Control of operations, by definition, means controlling the range of effects produced by driving a collection of interactions. The usual approach to tracking degrees of control is to put gauges on each one of the smallest number of critical states (conditions) produced within operations -- and to use real-time gauges as continuously as possible. The correlation of the information from the various gauges tells whether overall operations are proceeding within an acceptable range of behaviors.

The collection of gauges is readily recognized as a dashboard. But the correlation of them is where the actual control begins. The diagram above shows the Archestra model for this correlation.

The model shows how to avoid non-sense metrics and focus on essential observations and connections. For example, there is a shared boundary between Priority and Plan, where the sharing indicates the need for an instrument that coordinates the priority and the plan. The instrument is Policy. Meanwhile, the primary rational coordinator of  Priority and Quality is a Standard. And for example, the primary rational coordinator of Accounting and Reporting is Rules.

Each part of the model is a part that has an independent definition and can be independently produced, implemented, tracked and changed. In putting all the parts to use, procurement and architecture and engineering are required to assure that they can interact in an appropriate way; while management controls assure that they probably will interact appropriately.

The explanation so far leaves two areas for further clarification.

First, the model shows four "parts" that are more like regions: Priority, Plan, Activity, and Quality. Many people may detect some similarity in this quadruplet to earlier models such as the "Deming cycle", so it is important to note that the terms in the Archestra model do not attempt to share the Deming vocabulary or any other. In the Archestra model here, 

- Priority refers to identifying and grading preferences, which logically precedes the other three terms as a management or "controls" concern.

- Plan is seen as step two, by which priorities are organized to be actionable with presumed resources.

- Activity then logically follows the plans.

- And Quality -- although it is always a target and likely referenced in both prioritizing and planning -- is not actually in the sequence until Activity has caused some output or outcome that must be held against the need for quality.  In a control model, the place of this last step is important because quality must practically pertain to all actuals, not hypothetically pertain to all possibles. In fact, a major intent of building controls to this model would  be to achieve streamlining and transparency of observations about each part, so that as little time as possible is required to get awareness of whether priorities and quality are aligned. Misalignment is dealt with by corrections.

Second, let's take one of the four main items just discussed, for example Quality: the model shows that two of its shared boundaries are Standard and Process. But what about the other two apparent boundaries -- Practices and Goals? Frankly, this may be a flaw in the visual representation offered. However, the intent here is not that the Practices and Goals arrows connecting Monitoring, Modeling and Accounting are boundaries. Instead, using Quality again as the example, Modeling is the primary referent for Quality, and if Modeling is to be able to succeed as the referent for Quality, then Modeling must be logically complemented by the definitions of Monitoring and Accounting. Likewise, Reporting (aligned with defined Rules and defined Events) is the primary referent for Plans. And so on.

Customarily, Archestra models offer "maps" to use for identifying defects, discontinuities, or other problems that exist in an already active environment. The model is an abstraction and can be taken prescriptively, but it does not assume that the actual environment is already organized as illustrated. The argument of the model is that its illustrated organization can comparatively expose an important disorganization in an existing actual environment, and help to promote the source of the disorganization to a high level of corrective attention.

These efforts aren't happening by accident. So we often take it for granted that we should really bother seriously with their outcomes. But this default attitude might be a mistake.

Now that John Bogle's new book Enough is published, one of the fundamental concepts underlying archestra's separated definitions of "value" versus "worth" will be in the spotlight on a multinational basis for a while.

Outside of the book, but to recap archestra notes, there are a number of ways to summarize the working idea involved, such as the three cases below. In all of them, there is the underlying base dynamic that some kind of effort, let's call it work, is producing some measured distinction -- more... better... enough, or whatever -- that didn't exist before the work was done.

But all of the cases point at the need for understanding that unless we know what matters, counting by that measure is always possible but risks being (at least) irrelevant or even (at most) irresponsible.

The Who Cares Case: In this instance, unless a distinction causes us to consider each element it creates in some way different from before, the distinction would not be "significant"... But if the distinction is significant then we say it has value. Still, the value that it has may be irrelevant to some parties, while crucial to other parties. So that same value has a different worth to one party versus the other. The problem, then, is in diligent pursuit of a worthless value.

The Hero Case: in this instance, the usual reference is the old saying "it's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game." On that note, first consider the ersatz "Government Employee's Credo" which says:

We the Willing,
Led by the Unknowing,
are doing the Impossible
for the Ungrateful.

We have done so much,
for so long,
with so little,
that we are now Qualified
to do Anything
with Nothing.

The issue being described, by the largely "invisible" public service workforce, is really the issue of character, which is often described as "the quality you choose to exemplify when nobody is watching". This is pointing at the decision to pursue the correct value, especially in the face of substantial opportunity (or worse, pressure such as from politics, greed or fear) to avoid responsibility for pursuing it.

The Do the Right Work versus Do the Work Right Case: In this case, the issue comes up in so-called "performance" measures, where confusion between compliance and progress is rife. The classic examples today are problems such as "learning to test well" versus "acquiring actionable knowledge"; the pre-crash share price of Enron; and of course the ever popular joining up with the legions of "the unhappy rich". Scorekeeping is seemingly inevitable, but there's nothing better than keeping the wrong kind of score to put new clothes on the emperor.

In short, value is what counts, but worth is what matters. Sadly, so much of what appears to be valuable can easily turn out to be worthless.

It might be more precise to say that the article promises understanding of the adoption of BI capabilities by the currently recognized differing types of BI users, which are relabelled and listed here:

• activity monitors
• managers and dataset explorers
• information explorers and power users
• professional information analysts
• information subscribers

This offers a view of how business is learning to adapt to BI technology so that the tools can be more effective. The individual user may find it easier, as well, to identify where he or she fits into the big picture of possibilities. In turn, that refines demand for the BI tools and helps to organize deployments.

But to get a real grip on this, it makes sense to reorganize the groups into producers, providers and consumers.

• Information Producers find and manipulate data to create information appropriate for describing and distinguishing events and conditions.
• Information Providers group and package information for managed delivery to designated recipients per requirements mandated by rules and/or agreements.
• Information Consumers receive and examine packaged information to determine what correspondence its included descriptions and distinctions may have to prior expectations and/or to prior received information.

What makes this more complex is the accompanying issues confronting each party (producer, provider and consumer) such as:

• formulation (validation/certification) of information
• formatting of information
• information access methods

The challenge, then, is to establish logical connections between how producers solve those three issues, how providers solve them, and how consumers solve them.

(You've read the book; now see the movie!)

One continuing dynamic affecting that interconnectedness is the shifting balances between the willingness of the different parties to use solutions offered to them versus working up their own solutions. The shifts occur from time-to-time, from place-to-place, and according to prevailing levels of urgency and risk. This brings up the matter of standards and governance in the overall BI "practice", but from an evolutionary perspective it is most likely that "standards" must be seen mainly as negotiable "agreements" that are living (changeable) but socialized. Given that, some agreements could become jurisdictional (e.g., consumers should not force information formulation) and others may become promotional (e.g., providers should diversify for consumers) -- which sets the stage for different roles to be defined and anticipated in the organization's ecosystem of BI.

In BI, there are also higher-level operational problems to be solved such as how to compare word-of-mouth with statistical analysis, or how to repackage existing information on demand for a different party. It is fair to say that the day-to-day experience of business is pretty rich with such higher-level "BI" problems, and that the presumptive evolution of BI should be describable in terms of what solutions to these problems have turned out to be most broadly feasible. These may generally surface as "use cases" during the construction of RFPs or in the design phase of implementations, but without a survey it is difficult to know whether they are usually seen as necessary or just nice to have, short of any Darwinian force they might prove to exert. What may be the most interesting question of all, then, is this: increasing rationalization of different tools makes BI more likely to help advance the cause of businesses, but isn't it still mainly the case that BI is adapting to each business more than that business is adapting to BI? No harm meant in the question: the point is only to encourage adequate attention to managing the internal business environment of participants (producers, providers and consumers) before making valuations of a BI tool's importance.

Tools referenced in the MicroStrategy article:

• Enterprise Reporting - incl. scorecards/dashboards
• OLAP Cube Analysis
• Ad Hoc Query and Analysis and  automated OLAPslice and-dice into all data
• Statistical Analysis and Data Mining
• Alerting and Report Delivery

Eric R. Chabrow checks in with the September 17, 2008 CIO Insight in an article called "Do CEOs Get Alignment?"

Chabrow's citations of a now-popular survey by IT professor Jerry Luftman bring to light a few things that, as it turns out, "represent IT" with an impact unhelpful to forging the "I get it" moment in the CEO/CFO offices:
- Personal experience with replaceable devices...
- management decisioning about replaceable providers...
- and of course the implication that CIOs are replaceable without strategic loss...

These frustrate the chances of recognizing "a business process called IT".

On the one hand, this is hard to overcome if people don't say what aspect of IT they mean to identify when they say "IT". An interesting point to put on the matter is that the primary expectation of IT users is actually "process management automation" -- not the same problem to solve as "information management" nor the level-setting about which sanctioned company processes are strategic/tactical/operational.

On the other hand, the word "alignment" itself continues to provoke and refresh the difficulty of reaching "I get it". The more important term to emphasize is not "alignment" but "integration". Imagine that some decision-making sector called "Business" was not integrated with the decision-making sector called "Finance". Since managing IT, like managing Finance, creates and governs a critical dimension of the business operational environment, some businesses cannot be dis-integrated with it and still rationally expect to succeed.

What might be really interesting short-term is to see and compare what stances about "alignment" come from CEOs who are Lawyers or are Technologists as opposed to Finance alumni.

Furthermore, however, as long as the "alignment" banner keeps getting hoisted by analysts and pundits in the trade, they'll keep educating CxOs to think about things in the wrong way. When it comes to IT, CxOs should be working on the management process competency at all levels -- an approach that would make it more obviously the responsibility of CEOs and CFOs to cultivate, not just for CIOs to offer.

Given that management is undertaken to provide some assurance of "success", this connotation may be why management effectiveness is most often sought in terms of proof of control. The problem with this attitude is that it ignores more than half of the range of opportunity that is available to deliberately effect valuable progress in an endeavor.

In the framework below, a much fuller range of management is identified, in a way that puts "control" in context -- and shows it to be not only more varied than we typically allow it to be, but also that it is accompanied by important complements and alternatives for driving progress. To start with, the framework shows how the usual old notion of "control" is probably contained by items (left column) that are not best called control but rather "organization".

A simple observation that may capture the ambitions about success in management is this: if it takes scoring to win, intending to score is more essential than planning to win. In management, progress is essentially like scoring. Given that, strategy is fundamentally about how to enable progress under the prevailing circumstances -- which in turn means that as circumstances change, strategy dynamically identifies and solves the problem of sustaining an ability to progress.

This readiness to improvise the action -- to take the "fast break", acknowledges that the circumstances of the game are all incidental within the basic boundaries that others play within as well. That is, within the same standing set of boundaries, many separate games are played -- and one game never necessarily predicts the next even if it winds up resembling it.

In that regard, what may be most difficult about competitive strategy is, first, to identify the boundaries that most matter; and second, to invent relevant actions within that awareness. In a competitive situation, much of what truly surprises the competition is an action that they didn't foresee because they hadn't identified the pertinent boundaries yet. (This is exactly why we often tend to speak of game-breaking competitors as being outfits that "change the rules"...)

Arriving at the necessary awareness is the product of surveillance and analysis, to which much dazzling and complex effort is formally dedicated now through business intelligence and knowledge management.

But the framework above imagines it more simply. It is not hard to see that the three forms of "management affects" -- controls, influences* and standards -- correspond respectively to knowledge, communications, and references -- are different modalities of common information that generate authority and action. The question is, how are the modalities currently being used?

So, what we get from this framework, mainly, is another perspective from which to assess how we manage now and whether the right modes are applied in the right ways.

Along with showing how information figures in, the framework helps show that the nature of management authority ranges (bottom to top) from being externally objective (standards) to being more cooperatively elective (influences) to finally being internally directive (controls). This tracks the application of recognized authority from its lightest to its heaviest.

The layout of the framework also corresponds (left to right) to the difference between micromanagement (organization) and macromanagement(improvisation). From that viewpoint, when we think of managed action as execution, the span of potential methodologies shows up being quite broad. Assumptions about what is needed to realize a strategy are challenged by showing that taking management more "micro" is possibly an inhibitor, but really just a supporting option, not a defacto requirement. For example, we have to allow for the possibility that individual contributors, rogues or artists -- left unbridled amongst changes -- may be enough, or even best.

In short, the old notion of control is really micromanagement. And as argued by the framework here, a big implication is that micromanagement and strategy are possibly allergic to each other or at least require arbitration -- a thought that may be the cause of some fresh assessment of management.

* While the word "influences" seems somewhat forced here (and may be replaced in the future), the intended sense of it is as a degree of imposition, here being neither benign (like standards) nor compelled (like controls).

That sounds bad, but the only problem with shamelessness is that it's hard to pull it off successfully, so not everybody can do it. In the strategy of shamelessness it is still, paradoxically, a requirement to maintain some cool.

This amounts to predetermining what kind of "online presence" is needed, and why -- backed of course by the right tools to generate that online presence. Where should people find you online? who should they meet when they find "you"? and why should they (from their perspective) find "you" the way that they do? Assume that they are wherever they are not because of you but because of what that channel offers them; then determine what version of yourself is appropriate to have appear in that channel. "You" might be different from one channel to another, but the different "You's" need to all be appropriate representatives of the brand you are trying to maintain.

It's pretty much like getting dressed to go out with strangers. But how hard could it be? Humphrey Bogart got to say it first: "The only cause I'm interested in is Me."

The scary part is finding out there's not much mileage in your hype. You remember: there's the famous Andy Warhol saying: "In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes."

As for blogs, it's more like "in the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people." (I can't remember who it was that said that, but the quote is certainly memorable, and the citation for it is probably retrievable via Google, etc.)

There are different levels of shamelessness, with blogging and online social networking holding down the opposing goalposts. (Incidentally, Archestra is not a blog, although it runs in blogware. Archestra is, instead, just an open studio.)

Surely, blogging is important to marketing, particularly with the aspect of staging a "market" of ideas about what you sell. But blogs are just the booth in the marketplace. Blogs are inherently editorial, and the only reason we would expect one to succeed is because of the popularity of the personality that is the explicit editorial energy of the blog. (Note: not being a blogger myself, I can't claim to have any expertise on making one work; but having subscribed to several in the past, I found that I only go to the ones where I feel like I am interested in the person whose blog it is. Moreover, with zillions of blogs out there, the fatigue factor of going through yet another new blog is a real impediment that makes it just seem unnecessary. What gets me past the impediment is either a recommendation from someone or a sample of the subject handling that shows me the blogger is unusually interesting.)

Wikis are a bit like blogs in that they have a subject focus, and that subject attracts a crowd (you would hope), but the subject focus is maintained by a crowd, not by a singular editorial personality. With a wiki, one always hopes that peer criticism will culture the crowd towards "wisdom", as they like to say.

Finally (for the moment), the point of a social network is that the crowd moves its focus around and shares what it finds by talking to each other. Focal points emerge rather than being prescribed. But the sharing occurs because of people in the crowd who are already interested in each other and keep introducing who they know to other people. This thing about "buzz" is about when the communication gets flowing strongly about an emergent focalpoint.

A marketer should look at how the online forums* perform compared to each other:
- blogs establish relevance
- wikis establish credibility
- and social networks (which I hereby impertinently deem "SOCX"), being where markets actually live, establish importance

(Let's face it, most people who have used the sound "SOX" outside of baseball could not tell you who Sarbanes is nor Oxley nor whether their company would survive an audit. So why should they get to monopolize the phonemes? In the real world, social exchanges are vastly more interesting, and after I've said "blog" twice and a quick "wiki" a few times in a row I'm not interested in two-part five syllable elaborations for the rest of the choices. SOCX it is. Could be lonely, but I don't care.)

* apologies to anyone with a language degree

The rule of thumb is that concepts are not property. The challenge is to wrap "property" around the concepts, so that the property is where people go to find the concepts. Since the value of the property is to some degree related to its scarcity, it is not difficult to understand what to do next.

- Use of ideas can be licensed in certain contexts.

- Information is either confidential or it is not, and you can sell access to confidential information.

- Knowledge is proprietary only if you have the ability to control the context of the knowledge delivery; control is all about packaging (whether the package is a venue, an event, a medium, or a box). You can sell the package; you can also sell delivery.

To get probability on their side, leading thinkers usually have to choose to think about something that approvers already want to implement.

This certainly distresses the notion of "innovation", except within the sense of "infusing the accepted with newness". But that is not an outright knock on anything; it simply points to a reason for having the notion of "pragmatic innovation".

Much leading thought throughout history has been pretty rapidly dismissed as "impractical", which of course should have meant "unable to be put into practice"... But with 20/20 hindsight we are able to know at least that what is undoable for one outfit is merely inconvenient for another. And yet another may have no resistance to the idea at all and let it rip, wherefore the popular "disruptiveness" tag in the vocabulary of the betting pundits who track ersatz innovators.

Thought leadership is safe. It doesn't carry along with it the stockades, burnings-at-the-stake, smear campaigns, or other proven techniques used to enlighten leading thinkers about their impracticality. In fact, when you get right down to it, thought leaders are "voted into office", more or less like successful consultants, which means that they are the product of followers, not vice versa. This explains why the best-known thought leaders hardly ever have a hardluck story about finding followers...

In the other camp, leading thinkers sprout of their own accord and may carry on for quite some time with no followers at all. Some leading thinkers get lucky: they wind up being befriended either by a thought leader or by an influential producer who can spell "pragmatic" but isn't worried about it for the time being. But conventionally, the bridge between leading thinkers and thought leaders is the kind of engineering called "R&D".

The problem is that if R&D is not funded well enough, then the bridge may not reach all the way across. So the issue mainly comes down to who will sponsor the way that the R&D is adequately funded.

Leading thinkers really are often into fundraising, but a lot of fundraisers aren't any good at it. In a healthy organization that wants to be progressive as well, the case for funding thought leaders is not so hard to make, but the exceptional organization strategizes funding of its leading thinkers.

So, how do you get it going at such a late stage in the race?

The first part is to pick my Vice Precedent. Eventually, I’ll get caught for something, right? and why not just tell people what it is in advance, especially if it's something that's just more me? Thanks to the internet, people are confused... there’s no longer any sense of priorities amongst most of the self-indulgences that actually get us from Monday to Tuesday and from Tuesday to …

…. oh, you meant vice “president”… hmm, in that case, it would have to be the guy from truTV, Marc Juris, executive vice president and general manager, who showed me that if you can’t be the head, at least keep it on straight. For example, the other day he was saying, "Reality has a connotation of not being real, of being phony… We felt that because (our programming) was real, we couldn't call it reality." There aren’t that many people running around with that kind of clarity now.

The second part is I’m going to play the gender card.

How does that make sense? Wouldn’t you be running against two men?

Well, what difference does that make? The point is, I accuse them of being guys, and then they both screw up their responses to that more than I screw up mine. That’s what voters care about.

What’s the third part of your strategy?

It’s very simple, a call to action, but it might be hard because it calls for breaking a tough habit. When you’re president, you should have a limited number of Stupid Points to work with, not term limits. If you spend up all your Stupid Points too fast, you’re out! and someone with fewer Stupid Points should take over. This might not be the other person from your party who is hanging out in the other wing of your big white house. Think about it, if it’s your party at your house, and your party gets seriously boring, people need to be able to go to another party at somebody else’s house, right? Really, it’s not such a new idea, but we can’t be wimps about it.

Is that it? Any other parts?

Well, aside from the challenge of getting enough ME-dia attention, I’m working on getting an additional line added to the list of nominee names on the ballot, right below the third party candidates. If I’m successful, it should just say “Surprise Me: __________________”

(Happy Birthday Diana! xo - M)

Category: Stuff That Totally Speaks For Itself. (here)

Some actual music, too. (Copyright Gary Radford, Marie Radford, and Stephen Cooper.) (there)

But if you can't drag your butt to the site, there's at least this excerpt:

Verse three is based on Foucault's response to the charge that his work changes constantly. Foucault responds: "What, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing, do you think that I would keep so persistently to my task, if I were not preparing - with a rather shaky hand - a labyrinth into which I can venture, in which I can move my discourse, opening up underground passages, forcing it to go far from itself, finding overhangs that reduce and deform its itinerary, in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again. I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same:"

That's what I call a smackdown.

Scientists unlock mystery of 2,000-year-old computer

As reported in 2006 by the CBC (i.e., Canada, yesterday) a then-recent study in the journal Nature had revealed the device known as the Antikythera Mechanism to be actually a complex means of tracking the movements of astronomical bodies for use in navigation.

As reported in 2008 by the American newspapers (i.e., USA TODAY), the same device, known as The Mean Sun Wheel, held 30 bronze gearwheels marked with instructions, allowing the user to link the cycles of the heavens to "the very mundane Greek games" (i.e., the Olympics).

Tthat particular usage, scholars believe, was primarily by wealthy sponsors of the games, for scheduling purposes -- putting the wheel in the same class of "information technology" as satellites, but not in the same class as television broadcasting, with which advertising spawned the Olympics Hype Cycle -- used for tracking the movements of earthly bodies -- nowadays far more important than a mundane thing like weather.

The only question here is already asked and answered: whether the 2,100 year old Mean Sun Wheel, given that it still works and all and doesn't even need batteries, can hold its own against a much bigger machine: marketers. Marketing's vanguard, the American press, took two years to find something in it that rated worth mentioning again. Maybe it's time to move to Canada.

Why is portfolio management often misplaced amongst these efforts? There are two predominant reasons. For one, practitioners of these efforts often mistake scorecards and dashboards for portfolios. And two, portfolios are often pursued under "performance" requirements (i.e., requirements to increase the rate of return on equity), whereas the actual purpose of a portfolio is to provide a model for the commitment to the opportunity, defining how value will be recognized, not how "value will be generated and captured".

The language that helps to understand where portfolios help goes like this: "what is the benefit of the investment model?" Obviously, one model could be modified or even discontinued and replaced, while still addressing the same apparent opportunity. At the least, this simply acknowledges that two competitors may chase the same prize in different ways, with both making progress (without predicting which one will prevail or even whether one necessarily must). But within the model, other key actions are generally positioned as catalysts or governors -- including things like identifying a distinctive market niche and specially producing for it, tracking the cost of scaling up for the demand level in that niche at a given quality benchmark, and exercizing policies to keep decisions and approvals predictable throughout changing circumstances -- all relative to a certain type of enabling stakeholder who is the primary beneficiary.

Bruce MacEwen's industry-leading website Adam Smith, Esquire offers an opportunity to gaze into the abyss of metrics and walk away without jumping. In the article
"How High Quality Are Your Lawyers? (How Can You Tell?)"
a close reading shows contrasting business models contesting notions of "performance @ cost" and "value @ quality". In the competitive situation covered, one upstart model strategically goes after a chunk of the opponent's business by bringing customers the performance/cost equation, surprisingly leaving the traditionalist competitor to justify how pricing for that same chunk of business could rationally be based on value/quality. What makes this all interesting, notes MacEwen, is the idea that 99% of what the traditionalist does is what the upstart can steal away.

For those of us who fell out of the old hot habit of saying "disruptive innovation" once a month, this looks like news, but not new news. Still, there are some fresh perspectives worth bringing to this contest.

As seen in the diagram below, the different models above are easily distinguished by what they actually offer, making it inappropriate (for managers) and intellectually dishonest (to customers) for either of them to masquerade as the other. Customers buying into cost/performance are investing in the promise of efficiency, while those buying into value/quality are investing in the promise of reliability.

In MacEwen's article, we are sensitized to the problem that high-prestige value/quality law service firms institutionalize a significant unmanaged cost in the form of "available overachievers", against which these firms then build a hedge by charging premium prices beyond rational evidence of economy for the customer. But what is sold as the justification for this pricing? Their quality?

To be sure of avoiding management posturing, "quality" here must mean only one thing: adherence to the promised appropriateness of the deliverable versus the stated need. Consider that meaning against the question of what it takes to get quality: the value/quality firm proposes that by exceptional capability they eliminate the risk of not getting quality. Therefore, the key variable that this firm actually addresses is unpredictability in the customer's need. As an operational tactic, the value/quality firm hoards talent in order to avoid outsourcing and to presume agility.

But the cost/performance firm basically argues (by demonstration) that legal work requires only competency to sufficiently meet most stated needs -- not a matter of being exceptional but instead simply correct for the task, which eliminates unnecessary effort from the equation right off the bat. Of course this presumes a degree of predictability in scope of need -- and agreement on the scope becomes the main feature.

The discussion above intends no effort to offer a wisened critique of law firm strategy. That said, on the surface there are no truly important differences between marketing professional services in law versus other disciplines where subject matter expertise is the raw material and advice is the product.

Idiosyncracies in the legal services industry will of course provoke distinctive problems and solutions there, yet these are probably driven more by the state of mind of the customer - which is the underlying important difference because it is the competitive arena. Oversimplifying MacEwen's article, the difference between the value/quality firm and the cost/performance firm is that the former sells confidence while the latter sells credibility.

Are there spats? One accusing the other of con games, and the other accusing the first of being incredible? MacEwen's article says yes; but what is further interesting (per evidence of the illustration above) is the opportunity that both types of firms can objectively profile themselves on common ground (efficiency, capability, reliability and acceptability) -- and use those profiles to determine how to optimally segment and grow a shared market. When they don't do that, you can bet it isn't because the customers don't care.

"Why do top managers, steeped in theories of good business strategy, still make bad decisions? While ignorance and hubris sometimes play a role, the brain itself—how we think—is also a culprit. Insights from behavioral economics help explain why we don't always think rationally and how our logical flaws can lead to bad strategic decisions."

On a day like today, when the stock market dropped over 300 points, the catchiness of that intro is in the contrast between the confidence we want to have in logic and the confidence we want to have in our ability to use it.

Getting strict, we might have to say that when strategy is based on logic, strategy is interpretive -- because in different hands, the same logic might lead to different strategy and/or different strategic outcomes.

But why doesn't it make just as much sense to place the first faith in the strategy and then find the logic to execute it? Well, it does; it's just that in this mode, the "strategy" is not a performance; instead it is a proposition that supplies the point of view to be used when managing functions.

McKinsey's discussion seems to be poised to warn us away from the problem of management personalities corrupting objectivity, and further, poised to argue that this should be the right warning because we can assume that there is usually going to be sufficient objectivity to correctly navigate to the correct destination. That is, the most prominent assumption that we can read into the McKinsey caution is that it's not cool to split from the plan. Logic shall bear decisions and decisions shall bear the plan and the plan shall be righteous.

But isn't that still letting the bad boys off the hook? Levity aside, coaches bring the game plan to the players knowing this: that the players actually have to play, which means that the players will improvise their way to the opportunity to comply, if they understand the strategy -- "strategy" which is again essentially a point of view and not a performance prescription.

Strategy is about belief in the value of your position. It is esentially about where you're going to be, and why you're going to be there. Because of that, any position within a hierarchy of operational dependencies can be a strategic position. In effect, a position represents the opportunity, so the most direct way for a leader or manager to damage the potential of a strategy is to make decisions that inhibit or prohibit the players' opportunity to align and coordinate their compliance to the strategy.

Because of that, we want a model of coaching to rely on, not just retraining (or re-straining) of senior staffers to the logic-decision-plan mode. We want an observation-design-motivation mode just as much if not more. We want the sideline clipboard.

Chief Information Officer

• Serves as the company’s top technology infrastructure manager


• Runs the organization’s internal IT operations


• Works to streamline business processes with technology


• Focuses on internal customers (users and business units)


• Collaborates and manages vendors that supply infrastructure solutions


• Aligns the company’s IT infrastructure with business priorities


• Developers strategies to increase the company’s bottom line (profitability)


• Has to be a skilled and organized manager to be successful

• Serves as the company’s top technology architect


• Runs the organization’s engineering group


• Uses technology to enhance the company’s product offerings


• Focuses on external customers (buyers)


• Collaborates and manages vendors that supply solutions to enhance the company’s product(s)


• Aligns the company’s product architecture with business priorities


• Develops strategies to increase the company’s top line (revenue)


• Has to be a creative and innovative technologist to be successful

1. Infrastructure affects the bottom line (what you get to keep), while systems affect the top line (what you get to get). Of course, this goes a long way towards explaining why a CIO would report to a CFO, while a CTO would report to a CEO. More importantly, it indicates that strategic resourcing can be a CIO's calling card, but that strategic positioning can be a CTO's calling card.

2. Much less explicit but still clearly in evidence is the difference between being a chief operations technologist (a.k.a. CIO) and a chief business technologist (a.k.a. CTO). Naturally, the easy way of understanding how to assess their respective progress and performance would rely on understanding the consequences -- of not having good infrastructure (provision of operations technology) and not having good systems (provision of market interaction technology). But getting it figured out in positive terms has stumped the panel often enough and long enough that these job descriptions still have to get spelled out long after the hiring has been done . What's still needed furthermore to get the dust to settle is a plan of co-production between them. Whereas neither effort alone could get the whole job done, the combined efforts of the two groups would offer a company an office of Business-IT Alignment...