A LOT of people think that a manager is never more a pure manager than when he is controlling a crisis. I can see why people believe that. There's something grand and dramatic about an executive calmly facing doom and heroically marshalling the troops to overcome disaster.
I'm not sure I buy that. I put a lot more value on a manager who can see a crisis coming months or years in advance - and knows how to marshal the troops so the crisis never gets a chance to happen. As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. We should exalt the people who prevent problems even more than we admire the people who cure them.
We should also exalt managers who can create a sense of crisis even when a crisis doesn't exist.
There's a dangerous tendency at any company to get complacent when things are going well. People take success for granted. Even worse, they adamantly oppose any sort of change. ''If it ain't broke, don't fix it,'' is their motto.
I also don't buy that. I've learned over the years that no matter how great things may be going now, everything changes three or four years out. You can bet on it. And you can't afford to stand still. In today's climate of fickle tastes and accelerated change, a more appropriate management motto might be: ''If it ain't broke, break it.'' Obvious as this may seem to some, I can see how a lot of people miss it. There's a certain comfort in looking at your business and projecting its future for five or 10 years in a smooth line of modest but steady growth. If you're selling $1 million of widgets now, it's not unreasonable to expect to double that in a few years. Unfortunately, this fallacy-laden thinking ignores the possibility that a competitor will build a better widget, lower the price of his widget or create a product that replaces widgets altogether, eliminating your business altogether.
I constantly have to remind our people that change is constant and prod them away from the fallacious thinking that leads to complacency. Here are three fallacies that often blind people to an impending crisis.
