Voices at the Table I
Great leaders not only are not afraid of contrary data, they actually welcome it. We leaders make our best decisions when the data is most complete, but information overload is the problem of our day. So what should we do?
One point is deciding who to listen to and how much.
We owners listen to finance people. In fact, often we are captives of the finance people who can win any discussion with excel files. Finance people often are experts at fear mongering. They faithfully serve us and often make workers and customers less passionate about the product/service.
Other owners are captives of the lawyers. Lawyers are often the masters of fear mongering. The hardest problem is when the lawyers and finance people feed off each other to entrap the company in fear. Both know how to work us owners.
We need to hear the accountants and the lawyers. Their voices have value, but what about the salesmen and the engineers? What about the customer service people and the service providers? What about floor workers?
Wait, what about the customer? Does the customer want us crippling our organization for the sake of the lawyers and accountants? Is their work value added for the customer?
Actually, the customer usually does not want to pay for them. So lets hear the lawyers and the finance people. However, we should not let them run the business via fear mongering over non value added activities.
Thoughts?