You've been the CEO of Vandre Industries for several years, a behemoth in the transportation space that's been around for decades.
real strategy
You really want the stock price to go up as quickly as possible so that you can sell your stock at the perfect time before the wheel of fortune turns and the board inevitably drives you out.
You're tired of dandelions and want to move on to a better CEO job before the stock price drops, or a nice juicy chair on another juicy board.
What happens to Vanderlei after you leave is not your problem. In fact, since you're likely going to work for a rival company, it might be better if Van der Ley's situation is worse after you sell your stake .
Any necessary means are on the table.
Fortunately, the solution to this problem is simple:
Announcing a major technological revamp! Why?
Why? Wall Street will love it. They love the "transformation" of machismo. Things will change through purely executive orders, that's for sure.
Throwing out "technology" will make Wall Street even more inflated.
The fact that few analysts or serious stock buyers have any idea of what this transformation involves is irrelevant. They will clap their hands and cheer.
This is how capitalism works, and it indisputably leads to the most efficient allocation of resources.
A small number of layoffs, a small number of talent
These analysts and buyers will think that the reduction in headcount is a matter of time, which of course makes the turnaround faster and paves the way for a quick profit.
Hiring top "industry experts" who know the magic required to make it all happen and are able to pass on their wisdom unreservedly to the enthusiastic employees who stay will make this a necessity.
Of course, in the end, you don't want to look too bad, do you? So how do you minimize any consequences of this effort?
leadership
The first thing you should do is sort out the leadership of this transformation.
Hire a senior executive who is solely responsible for making this transition. Well, at least take responsibility. This can be very useful when you need a scapegoat for failure.
Ideally, this would be someone who has held similar transformational senior roles in various global businesses.
Don't care if these former roles actually lead to any lasting change or commercial success; that's beside the point. The point is that they have a lot of experience in this role and know how to be a good scapegoat. Or you could get someone with Dunning-Kruger syndrome so they can really fit into the role.
This is the leader you want:
Make sure this executive is good at managing his (also hired) subordinates in a divide-and-conquer fashion, so their goals never align, or multiply in different directions in a four-dimensional ball of yarn.
Incentivize senior leadership to grow their teams rather than achieve the overall goals of the project. (Ideally, the overall goal is never explicitly stated by anyone - see strategy below).
Change your CIO during your transformation. The resulting confusion and change of political direction will ensure millions are lost as teams and leadership chop and shift positions.
With any luck, the directionality will be so weak that the core business will not be affected.
strategy
This second question is easy. Don't have a strategy . Then, you can hack and change plans without any overall direction, ensuring (along with the leadership anarchy above) that nothing gets done.
Unfortunately, the world isn't sympathetic to this reality, so you're going to have to pretend to have a strategy, at least. Make the core PPT very dense and opaque. Include as many buzzwords as possible -- if you include enough buzzwords, people will think you know what you're doing. It helps if the buzzwords directly contradict the content of the strategy document.
Just as importantly, the strategy makes no mention of "customers," or anything that provides van der Rey with revenue , or why the proposed changes would have any impact on the business. This will help nicely reduce any sense of urgency throughout the process.
Try to make any stated strategy:
- Hopeless optimism (setting ridiculous and arbitrary deadlines)
- Internal conflicts (e.g., tight annual budget cycles working with agile development).
- Inflexible from the start (think "either my way or the highway").
Whatever strategy you pretend to pursue, be sure to "do it big and fast" so you can waste as much money as possible, as quickly as possible. Don't waste your precious time learning how to accomplish change in your environment. Remember, once you're gone, this requires failure.
Technology Architecture
First, build a fully green "transformation team" separate from your current workforce. Then, make them responsible for solving every possible problem in your business at once. You can also throw in some questions that don't exist yet if you want! Force them to coordinate closely with every other team and fulfill all their wishes.
Make sure your security and control functions are separate from (and, ideally at some point at war with) the transformation team, which is as isolated as possible from the mainstream of the enterprise. This would create the perfect environment for building expensive white elephants that no one will ever use .
All of this combined will ensure that the transformation team's plan has as little chance as possible of going into production. Don’t give security and control functions any accountability or rewards, only reward them for thwarting change.
Don't bother with the "decagon of despair" (pictured below). These things have nothing to do with transformation, they're just blockers that people like to talk about. The official line is that hiring talent (see below) will solve these problems. It's easy to play down the importance of these things by exploiting an organization's insecurities about its own capabilities:
talents
Hire hundreds of very expensive engineers and architects who don't understand the business context. Do this before you have established a clear structure for your overall goals (which will never be defined).
By not giving these employees clear leadership, they are encouraged to argue with each other (and others, if they happen to come across them) over the small academic details of software development and delivery, thereby ensuring that no actual delivery is at risk.
Just let them get on with it:
finale
If all goes according to plan, the program peaks at around 18 months. The program is well underway, and analysts are looking forward to seeing benefits show up on the bottom line in upcoming reports. Fortunately, you've already done the groundwork, and on the inside, everyone can see that it's a mess.
People are starting to ask questions about the lack of results. The promised benefits are yet to come, while costs appear to be spiraling out of control. The reformists you encouraged are now on the defensive in high-level meetings, and the old-school cultural immune system kicks in again, reasserting its control.
Now is your time to protest that everything is going according to plan, but accept your fate and your juicy rewards gracefully. If you still don't have enough cash to satisfy, then you can go to competitor Landview Industries and use your hard-earned experience there to help turn the business around. Maybe it will work this time, since your main competitor (Vandelay) seems to be struggling since you left...
useful resources
- Effortlessly generate a strategic statement
- Cloud-native transformation patterns to avoid
disclaimer
None of this happened in real life. Any relationship to the existence or cancellation of any corporate or technological transformation is entirely incidental.
A version of this article originally appeared on the blog zwischenzugs .
