| In public discussion of business, we take certain values for granted. |
| Today I'm going to talk about four of them: |
| collaboration, hard work, creativity and excellence. |
| Most people would say they're all 'good things'. |
| I'm going to suggest that's an over-simple view. |
| The trouble with these values is that they're theoretical concepts, |
| removed from the reality of day-to-day business. |
| Pursue values by all means, |
| but be prepared for what may happen as a result. |
| They can actually cause damage, which is not at all the intention. |
| Business leaders generally try to do the right thing. |
| But all too often the right thing backfires, |
| if those leaders adopt values without understanding and managing the side effects that arise. |
| The values can easily get in the way of what's actually intended. |
| OK. So the first value I'm going to discuss is collaboration. |
| Er, let me give you an example. |
| On a management training course I once attended, |
| we were put into groups and had to construct a bridge across a stream, |
| using building blocks that we were given. |
| The rule was that everyone in the team had to move at least one building block during the construction. |
| This was intended to encourage teamwork. |
| But it was really a job best done by one person. |
| The other teams tried to collaborate on building the structure, |
| and descended into confusion, with everyone getting in each other's way. |
| Our team leader solved the challenge brilliantly. |
| She simply asked everyone in the team to move a piece a few centimetres, to comply with the rule, |
| and then let the person in the team with an aptitude for puzzles like this build it alone. |
| We finished before any other team. |
| My point is that the task wasn't really suited to teamworking, |
| so why make it one? |
| Teamwork can also lead to inconsistency - a common cause of poor sales. |
| In the case of a smartphone that a certain company launched, |
| one director wanted to target the business market, |
| and another demanded it was aimed at consumers. |
| The company wanted both directors to be involved, |
| so gave the product a consumer-friendly name, |
| but marketed it to companies. |
| The result was that it met the needs of neither group. |
| It would have been better to let one director or the other have his way, |
| not both. |
| Now industriousness, or hard work. |
| It's easy to mock people who say they work hard: |
| after all, a hamster running around in a wheel is working hard - and getting nowhere. |
| Of course hard work is valuable, but only when properly targeted. |
| Otherwise it wastes the resources that companies value most: time and energy. |
| And that's bad for the organisation. |
| There's a management model that groups people according to four criteria: |
| clever, hard-working, stupid and lazy. |
| Here 'lazy' means having a rational determination not to carry out unnecessary tasks. |
| It doesn't mean trying to avoid work altogether. |
| Most people display two of these characteristics, |
| and the most valuable people are those who are both clever and lazy: |
| they possess intellectual clarity, and they don't rush into making decisions. |
| They come up with solutions to save the time and energy spent by the stupid and hard-working group. |
| Instead of throwing more man-hours at a problem, |
| the clever and lazy group looks for a more effective solution. |
| Next we come to creativity. |
| This often works well - creating an attention-grabbing TV commercial, for example, |
| might lead to increased sales. |
| But it isn't always a good thing. |
| Some advertising campaigns are remembered for their creativity, |
| without having any effect on sales. |
| This happened a few years ago with the launch of a chocolate bar: |
| subsequent research showed that plenty of consumers remembered the adverts, |
| but had no idea what was being advertised. |
| The trouble is that the creator derives pleasure from coming up with the idea, |
| and wrongly assumes the audience for the campaign will share that feeling. |
| A company that brings out thousands of new products may seem more creative than a company that only has a few, |
| but it may be too creative, and make smaller profits. |
| Creativity needs to be targeted, to solve a problem that the company has identified. |
| Just coming up with more and more novel products isn't necessarily a good thing. |
| And finally, excellence. |
| We all know companies that claim they 'strive for excellence', |
| but it takes a long time to achieve excellence. |
| In business, being first with a product is more profitable than having the best product. |
| A major study of company performance compared pioneers - |
| that is, companies bringing out the first version of a particular product - |
| with followers, the companies that copied and improved on that product. |
| The study found that the pioneers commanded an average market share of 29%, |
| while the followers achieved less than half that, only 13% - |
| even though their product might have been better. |
| Insisting on excellence in everything we do is time-consuming, wastes energy |
| and leads to losing out on opportunities. |
| Sometimes, second-rate work is more worthwhile than excellence. |
| 'Make sure it's excellent' sounds like a good approach to business, |
| but the 'just-get-started' approach is likely to be more successful. |