Consistency in times of change the winning recipe for great companies
Consistent companies bring about the most significant global developments and have the largest impact on the economy and society by evolving with discipline. PHOTO | FILE
What you need to know:
Kenyans must be specific, methodical and consistent, knowing that our politicians will choose not to be so. And that as voters we haven’t minded a bit.
At Christmas, my wife presented me with Great by Choice, the latest book by Jim Collins, author of earlier trio of classics, Built to Last, Good to Great and How the Mighty Fall.
As always, I found him to be full of valuable insights. He, co-author Morten T. Hansen and their team of researchers reveal a bunch of “provocative surprises” – not least that the best leaders, those who run the most successful organisations, don’t take more risks and aren’t more visionary or more creative than others.
Rather, they are more disciplined, rely more on empirical evidence and are more paranoid.
They also found that great companies change less in reaction to our fast-moving world.
In laying out his ‘SMaC’ (Specific, Methodical and Consistent) recipe, Collins turns to the example of the American constitution to illustrate the element of consistency.
He explains that when the framers of the document convened in 1787 they wanted to create a practical framework that would be both flexible and durable. The authors certainly could not predict how the world would change, so if they were to put in too many strictures it would “become either a straightjacket or irrelevant”.
On the other hand, if they provided only broad and general guidelines it would “lack teeth and fail to provide the practical guideposts that meld a diverse group of people and individual states into a single union”.
So in order to ensure “a coherent, consistent, enduring framework holding the enterprise together”, they came up with an ingenious invention, the amendment mechanism, which would allow the constitution to evolve organically.
They also ensured stability by making it far from easy to change the document. Indeed, after the first ten amendments (the Bill of Rights) in 1791 there have been only 17 in the following 220 years.
Collins admires the fact that the authors of the American constitution understood how a great nation must have a consistent framework, especially in a radically changing and unpredictable world.
Any enterprise, he admits, faces a constant struggle to find the balance between continuity and change. But those who spend much of their energy merely reacting to change are certainly not the successful ones.
It is the consistent ones who triumph, who bring about the most significant global developments and who have the largest impact on the economy and society. They do evolve their enterprises, but with discipline.
Reading this took me to a couple of thoughts. First, it led me to look up the relative lengths of the American and the Kenyan constitutions.
The American supreme law is expressed in less than 4,500 words, and is the shortest written constitution of any major government in the world.
The British have no written constitution. By contrast, the Kenyan Constitution extends to more than 50,000 words – and still allows for endless legalistic tussles of interpretation.
Is it because ours is still a young nation? Is it because too many of our legislators are such clever lawyers, forever quoting from the document just as a means of gaining political advantage? Is it, as some suggest, unnecessarily long and over-prescriptive, including aspects that could and should have been dealt with elsewhere?
Pondering such questions also led me to take from another wonderful book, The Speed of Trust by Stephen Covey, in which he suggests that the more trust there is in a society the easier and quicker it is to make decisions and negotiate agreements.
There is less need for lengthy contracts (or constitutions) that protect the parties against all kinds of worst-case scenarios – and less need for fussy lawyers to be so deeply involved.
Here in Kenya, a particularly high-energy, adversarial and low-trust society, we have not only become aggressively litigious but at every turn we feel we need yet more legislation to cure society’s problems; this despite the fact no amount of elaborate legislation will bring unreasonable people into line.
My second thought relates to the constant organisational restructuring we see. The frequent upheavals are the cause of so much diverted and wasted energy, and they give rise to much uncertainty and stress. In many such reshuffles one mix of advantages and disadvantages is merely being exchanged for another.
Alongside the sacrifice of continuity and consistency, those responsible for the turmoil feel innovative and decisive, while building their CVs. They have, after all, been bold and dramatic. But for everyone else, not excluding the customers, life is all confusion and distraction.
This reminds me of what Tom Peters said in a recent McKinsey interview for the 50th anniversary edition of the McKinsey Quarterly: “The fact that people think first about lines and boxes means they haven’t gotten the corporate culture message yet. Lou Gerstner has this wonderful passage in his book that says something to the effect of, ‘When I came to IBM I was a guy who believed in strategy and analysis. What I learned was that corporate culture is not part of the game: it is the game.’”
That kind of talk takes us back to Peter Drucker and his wise assertion that culture eats strategy for breakfast.
If Kenya is to graduate from the present merely “good” to our readily possible “great” status, we must make radically different choices.
We too must get hold of that SMaC recipe: we must be specific, methodical and consistent, knowing that our politicians will choose not to be so. And that as voters we haven’t minded a bit.
