The company was on the way to recovery after management change
which decided to renovate the business and bring it back to relevance to new
customers at their terms; products went through a facelift and upgrade to
appeal to the younger generation of consumers. The forgotten sleepy company
thus began their journey into the big bad world of Digital customer engagement,
ecommerce, and compete with the old and new age companies who had already
gained mindshare and market share with a head start.
The new CEO had some success to his credit of having turned
around ailing business; in his no nonsense style he reviewed and made
appropriate changes across various functions inducting fresh talent where
required. As a part of the transformation he also endorsed technology
enablement of company operations which was executed successfully by the new
CIO. Everyone aligned to the vision of the CEO who took decisions swiftly,
leveraging old connections and partners from the industry who had worked with
him.
With aspirations to make a dent in the global market with
digital commerce, he tasked an old friend and known marketing guru with much
acclaimed success of having turned around the fortunes of flagging brands a few
decades back. Bringing him out of semi-retirement, the CEO believed that he
would be successful in the new age too. The old man acquiesced to the request
and used it as a launch pad for his struggling digital practice run by the next
generation; the project was signed off with broadly agreed scope and timelines.
Months passed quickly as they progressed on the journey with
Marketing taking the lead of the new business opportunity. Working with the
vendor and market sales team, the HQ Marketing team created a market communication
plan, collateral, outreach and activation program, while coordinating with
other teams to come together to launch the business. It is then they realized
that integration with the new IT systems was critical to launch and sustain the
new business; so the CIO was inducted into the group.
By this time the initial deadline had already passed and the
CIO was asked to rush through system integration and not delay the launch.
Apologetically he agreed to expedite the task and traveled the extra mile to
understand requirements from the vendor and provide the necessary help. As meetings
progressed, his antennae buzzed that everything was not hunky dory. He dug deep
and wide to realize that they were hurtling towards eventual Armageddon with no
signed off requirements, project plan, and skills of the developers.
Subtle shift of responsibility, the CIO setup project
governance, requested weekly updates that reluctantly started coming as the
second deadline passed. Marketing happily deferred to the CIO to take lead in
fixing the broken and achieve success; the CEO was apprised of the situation and
that the project will slide some more before recovery. Surprisingly, the CEO
accepted the status without too much protestation and asked the CIO to keep him
informed as they progressed; he justified the potential debacle as a calculated
low cost risky experiment.
The CIO intuitively knew that the project will not be able
to deliver to expectation if it continued on its current trajectory. Taking
external help he educated the team about best practices and what can be with
the right set of resources; The CEO unwilling to accept the mistake of having
chosen an incompetent vendor continued to push on; he was unable to go back to
his old friend to shift the project to an alternative vendor. The project thus
continued to flounder for a while, the business losing the opportunity as a
result.
This situation of the CEOs
pet project continues to haunt companies where decisions are taken
based on comfort and past performance even though unrelated; in many cases
convenient scapegoats are found. Almost every CXO steps outside their
competency to demonstrate value addition beyond their roles, many times with detrimental
results. Corporate politics unfortunately does not allow open debate on
these matters; power centers get away with suboptimal designs and strategies
leaving the organization at loss.
It requires strong leadership to accept a mistake and
equally strong leadership to challenge the situation before it gets out of
hand. C level teams rarely get into confrontations preferring to be nice to
each other and loud mouth managers take advantage of this state of affairs. “I am here to be effective and not popular”
was a quip I had heard from one such maverick leader who had taken the company
to new heights. Everyone loved him as he bonded the team together on sustained
success that he brought to the company.
Where did the project end up ? Coming soon …
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