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    You are here Home » leadership

    Right Leadership, Right Model

    Last updated on Apr 18, 2019 by Dan McCarthy · This post may contain affiliate links

    Guest post from Charles D. Morgan:
    A few decades ago, when time was still a gentle concept,
    companies just rocked along in their comfortable hierarchies, everything
    centralized, proposals moving up the chain of command and decisions moving down
    at approximately the speed of glue.
    Then in the late ‘90s, early 2000s, we had the tech bubble,
    and the old business model began to come apart. A pendulum tends to swing too
    far at first, and pretty soon we were in the second Wild, Wild West. With
    “clicks” and “eyeballs” as the watchwords, everybody began racing everybody
    else to get projects launched before the next guy did. They were just crazily
    developing things, business model be damned. They threw tons of money at things
    that went absolutely nowhere.

    It could’ve been just a brief period of madness, like the
    tulip craze of 17th century Amsterdam. But in fact the tech
    bubble was a message from the future: Time now moves faster, and businesses
    must too.
    In my long career, 45 years of it as a CEO, I’ve lived that
    change. In general, the old hierarchical structure and central leadership model
    that I knew as a young man at IBM has given way to a more nimble team concept,
    in which power resides within small, self-contained units.  But the
    challenge for modern business leaders is to adapt and empower the kind of
    team-based structure that’s right for their particular businesses.
    That right model will evolve as the business evolves, so you have to keep
    adapting. But mission is key. And today, especially in tech companies, every
    mission involves innovation, and every innovation requires speed because of all
    the competition.

    Our company, First Orion, builds scam blocking and caller
    ID solutions for mobile phone carriers. Our senior management just spent two
    days in a retreat talking yet again about organization and how best to continue
    to drive proper decision-making. Several years back we elected to go with a
    high performance business unit concept – that is, each business unit has its
    own overall mission and is comprised of several teams charged with achieving
    parts of that mission. We give each business unit as many resources – tech
    support, product management, marketing – as we can to enable them to operate as
    autonomously as possible.

    But there’s always tinkering to be done. For example, if
    two or three teams within a unit are developing technology products, is it
    really efficient for each team to do their own product management internally?
    Or should there be a single product management group within the business unit?

    There are problems both ways. If a team’s mission is to
    build a certain product, they want to hit the ground running. What they don’t want
    to do is have to wait around for some centralized product management group to
    tell them how to proceed. On the other hand, if every team is totally self
    contained, when you bring together all the product sheets from every business
    unit it’s like you’re five different companies. Wait a minute, you
    say, this is nuts – nobody is communicating, nobody is coordinating,
    nothing is consistent. 
    Somehow or other have to bridge the gap between
    a central product management organization – which is slow and cumbersome but
    gives you nice, orderly product definition and growth – and the guerilla-like missions
    of autonomous teams, which sometimes take you back to the Wild, Wild West.

    Anyone who spends time around businesspeople today will
    frequently hear some variation of the words, “I own it.” This speaks volumes
    about the difference between the old centralized hierarchical business
    structure and the new team models. In the old days, lots of employees spent
    their careers as cogs in a giant machine. They were there, often precisely from
    9 to 5, just to play their small parts in the overall pageant of their
    companies’ business. Today’s small team members “own” their work, which means
    they accept the accountability that comes with the freedom to make their own
    decisions.

    This change alone means that contemporary business leaders
    must approach their jobs differently than did business leaders of the past. A
    CEO today points the way, of course; but rather than sitting in an executive
    suite on high, he or she must be comfortable down among the troops, in the
    middle of the fray, moving at the speed of innovation.


    Charles
    D. Morgan
     is the visionary former Chairman and CEO of Acxiom
    Corporation, and is now Chairman and CEO of his latest tech venture, First
    Orion.  His new book is Now
    What?  The Biography of a (Finally) Successful Startup
    . Morgan lives in
    Little Rock, Arkansas.  For more information, please visit https://firstorion.com.  

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