Tribal wisdom amongst the North Dakota Indians says that ‘when you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount a great leadership parallel for the unsustainable business model. So the subheading of this article can also be:
As businesses re=awake post-COVID-19 and seek to get back to previous levels of business activity, we sense here at Leading Green that there is a real risk of some Boardrooms seeking to re-discover this old and ignoble horse-flogging management art by falling back into the behaviours that existed in the business pre-Covid. The world has moved on from 2019, and new more sustainable business models are available to organisations willing to take advantage of greater sustainability within business
We have all experienced those leadership debates within our business lives, and like many other senior managers wish we could break the endless cycle of circular arguments that many organisational managers love to revisit. Stuck in an embedded Groupthink mentality, with established leadership behaviours and a mindset that wishes for the return of days past when the business was at the forefront of its competitors.
I was thinking about this as I sat listening into a long slow meeting the other day. I had been asked to dial in to talk about our approach to sustainability and leadership development by the HR Director. Before I was listed to speak a long agenda had to be waded through first. The agenda was dull, formulaic and probably the only thing recycled by that current organisation. The meeting as a result was slowly sapping the energy and will to live out of all present. I was happily reminded of previous days in the public sector! Nobody seemed to care about what was being discussed, it was clear several old antagonistic were throwing rocks at each other for old times sake and that no appetite existed for putting any real strategy into a ‘strategy meeting’.
As a case study in business leadership, it was a prime example of poor management behaviours and how these were slowly eroded group performance, business growth, and organisational culture! It is regretful that something so damaging as coronavirus has had such a big impact on business over the last 18 months, but for some organisational leadership teams, it is a wake-up call that they have let themselves become complacent, resistant to change and have potentially turned their attention inwards too much, taking their eyes off competitors and the wider marketplace.
Organisations with business models that are unsustainable in economic terms are at even greater risk if their future growth and recovery is dependent on practices or behaviours that have become unsustainable in the eyes of consumers.
Firstly, we ask you to take the Flogging a Dead Horse Test to evaluate your own business resilience strategy. Consider the statements below and consider whether there are parallels in your own organisation and its management approaches to business recovery. Do any of these tactics mirror ‘initiatives’ or debates ongoing internally around your own management tables?
| Useful Strategies when attempting to Flog a Dead Horse | Equivalent Business or Leadership Initiative | |
| 1 | Buy a stronger whip | Flex your Authotiarian or Transactional Leadership style and issue a performance order (or else!) |
| 2 | Change riders | Dismiss or look to change the existing manager on performance grounds |
| 3 | Offering a carrot or drink as encouragement for the horse to get up again | Offer inducements or increased performance pay in a desperate attempt to raise performance |
| 4 | Threaten the horse with termination | HR and End of Year Reviews adopt a threatening and more sinister tone, threaten to curtail or withdraw bonuses |
| 5 | Accept suggestions from curious bystanders | Consider bringing in a major change programme after a quick conversation with a leading management consultancy to find the solution on how the deckchairs should be arranged, or at minimum appoint a committee to investigate the issue |
| 6 | Looking over the stable door | Arrange a fact-finding trip to another country or organisations to see how they are managing |
| 7 | Levelling the course to remove obstacles to the horse’s progress | Lower internal standards so that the organisation can demonstrate ongoing progress to investors |
| 8 | Adopt the language of John Cleese to reclassify the dead horse as ‘living impaired | Adopt PR whitewash to announce ‘deferred success’ and to inflate the overall level of ongoing progression towards project completion |
| 9 | Prod the horse with a new attractive, beautifully crafted, and expensive riding crop | Attempting to reposition the current situation in more sustainable terms such as ‘low carbon intensive’, ‘energy-efficient performance’ and ‘climate neutral’. |
| 10 | Hire a jockey from another stable to ride the dead horse | Pass responsibility onto external suppliers (supply chain, contractors, etc) to try and rectify the issue |
| 11 | Harness several dead horses together to increase overall power and speed | Combine several defunct projects or resurrect long-buried initiatives – and call it ‘innovation’ |
| 12 | Provide additional funding and or training to both horse and rider to improve their cumulative performance | Sign off on a new unfocused ‘leadership training and development programme’ that tries to meet the lowest denominator in the business – at the lowest cost – and possibly online by multiple choice. |
| 13 | Doing a productivity study to see if a lighter rider would improve the dead horse’s reaction and performance | Offshore or subcontract critical backroom services to become instantly ‘agile’. |
| 14 | Declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries fewer overheads and thus contributes more to the bottom line than do living horses | Reposition the goalposts for organisational success and declare an innovative approach to market competition by depriving the organisation of innovation, celebrate endeavour over outcomes, and seek to invest all remaining capital in AI before creating an IT strategy |
| 15 | Re-write the expected performance requirements for all horses | Alter specifications, switch suppliers, and accept a greater demand in the returns & claims department. |
| 16 | Promote the dead horse to ‘stud stallion’ to re-invigorate it, and seek their advice on hiring a replacement dead horse | Move specific executives into special project positions whilst allowing them the freedom to get it right this time. Alternatively, buy struggling companies in the same shrinking market sector and call it organic growth! |
| 17 | Leave the carcass and come back to it at regular intervals to re-assess viability | Extend the project delivery time. or retain expensive ‘stranded assets’ on the balance sheet in the anticipation that lost and past markets will always return. |
Leading Green considers that now is the time for business and sustainability leaders, mentally tired from the dramatic short term decisions they have had to make over the last 18 months, to stand back and take a fresh look at the sustainability of their business model, the organisational culture and the purpose that drives business growth. In particular to examine how a re-evaluation of sustainability priorities can promote future resource efficiency, market branding and opportunities for growth.
To do this we suggest that you undertake four key actions:
Organisational success and growth are fuelled by creativity and innovation and promoted by bold decision-making that dares to be different from competitors. Many large or successful organisations have reached this point in their history but have now flatlined or lost their way as they look around for continuous, but also unsustainable growth rates. Like the cavalry officers of old, senior executives can become focused on outdated economic values, models, and behaviours. Uncertain of what is happening outside the barracks, they seek marginal short-term gains to give them confidence that their “tried and tested” drill manoeuvres are still relevant in today’s world.
Similarly, organisations reorganise, restructure, rationalise, rebrand and all the while there is little change at the top and no new debates in the Boardroom. These businesses are simply flogging a hypothetical dead horse, and unfortunately, coronavirus has hastened the rate of decay.
At Leading Green, we look for 5 indicators to tell us if an organisation or leadership team has become stale and needs re-energising through improved sustainability leadership principles.
As the North Dakota Indians suggest, the answer is to mentally dismount from your dead horse, critically examine the situation and then find a new mount that suits the new journey to be made.
The solution is to dismount from your dead or dying horse and find a new mount. To achieve this, you need to stand back and consider your own leadership wellbeing. How fresh is the rider? What intellectual, personal, and innovative assets exist in the organisation that need to be freed from the existing culture and incubated for future growth. When examined in terms of business resilience and future sustainability have some human and organisational assets past their sell-by date? Has the existing leadership the drive and commitment to re-energise the existing organisational culture and re-engage with the workforce in delivering this new future?
In 2011 Govindarajan & Trimble’s published an excellent article in the Harvard Business Review entitled “The CEO’s Role in Business Model Reinvention”. Within the article they offered up a three-step approach in how to change: In summary to ‘manage the present’, ‘selectively abandon the past’, and ‘create the future. They also promoted the use of backcasting which is a favourite tool of ours when looking at sustainability visioning.
In our own experience when helping increase business sustainability resilience and sustainability leadership development post-Covid-19, the abrupt braking and slow down caused by a coronavirus and the societal changes that have occurred have necessitated subtle changes in business progression.
Dismount and examine your own leadership well-being and the impact of the last few months. CEOs and other business leaders are not just responsible for ‘managing the present’. They have a critical role in guiding steps 2 and 3. If they are and their teams are in the wrong state of mind, stuck in short-term management or unable to objectively consider the world around them, the business really is in trouble. All strategic change processes are dependent on active leadership participation and open engagement – you must be in the right mindset and sure of your leadership capabilities.
Only when the leadership team has shed itself of past conflict, entrenched positions and organisational blockers can it objectively evaluate all aspects of the organisation. As Govindarajan & Trimble describe it, this stage is about pruning lines of business that are underperforming or no longer fit the company’s strategy. This also includes past disagreements and boardroom conflicts so that an open and wide-ranging debate can take place. Petty organisational politics have probably soured more business environments than active market downturns. Some organisational teams are effective in clearing the air, others are often dominated by a few individuals specialising in restricting the scope of their debates. Similarly, some organisational leadership teams will happily remove sacred cows from their asset sheets when they no longer perform, add value to the business or stifle innovation opportunities. Pruning simply requires a commitment to objectively re-evaluate the future business resilience or sustainability of organisational components whose time may have come or whose past innovative glory has been superseded by new disruptive challengers.
Why do we ask executives to stand back from their mounts – because how can you manage the present when you are sitting right on top of it unable to see the bigger picture? Unless your organisation is a new start or retaining much of its youthful agility, there is a likelihood that you have become too immersed in your current business model, attached to its processes and dictated to by its traditional short term demands, and difficult to let go.
It is hard to relinquish what is familiar and understood. Few leaders are still confident to own up to past mistakes, or lacking the understanding of new technologies, societal value propositions or the management of intangibles – such as cobid-19, However, it is essential for an organisational leadership team who is committed to change to free itself up to find the time and intellectual resources to delve into future scenarios, options and alternatives; to embrace future marketplace change or technology and to define the niches they have the capacity to exploit and drive growth through.
In an increasingly global marketplace where goods and ideas now move freely across boundaries, unless you are in a unique niche – disrupt or be disrupted, is the new mantra in business development. These prompt new ways of acquiring skills, knowledge or cultivating new partnerships. This is the key to future agility, not through the removal of key service assets to second parties to reduce current overheads as you strive to keep above the line.
It takes boldness to carve out a new future, to sacrifice elements of the business that may have been the precious jewels in the crown. It can actively go against cherished principles regarding governance and financial risk to discard today’s liquidity for higher revenue in an uncertain future.
One thing that can be safely said is that a non-resilient and unsustainable business is unlikely to be a live business in a few years’ time from now. Do you want to flog your horse into an early grave or is it better to dismount now and get a new mount out of the stable? Businesses have a time expired point – look how few cauldron, pyramid or Blackberry smartphones are out there now!
If Covid-19 has forced serious concerns regarding whether the effort likely to be involved in recovering or saving the business will be equivalent to flogging a dead horse, dismounting, standing back and re-evaluating the situation and obtaining a fresh horse for a new future.
For more on sustainable business resilience, refreshing leadership programmes and articles on business change, please visit our website or contact us directly at Leading Green to start a conversation.
No actual dead horses were flogged during the writing of this article!