am grateful for your multiple reviews of this book throughout its creation. Your programming background provided a much-needed lens to our work. Thank you to Louis Bodin for your careful review and edits. Finally, I want to express my gratitude to Lance Perry. Lance not only reviewed the book, but provided the forward. Thank you, Lance.
About Pat and Robert
Pat Bodin started his career over 30 years ago as a Certified Public Accountant. After a few years as a CPA, he moved into the growing area of open computing. His technology career had him working with Lockheed Martin, Turner Broadcasting, and Cisco Systems. In 2003, Pat saw an opening in the education market to create an organization that demonstrated competency, experience, and knowhow. Firefly became wildly successful and Pat sold it in 2012. Since then, Pat’s interest has been in business relevance and continuous improvement. Pat lives with his family in Florida.
Robert Schaffner is a native Austrian and has lived and worked in Austria, Germany, Australia, and currently makes his home in Singapore. He started his career as a technologist 25 years ago at Siemens. In 2006, he co-founded Avodaq, a German IT system integrator. He co-founded the collaboration software company, Andtek, in 2011, which he later sold. Robert’s passion is teaching leaders, sales teams, and organizations how to have impact on individuals, organizations, and society.
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