Principles of Talentism: Part 10 - Businesses, not Departments

Let's abolish the idea of the insular  "corporate department." Either what a group of people do adds strategic value or it doesn't. If it doesn't but the work still needs to be done, then it should be outsourced to someone whose whole job revolves around solving customer / client problems in that domain. But even more, when a function is strategic it has to be connected to market feedback. There has to be someone making a buying decision about what your produce. This is critical for HR to understand: HR is a strategic function but tends to believe that it is in a "problem solving" business as opposed to the "value delivery" business. You have to be able to “sell” your solution in order to gauge the value of your approach to the people who will be affected by it.

I see this all the time. HR analyzes a situation and determines that something is wrong. They then create a solution and go put it into operation. Because HR is assessing both the value and effectiveness of their solution, the only ones they really need to convince of their success is themselves. In the meantime, the client is sitting there wondering exactly what is going on. Either the client likes the solution, but was never forced to show just how important it was to them (so they have little long-term commitment or attachment to its success), or they are ticked that “the bureaucrats” have shoved yet another solution down their throat to a problem they didn’t even know they had. Neither situation is optimal (or even advisable).

People tend to value things that they pay for, and they really value things that they pay for and believe they thought up themselves. “Businesses” get this and leverage this tendency of human nature every day in millions of sales situations. “Corporate Departments” aren’t accountable to customers and therefore don’t think they have to “sell” anything. This is at the core of most corporate dysfunction – when a function is accountable neither to shareholders nor to internal customers who are accountable to shareholders then their interests and the interests of the business often diverge (sometimes widely).

We’ll get into that more in a later post, since it’s an idea that has been around since 1932. But a relatively quick fix for this phenomenon is to focus on creating businesses that have to sell and be responsive to a constituency, not departments that institute and evaluate their own solutions.

Comments

[Sourcing Guru]

hey jeff,

i love checkin' in and readin' ur blog from time to time ...

you been on vackay recently or ?

miss your posts !!

~jer www.o0.typepad.com

[Critic]

This is one of my favorite posts. Its a well-articulated "heart of the issue" essay which, once voiced, is so obvious its a wonder the whole bureacracy doesn't just crumble.

The point is so straightforward and the need so obvious, yet I see little change. I wonder if corporate executives read anything outside their immediate domain...