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Feeding Problems & Starving Opportunities?

In recognition of what would have been Peter F. Drucker’s 100th birthday, the Wall Street Journal is rerunning some classic Drucker on Management pieces.  The piece today,  originally published Oct. 21, 1993, is The Five Deadly Business Sins. 

The first 3 sins are related to pricing and profit margins, the 4th is “slaughtering tomorrow's opportunity on the altar of yesterday”, and the fifth is feeding problems and starving opportunities:

“-- The last of the deadly sins is feeding problems and starving opportunities. For many years I have been asking new clients to tell me who their best-performing people are. And then I ask: "What are they assigned to?" Almost without exception, the performers are assigned to problems -- to the old business that is sinking faster than had been forecast; to the old product that is being outflanked by a competitor's new offering; to the old technology -- e.g., analog switches, when the market has already switched to digital. Then I ask: "And who takes care of the opportunities?" Almost invariably, the opportunities are left to fend for themselves.

All one can get by "problem-solving" is damage-containment. Only opportunities produce results and growth. And opportunities are actually every bit as difficult and demanding as problems are. First draw up a list of the opportunities facing the business and make sure that each is adequately staffed (and adequately supported). Only then should you draw up a list of the problems and worry about staffing them.

I suspect that Sears has been doing the opposite -- starving the opportunities and feeding the problems -- in its retail business these past few years. This is also, I suspect, what is being done by the major European companies that have steadily been losing ground on the world market (e.g., Siemens in Germany). The right thing to do has been demonstrated by GE, with its policy to get rid of all businesses -- even profitable ones -- that do not offer long-range growth and the opportunity for the company to be number one or number two world-wide. And then GE places its best-performing people in the opportunity businesses, and pushes and pushes.”

Drucker concludes the piece:

“Everything I have been saying in this article has been known for generations. Everything has been amply proved by decades of experience. There is thus no excuse for managements to indulge in the five deadly sins. They are temptations that must be resisted.”

So, I have to ask, is your IT leadership indulging in the fifth deadly sin?  Is enterprise architecture, typically staffed with top performers, focused purely on problems?  Or, do they resist temptation, by investing some top talent in opportunity?

Cloud Watching for Enterprise Architects: Picks

As promised, here are some links that should be of interest to enterprise architects who are (or need to be) cloud watching.  And yes, I realize I’ve mixed in a leadership interview with Xerox’s Anne Mulcahy, but once you read the others, you’ll be appreciative of a leader who gets that dealing with ambiguity is a sought after, and well compensated, skill.

What SOA Can Learn from Cloud Computing and Vice Versa | David Linthicum

SOA can learn from cloud computing Service Design & Expandability. Cloud from SOA: Governance & Architecture driven. Service Design: "Those who deploy services in the cloud, such as Amazon, TheWebService, Force.com, have done a pretty good job with service design. You really have to do a good job in order to rent the darn things out. Many SOA projects have a tendency to build services that are too course-grained, too fine-grained, or just not at all well designed. The reality is that services that are not well defined and designed won't sell well when delivered on-demand, and thus those who provide services out of the cloud - which are most major cloud computing providers - have to spend a lot of time on the design of the services, including usability and durability. I urge those who build services within their SOA, no matter the enabling technology and standards involved, look at what's out there for rent as good examples of how services should be designed, developed, and deployed."

IBM, Sun and cloud computing | Gathering clouds | The Economist

"The economic crisis has pummelled Sun, which never really recovered from the dotcom bust. As its share price plumbed new lows, IBM’s remained relatively unscathed—a reflection of its business, which has been protected by the computer giant’s global scope and the fact that it makes most of its money from software and services. In the months to come, more big fish will seek to swallow smaller fry. That is because something deeper is going on in the computer industry. Thanks to ever more powerful chips and new software, servers and other hardware can now be “virtualised”, meaning physically separate systems can act as one. This enables computing power to become a utility: it is generated somewhere on the network (“in the cloud”) and supplied as a service. To simplify their complex data centres and cut costs, more and more companies are thinking about building in-house computing utilities, called “private clouds”, or outsourcing computing to “public clouds” of the kind Sun launched..."

James Governor’s Monkchips » Amazon Web Services: an instance of weakness as strength

"Amazon isn’t the de facto standard cloud services provider because it is complex - it is the leader because the company understands simplicity at a deep level, and minimum progress to declare victory. Competitors should take note - by the time you have established a once and future Fabric infrastructure Amazon is going to have created a billion dollar market. And what then? It will start offering more and more compelling fabric calls… People will start relying on things like SimpleDB and Simple Queue Service. Will that mean less portability? Sure it will…"

10 Must-Know Topics For Software Architects In 2009

"after quite a lull, the software architecture business has gotten rather exciting again...The hegemony of traditional 3 and 4-tier application models, heavyweight run-time platforms, and classical soa that has dominated for about a decade is now literally being torn asunder by a raft of new approaches for designing and architecting applications...incautious words but major changes are in the air and architects are reaching out for new solutions as they encounter novel new challenges in the field...these new advances either address increasingly well-understood shortcomings of existing approaches or add new capabilities that we haven't generally focused on before...Mainstays of application architecture such as the relational database model, monolithic run-times, and even deterministic behavior are being challenged by non-relational systems, cloud computing, and new pull-based systems where consistency and even data integrity sometimes take a backseat to uptime and performance."

Corner Office - The Manager of Change at Xerox - Question - NYTimes.com

"Q. Do you find yourself looking for certain qualities in a candidate more than you did several years ago?

A. Adaptability and flexibility. One of the things that is mind-boggling right now is how much we have to change all the time. For anybody who’s into comfort and structure, it gets harder and harder to feel satisfied in the company. It’s almost like you have to embrace a lot of ambiguity and be adaptable and not get into the rigidness or expectation-setting that I think there used to be 10 years ago, when you could kind of plot it out and define where you were going to go. I think it’s a lot more fluid right now. It has to be. The people who really do the best are those who actually sense it, enjoy it almost, that lack of definition around their roles and what they can contribute."

Rosabeth Moss Kanter on the discipline behind "Instant Success"

As I've mentioned numerous times, one of the great things about my job is I get to interact with lots of smart, interesting people and organizations.  But, odds would be that's not always the case.  Once in awhile, I find myself hearing about, or witnessing, a situation and I can't help but be astonished, and not in a good way. 

Inevitably, these situations -- failed projects, bloated budgets, redundant portfolios, spiraling technical debt, sinking delivery rates, flat-lined morale, general stasis -- can be attributed to a lack of discipline (business and/or engineering) augmented by a stunning lack of leadership.  Yes, that sounds harsh, but these are difficult times, and hiding from the truth only makes matters worse. 

Having (perhaps) recently been astonished, Rosabeth Moss Kanter's recent post, Instant Success Takes Time, caught my attention this afternoon.  Not because it describes a radical new management concept, but rather because it's a good, case study backed, call to business basics -- discipline, leadership and hard-work.  [emphasis is mine] 

""Instant success takes time" is one of my favorite sayings. New products, people, or ideas that appear to burst on the scene unheralded and soar to the top quickly have often been preceded by a long period of preparation, rehearsal, and trial-and-error experimentation.

One of the more mundane differences between perpetual winners and long-term losers among businesses, sports teams, and other organizations is that the winners simply work harder. As I learned from case studies and surveys for my book Confidence, winners are more likely to take the time to keep honing skills and testing ideas in preparation for change. That's not too dramatic or glamorous, but it's among the biggest differentiators.

In contrast, teams or organizations headed for losing streaks lurch from tactic to tactic without any apparent long-term direction. They lack discipline, do not always rely on facts before chasing fads, and panic under pressure."

Check out the full post.  Pass along as needed.  I certainly will.