Two new leaders walked in on day one with a simple brief. Follow the existing processes, meet the team, find the problems, and deliver results by the end of the quarter.
It sounds reasonable. It sounds like what you’d tell anyone starting a senior role.
The quarter ended badly. Everyone’s expectations had to be reset, because the old ones belonged to a way of working that had stopped producing results long before those two arrived.
I watched this one up close, and what stuck with me was the brief itself. The new leaders were told to run the existing process and deliver results anyway.
The process was the problem.
Intel made the same move with graphics chips. Nvidia took its product cycle from 18 months to 6, while Intel pushed its i740 chip through the same 18- to 24-month process it used for CPUs.
Nvidia’s faster cycle kept Intel’s chip from gaining any traction. An industry analyst said Intel wasn’t about to redesign its whole development process for what it treated as a sideline.
GE and Ford hit the same wall with their digital transformations. They set the new work up as separate units while the leaders of the main businesses stayed uninterested.
Strategy writer Richard Rumelt puts the cost of efforts like these in the hundreds of billions.
In each case, the machinery set the speed long before anyone chose one.
I don’t think the answer is to rebuild everything every time something changes. Intel had a point (a sideline business doesn’t deserve a ground-up overhaul, and one thing at a time works fine).
The impact you want decides it.
If you’re building something on the bleeding edge from the ground up, expect to spend heavily on the machinery first.
The two leaders never had that conversation. Nobody asked what impact their seats were meant to make before handing them the old process and a quarter.
What impact are you looking to make?