I know that look. That I-hear-what-you-say-but-you-guys-in-the-engine-room-will-never-really-understand-it look. Personally, I have been there lots of times. I even once had someone in the background asking, not very inconspicuously: “Isn’t this a Sales event? Who invited Operations?”
Of course, with the advent of Agile working and cross-functional teams, we have moved on. Collaboration has improved, gaps in knowledge have been bridged, and relationships restored. But we still often revert to norm when it comes to executive selection. Supervisory boards and HR teams frequently follow the traditional rules of thumb: if times are good, pick your next CEO from Sales. If times are bad, go with Finance. I would suggest we must revisit such simplistic heuristics.
Of course, I am heavily biased. Not only because I have spent a lot of my career in CIO, CTO, COO and transformation domains, but because I strongly believe that in our times of continuous transformation organisational value creation is shifting from the front-end to the back-end. As Dave Ulrich once pointed out, the competitive advantage of modern organisations is based not on individuals, but on organisational competencies. It requires the fruitful combination of processes, systems and people to craft the capacity to learn and develop fast and continuously, always leveraging the benefits of ever-improving technologies. Equally, the increasing demands for organisational resilience, risk management, security and data are becoming core to many industries. Hence, it is not enough anymore to just have a great sales plan and position our products well — deep customer understanding and innovation are often a result of the unglamorous work in the service centre, rather than the high-society sales pitch on the golf course.
But then, things are never quite so simple. COOs are often engineers who explain in much detail why something cannot be done. And Sales people often point to the stars, pretending that what must be done is simply whatever they decide. As a result, I experienced my fair share of Sales guys who were quick at throwing “shit over the fence” towards Operations, just to make sure they were far out of sight when a dirty deal blew into pieces. Or of Sales-CEOs who were much better at talking big and thinking big about themselves, than doing anything big. Of course, the truth is frequently (and literally) in the middle. But still, when it comes to core skills, Sales people are often trained to be the big manipulators — of budgets, people, customers — seeking to compete positionally in order to get the next big deal and their next promotion. People management is often a question of weekly sales charts; and of sending bottles of champagne to the top 10 sales men at EOY, whilst handing the bottom 10% over to HR. Conversely, Ops managers are frequently coached to build and collaborate — always seeking to connect people, processes, systems and data to the big picture. People management is complex, intercultural and focused on the development of a sustainable professional practice.
Which brings me to my main argument to upgrade our anachronistic selection mantras. Beyond the urgent need for many businesses to move from a paradigm centred on strategic marketing to one that nurtures continuous organisational learning and innovation, there is also an ambition to craft organisations that are good for all their stakeholders. Eventually, any organisation is only as good as the people “it creates”. This requires the ongoing transformation of the ‘organisation-as-practice’ — which in turn demands appropriate skills. And whilst it is undoubtedly hard for some COOs to develop strategic and big picture thinking, or to sell strategic deals, it is often much harder for Sales teams to “make chocolate” out of process and technology details, and to develop truly excellent people development skills. It is indeed funny that whilst Sales are in charge of revenues and COOs are managing costs, somehow, in a typical Sales mindset people very quickly come to be seen simply as costs, whereas in Operations people have to be fully developed as people.
At the end of the day, there are no perfect choices. What matters more than organisational siloes or denominations is of course the right combination of skills, experience and character to lead our organisations into the future. However, if on a jolly Friday morning like this you asked to make a bet on which role to develop strategically towards more transformational CEOs — simply choosing between Sales, Finance and COO - my moneys would be on the latter. Not only are COOs normally cheaper (and more humble), they are also better equipped to produce more sustainable value-for-money! And with that, a big cheers goes to all my many outstanding colleagues and friends in the Operations domain, who far too often still find themselves hidden away at the end of some dark corridor! Keep on the great work!
