According to the front cover of my copy, since its publication in 2001 three million people have bought Jim Collins’ seminal business book Good to Great. If we take away the people who bought it and put it straight on a shelf, and add the people who borrowed it from someone else, we might guess that about three million people have actually read it as well.
Imagine those three million readers. If we could go and ask them all, how many would remember the Hedgehog Concept? (Creating and applying the right Hedgehog Concept for your business is a key step on the journey from Good to Great). I guess about one million readers will have some memory of this idea – the attentive types, rather than those who skimmed the book on a flight to a meeting.
Of the one million readers we have left, how many would not only remember that a Hedgehog Concept is mentioned, but also recall at least one of the three elements that make up this central idea? My bet here is 200,000. What about those who could bring to mind two of the three components of the Hedgehog Concept? I reckon around 100,000. The number of people who could remember all three? I’d say 10,000.
10,000 people not only know that there is such a thing as a Hedgehog Concept, but they also know about the three things it is made up of (understanding what you can be the best in the world at, what you are passionate about, and what economic model will be the most effective for you – I paraphrase here, if you’d like to know more please read the book… or re-read it).
Of our 10,000, how many have successfully applied at least one of the three ideas that make up the Hedgehog Concept in their business? I think about 1,000 have tried this at some time and had some success. How many of the 1,000 have applied all three ideas and now have a working, effective Hedgehog Concept that they use to inform all business decisions, as the leaders of the Great companies had?
Of these people, how many are applying all the ideas from Good to Great in their business – from Level 5 Leadership, to Get the Right People on the Bus, to Create an Environment of Disciplined Entrepreneurship?
No wonder going from average to exceptional is so difficult – even when we know exactly how to do it, we rarely actually do it.
And here’s the killer line (page 204 in my copy of the book): “… if you ever stop doing any one of the key ideas, your organization will inevitably slide backward toward mediocrity” (the author’s italics). It strikes me that our real problem is how to start doing any of these ideas.
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Although you are likely to have thought of different numbers from mine, we probably both predicted the same trend: as we move from recall to knowledge to skill, the numbers fall drastically. This is not a criticism of Jim Collins’ book. You could replace Good to Great with your favourite management text, and the same trend would be evident. Apparently, something special has to happen to convert knowledge into skill.
If you’re still sceptical, consider any other aspect of leadership and management – for example influencing. Since Dale Carnegie published How to Win Friends and Influence People in 1936, thousands of books, articles, podcasts, YouTube videos and the like have been created to inform us about this subject. Never in history has there been a higher quantity of knowledge available on influencing than now, and never in so many formats, including e-learning, seminar room training, inspirational CDs, and platform speakers.
The internet has played a major role in disseminating more and more information, so how influential are people now compared to twenty years ago? It’s tempting to conclude that much of what is on offer functions in the same way as diet books – if they really worked we’d only need to buy one, and then spend the rest of our days eating celery and feeling proud of ourselves.
What and How – the Same Thing
A few years ago it became a truism that the world of training needed to focus more on the how and less on the what. Delegates were tired of hearing that they needed to motivate people, or create clear goals, or manage by principle – what they wanted to know was how to do that.
While this began an important shift of emphasis, it was only half the story. In many cases the how has always been with us. As the title suggests, Dale Carnegie’s book is about how to go about making friends and persuading others. Good to Great is full of how to create the conditions for making that exact transition. Many leadership and management training courses are stuffed to the gills with how to, including action planners, checklists, questionnaires and the like.
In a complex undertaking like leading and managing others, knowledge about how to do something is simply that – knowledge. Although I might be able to tell you the 10 Steps to doing this, or the 5 Keys to doing that, this gives no indication about whether I can actually do it or not. Knowledge about how to do something is not the same as skill at doing it.
“I know how to do it” has two meanings in the English language:
1. I have knowledge of how it is done
2. I have skill in doing it (and could do it right now)
Perhaps unsurprisingly we often conflate the two in daily life, and yet there is an enormous difference. When I was a schoolboy The SAS Survival Handbook was practically required reading for my peer group. What made the book riveting was the detailed descriptions of how to survive: how to track animals, how to make deer traps, how to butcher the kill. We all had quite detailed knowledge of how these things were done. To our mothers’ relief, actual skill in doing any of them was extremely thin on the ground.
The assumption in the more genteel world of leadership and management development is often that if people are given the knowledge of how to do something, the skill will follow. In fact, instances of knowledge converting into skill are relatively rare, as we saw in our discussion about the Hedgehog Concept. This is one of the triggers of the well known comment that “you’ll always get something from a training course”. This can mean that some aspect of all the how-to knowledge you acquire might undergo the magical transformation into a skill you use on a day to day basis to create the results you want (more depressingly, it can also mean that you will actually remember something from the programme).
There are two marketplaces for leadership and management development: the market for knowledge (including knowledge about how to do things), and the market for skill in actually doing them. If you’re reading this as part of our series on what goes wrong with training programmes and how you can fix them, you may not have got the results you wanted from your project because you found yourself shopping in the wrong market.
The Market for Knowledge
The trade in knowledge about leadership and management is a huge and often very profitable market that, like the universe, is constantly expanding. It includes the thousands of books that are published every year, a chunk of the $104.3 billion North American training market, podcasts, video, blogs, sections of university business courses, a large proportion of coaching, and everything else.
The commodity in the market for knowledge is information. This information includes, as discussed above, information about how to do things. Famous operators in this market, like Jim Collins, create their own information or, like Stephen Covey, put their stamp on pre-existing information. Less famous or gifted people act as middlemen between the information that’s out there and the consumer. Imagine you are writing a book about how small business owners can double, triple or quadruple their profits. You decide Chapter One should cover how the CEOs of small businesses should manage themselves to ensure they are contributing everything needed for success. What would you include?
Here is what the author of a real book on this subject included:
• Do what you love
• Eat well, sleep well, take regular exercise
• Have a positive mental attitude
• Take massive action
• Organize yourself
• Decide what you should stop doing
• Have an action plan
• Have a diary
• Work on the business, not just in it
• Have a filing system
• Set priorities and stick to them
• Eliminate distractions
Nobody would argue with any of these prescriptions – they could all make a positive impact on the effectiveness of the CEO of a small business. Equally, few would maintain that any of these ideas are not already widely known. They are all out there in the great knowledge hypermarket, and we can imagine the author reaching up to take each item off the shelf as the book was constructed “we’ll need one take massive action, an eliminate distractions, an organize yourself paired with a decide what to stop doing…”
We can draw two conclusions from this. First, the job of disseminating knowledge about what leaders and managers should do (and how to do it) has largely been completed. We know what, and we know how. It’s the transition from knowledge to skill that is the tricky part.
Second, the market for knowledge functions just like any other market. If the commodity traded in the market for knowledge is information, then the market will value some pieces of information more highly than others. While information that sounds new or that comes from a trusted or famous source (such as a celebrity CEO’s book) often has a high value, old or commonplace ideas tend to have a low value. The list above is “ho-hum” because we’ve heard the ideas before; the knowledge market is subject to inflation.
In a market where most of the commodity (information) is already available, the challenge is to create a buzz around your idea so that it sounds new or desirable and can be traded for a high price. Or, if you are an information middleman your job is to ensure you are selling information connected with an idea that has already attracted some interest.
Talent Management is a high value concept at the moment. The 1997 book The War for Talent struck a chord with CEOs, HR departments and operational managers, and now there is demand for anything connected with it. Naturally enough, business abhors a vacuum, and middlemen have stepped in and will sell you all the information you need. Google says you can attend a one day course on Talent Management for £495 at a location near you. Failing that you can buy a kit to run your own two day session on Talent Management for £149 + VAT (Action Planner included).
The proposition that we should recruit, develop, and retain good people is a useful one, and Talent Management’s popularity has been a timely reminder of this. At the same time, many CEOs and HR departments were using all the principles from the Talent Management tool kit in the years leading up to 1997 – the rise of Talent Management has simply given these ideas more caché.
Although most of the information about what leaders and managers should do and how they should do it is already available, the number of ways these ideas can be repackaged and marketed is limited only by our imaginations, and the knowledge market is constantly expanding. Just last night I received an email outlining four steps leaders can take to become more influential with the most senior managers in their businesses. Apparently the steps are: Trailblazing, Toolmaking, Teamwork and Translation. “The 4 T’s”, as I’m sure they should be called, might one day become as valuable as “The 7 Habits”. I hope they do.
More Knowledge Does Not Equal More Skill
The issue with the knowledge market is this: we decide to buy not only because the information on offer is based on excellent research, or championed by someone we admire, but also because we believe that it will work for us and create the results we want in our workplace. We buy the knowledge because we think that if we know all this stuff we will develop the skill.
It’s easy for us to make that assumption because knowledge and skill exist in such close proximity. Knowledge of how to do something has to be in place before skill can be developed. A very small proportion of the readers of Good to Great will have developed not only knowledge about what it takes to develop an outstanding company, but also some of the skills needed to do so. And it is easy to imagine that skill in one area implies skill in another.
As you would expect, some of the prospective clients who contact Mitchell Phoenix do so because they have been dissatisfied with their previous training programme. Sometimes the person running this programme was an expert: a former Finance or Marketing Director who had stepped down and was now teaching other aspiring FDs and Marketing Directors. To everyone’s surprise, while the ex-FD had a high level of skill at being an FD, he often had no ability at developing that skill in others, and the training programme became what most of them are: a way of transferring information. Despite engaging someone with a high level of skill, just a few minutes into the project everyone found themselves back in the knowledge market.
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Just a hair’s breadth away from the knowledge market is the skill market. It’s smaller, and it attracts less razzamatazz. Other ex-FDs and former CEOs could be operating there. The author of our book for small business owners almost certainly is working there, in his role as a coach. Despite being quieter and more out of the way than the knowledge market, the skill market is by far the most exciting both in terms of its impact on your business and on you. How you can find it, and what can you expect from it are our topics for our next post.
This post originally appeared at www.mitchellphoenix.com in 2013