Simply Illuminating, 1.02

[Part 2 of a short series]

A smattering of diagrams. A few abstract representations. That’s the normal extent of the artwork in the business bibles I read -- much of which, in my opinion, is mediocre: as if tacked on at the last minute; not well-integrated with the text (like the best illuminations of old); not effective in its own right.

Why’s this the case? Why do some business communicators place more emphasis than others on telling their tales with pictures? How is the relative success of their methodologies impacted by their art choices?

Don’t know. Don’t know. Don’t know.

Won’t know, either, ‘til I start asking questions.

And bringing up a few examples.

THE BAD

I don’t want to dwell on the bad, but I would like to start with (and then summarily dismiss) an example. The diagram directly below was used in a just-published book I just read. The main message therein? It’s a leader’s job to align his or her company’s strategy, organization, and people:

Had a chance to drink it in? If so, need I say why it added next to nothing in terms of my comprehension or appreciation of the authors’ theme? Why it detracted from my reading experience? Seeing the thing made me want to revisit…

THE GOOD

The good ol’ growth-share matrix. Probably the most important conceptual tool of the earliest stage (between 1960 and 1980) of the so-called strategy revolution. Walter Kiechel III wrote appreciatively about it in his 2010 book The Lords of Strategy:

Admire for a moment, the beauty of the thing. In a single graphic and conceptual device, the Boston Consulting Group had managed to pull together all the elements it thought essential to strategy, including the three C’s. [costs, competition, customers]

I can relate. Here was a simple, balanced, four-box structure -- “festooned with witty symbols” – that captured and integrated several complex concepts that BCG had taken years to develop. It was easy to understand. And powerful. It could both track and predict industry change, and thus offered guidelines for how businesses were to be managed. Here ‘t’is:

THE BETTER

Another diagram I especially like is this one below, devised last year by Haviland Studio (Palo Alto, CA and Lahaina, HI) and used by John Hagel, et. al. in The Power of Pull. It’s essentially a roadmap of the authors’ “new approach to value creation.” Take a gander:

By my count, it incorporates at least eleven (11) major factors, or themes, covered in the book. It strikes me as: original; imaginative; harmonious; balanced; thoughtfully constructed. The sizes and shapes and relative positions of the various elements all have meaning, i.e., they’re well-matched to the concepts they represent. (The overall shape and directionality of the arrow, for example, reflects the exponential nature of what the authors call an “increasing-returns collaboration curve.” ) All for the better.

(NOT) THE END

If I had to rate the topmost diagram on an imaginary scale from one to ten, with one = “ugly” and ten = “beautiful”, I’d give it a two or three. I think it does have some redeeming qualities. (The scales we use for judging diagrams are less like old-fashioned phone lines with single metal wires – and more like bundles o’ fiber optic strands; objects can strike us as beautiful in some ways, but not in others.) By the same token, however, the two diagrams beneath it each have their own shortcomings:

• GROWTH-SHARE: If beauty is truth, as the poet Keats said, then you could make a case that the g-s matrix and the logic behind it -- which came to be attacked as simplistic, even dangerous (i.e., untrue) -- became less beautiful over time. From a strictly artistic standpoint, it's also not something you're likely to see in a gallery. Even in an intro to design course it wouldn't get high marks.
• PULL: Like it a lot but I have some doubts about its utility as a teaching tool (it hasn't furthered my understanding of the authors' approach) or as a guide for going forward (it's not something to which you’d refer before making decisions). It strikes me more as an impressive feat (as in, How in the world did they engineer all o' those concepts into a single diagram?) than an impressive communication tool intended to make a real-world difference.

The quest goes on. 

What have you seen out there? I’d welcome hearing about particular diagrams that've made lasting impressions. One way or the other.

Everything Else Comes After

Can you match the S.M.I.B.S.F. (Single Most Important Business Success Factor*) on the left with its description & source on the right?

Answers:

1. PASSION = John Hagel, et. al, The Power of Pull
2. OWNERSHIP & SELF-ACCOUNTABILITY = Les McKeown, Predictable Success
3. GUMPTION = Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

*a little clunky, no?

Wasted 15 Minutes

30 MINUTES. That’s how much time I alotted the other day (“so long as nothin’ else goes sideways”) to learn as much as I could by perusing the ABOUT pages found at managementexchange.com and unstructure.org respectively. I wanted to understand the objectives of the people involved, how their interests do or don’t jibe with mine, and how their overall approaches compare one-to-the-other.

Going in, I knew that the Management Innovation eXchange (MIX) and Unstructure were online platforms for exchanging ideas having to do with ‘speeding up’ the evolution of management. And that’s about it.

What I discovered is that the two groups /projects are similar in just about every significant way: 

• ISSUE: Management is an important social technology, but one that needs a facelift – pronto.
• RESPONSE: Provide an open source, i.e., democratic, environment in which anyone can contribute to new thinking about management's evolution.
• HOPE: That actionable, helpful ideas will emerge.

There were a few differences. (One of the MIX Team Members, for example, is Gary Hamel – a rock star, as management thinkers go. The fact that discussions there are centered around his “Moonshots for Management” stands out.) But none of the differences were so earth shattering as to keep me from bookmarking both sites and thinking about participating. I was impressed.

The Rest Of The Story

My 15 minutes at unstructure.org were up, but there was one more link that had my attention. It lead me away from its ABOUT page onto one of its discussion forum pages and –

Boy, was I surprised to find out that the most recent post was well over two hundred days old! On further review, it now appears as though the whole site’s inactive. I don’t know what the deal is. Was there a merger with MIX? A stoppage? If Unstructure is no more, I’m sorry about that. Seems like a lot of effort and good intentions went into building it.

I s’pose there are many morals to the story. The first that comes to mind is this: 

I knew from the start I was taking a slight risk. I should have asked upfront: Are there tools or strategies I can deploy that'll prevent me from squandering up to 30 minutes unnecessarily? Had I done that, I would have remembered what the authors of The Power of Pull point out, that there are ways “to sort through the noise to find the signals that can guide us.”

Their advice? If you want the time and effort you invest in focusing on stuff to pay off, make return on attention a top priority. There are search and serendipity tools that can assist. Their book does a nice job of introducing some of them.