From 1998 through 2001, I had the pleasure of serving on the board of Morrison Management Specialists, an Atlanta-based food services company that today supports over 800 hospitals and senior living communities in 41 states. The CEO I worked with at the time, Glenn Davenport, had a great business philosophy that has really helped shape the company’s extraordinary success—never confuse efforts with results.
As I was thinking about this inaugural column for Globalization Today—IAOP’s brand new publication for people on the leading edge of reshaping the global economy—this simple phrase kept coming back to me.
I believe many of the challenges we face in globalization (and business in general) come from a failure to do just that–separate efforts from results.
Contracting for FTEs as opposed to business outcomes is one of the biggest traps that comes from failing to separate efforts from results. FTEs, wage rates and transaction per FTE dominate our thinking. But these are all efforts, not results. The results we seek are more likely to be a great customer experience and business growth.
Of course, it’s easier to measure and manage efforts—efforts are under our direct control. And after all, it is important to demonstrate that we did what we said we were going to do, and that we did it well. There’s nothing wrong with that.
And on the other hand, we really can’t manage results, can we? We can measure them, we can manage “to them,” but in the end the complexity of the variables that caused us to either achieve or fail to achieve the desired results are much harder to get a handle on. But that’s actually the beauty of not confusing efforts and results. It forces us to constantly reevaluate, rethink, reinvent and even reenergize the way we’re doing things.
A few years ago the CIO at DirecTV spoke at IAOP’s Outsourcing World Summit and talked with great passion about his company and its strategic outsourcing relationship with HP. While HP certainly provided a robust set of IT operations and application testing services, it was the way the strategic relationship was laser-focused on results that set it apart. Instead of being compensated based on the services being performed (i.e. efforts), HP’s compensation was tied directly to the number of DirecTV subscribers (i.e. results).
Focusing the relationship around the client’s desired business results—a growing subscriber base—had a dramatic impact. Conversations between the companies were not about the work being done and what it cost, but about how best to achieve the shared results. Efforts became a means to an end, not the end itself.
As this issue’s feature article on “10 Trends for 2010” points out, cloud computing and Software as a Service (SaaS) may well represent the first truly disruptive technology in outsourcing’s history. Taking business processes to the cloud by creating highly-trusted, robust and tailorable platforms will redefine how businesses operate globally. New companies, ones we don’t even think of as being in the outsourcing space today, are likely to dominate in this new world.
But how do these kinds of disruptive technologies emerge? They emerge because someone somewhere completely disconnected the efforts and results. They found a completely new way to achieve the result—one that had little or no basis in the current thinking about “how” to do something. That’s exactly what makes every disruptive technology so disruptive—and only people who are not confusing efforts and results are able to see them.
What do you think? Email me at michael.corbett@outsourcingprofessional.org with your thoughts about the power and challenges of separating efforts from results, examples you have of applying these ideas to what you do, or differing thoughts and opinions you have. Also, let me know about examples of thinking differently on any aspect of globalization and business that you’d like to see explored in a future column.
Michael F. Corbett is the Founder, Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer at IAOP. He believes it’s time think differently about the world we live and work in.
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