The operation was successful, the patient is dead.
Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos both talk/talked about the glittering lure of the business process and how it can easily become the focus instead of what it is there to serve.
“When they [companies] start getting bigger they want to replicate their initial success. And a lot of them think, well, somehow there’s some magic in the process of how that success was created. So they start to try to institutionalize process across the company and before very long people get very confused that the process is the content. And that is ultimately the downfall of IBM. IBM has the best process people in the world, they just forgot about the content.” — Steve Jobs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4Cz49MLh4o
“As companies get larger and more complex, there’s a tendency to manage to proxies. .. A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. …” — Jeff Bezos
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/2016-letter-to-shareholders
Why does this happen?
Roger Martin suggests that companies like to focus on what it can control. Companies’ don’t like uncertainty and customers are non-controllable. So they prefer to act on the internal environment (planning) compared to the external (strategy).
“Plans typically have to do with the resources you’re going to spend. Those are more comfortable because you control them,” .. “A strategy, on the other hand, specifies a competitive outcome that you wish to achieve, which involves customers wanting your product or service. The tricky thing about that is that you don’t control them.” — Roger Martin
https://hbr.org/podcast/2023/05/the-difference-between-a-plan-and-a-strategy
Focusing on the process creates the illusion of control and accomplishment: we did the process right .. to bad the project failed .. or as one of my former teachers used to say:
“the operation was successful the patient is dead”
Clayton Christensen suggests that it comes down to what companies measure and value as they grow. In the beginning companies care about the customer and try hard to understand the complexity of their needs and how to resolve them. Then as the firm matures it starts leaning towards its own products: how can we improve what we already have? Its preference for measurements becomes simpler, it moves from understanding and managing a complex (external) world to managing an internal one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkBp1ntD3Zc
Finally Shoshana Zuboff supports both Martin and Christensen saying that as a company is focused on its own efficiency and standardization it keeps the customer on the outside, something extrinsic to the organization so they don’t mess things up .. the company focuses on what’s intrinsic: the process.
“Because the old model was created to keep consumers out. Those are extrinsic factors that we keep on the outside so they don’t mess up our ability to be efficient and standardized and so on so forth. It’s very difficult from within the current management system to reach out and realign with the needs of these new populations.”
https://everythingnewisdangerous.medium.com/new-logics-new-business-models-new-commercial-frameworks-e133f67db035
