Lord Sugar in The Apprentice will often ridicule anyone with professional qualifications and if you have an MBA then you are a prime target.
Interestingly most entrepreneurs don’t appear to have MBAs. Maybe that’s because statistically there are more entrepreneurs than MBAs. Or maybe a lack of qualifications, a little naivety and a being nearer to poverty are exactly the circumstances that drive people into being an entrepreneur.
It is interesting to compare this to the delivery of projects. You may have some enterprising people coming up with new products, services or ventures and some bright people advising on the governance and implementation.
The former are internal entrepreneurs, or as James Caan once suggested intra-preneurs. The latter are the programme and project managers. The challenge for the latter is the same for the MBAs which is not to dissect and analyse every critical component, but instead create the environment and context for success.
I have seen programme and project managers monitor meticulously what is on-time, on-budget, to-specification and log the start date, end date, budget and other KPIs only to find that they are plotting a trajectory for doom. The information may provide light on what is happening, but the difference between project management and project leadership is doing something about it.
Project leadership demands being more enterprising, working with or in some cases being the intra-preneurs and taking responsibility beyond the time, budget and scope and being more focussed on the new products, services or ventures.
The success of a project is not that it was on-time, on-budget, to-specification. That is a management measure of success. The success surely must be that the new products, services or ventures achieved their aims for their intended audience.
Delivery of anything to a target is fraught with problems if the success factor is an output and not an outcome. For example delivery of a chocolate cake (£25) by 10:00am on 17 October is important part of a Birthday Party, but the completion of the task is not sufficient to guarantee a fantastic, fun and memorable occasion for all the participants.
One of the quoted challenges of LEAN (making things more efficient, effective [and cheaper] ) is that too often it results in a chocolate cake (£20) by 9:30am on 16 October without due regard to context. This is very often the case in divisional organisations or silo situations where each component might be great in isolation but somehow the outputs don’t come together as planned when it comes to outcome.
Plotting failure can be precise, achieving success is altogether vaguer. The issue is one of certainty. Managers like working with certainty. Leaders are most valued when you are dealing with uncertainty.
The public sector, as a function of their stewardship of public finances, will tend toward management of risk, of outputs, of money in their endeavours to deliver a cake. The private sector ostensibly appears less focussed on the cake and more on the party. Moreover a greater proportion of their resources will be deployed on the party, than the management of it.
But businesses fail. Even those of Richard Brandson and Lord Sugar, whereas government cannot fail. If government departments went broke as often as ventures on our high street people might go hungry, homeless or start a revolution.
Is there room therefore for greater public / private partnership with government setting the time, budget and scope and business providing the cake and party?
Answers please.
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