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Good managers buck consensus, says one Stanford GSB professor. | iStock/littlehenrabi
Do good managers look for consensus and strive to predict the future? Not according to
William Barnett, a professor of business leadership at Stanford Graduate School of
Business. Humans fear being a fool much more than they hope to be a genius, he
said during a recent discussion at the business school. Rather than risk looking foolish,
employees may opt to support a consensus view or fear to voice controversial ideas,
and that can lead to poor strategic choices for a business, he says.
Barnett says that if people in your organization are afraid that breaking from the consensus is bad
for their careers, its a sign that you need to rethink your approach.
He shared this and other insights on managing and building successful companies during a
Stanford GSB Faculty Lecture on Oct. 24. His main points:
By foolishness, Barnett really means ideas that fall out of the consensus view. If a company only
approves ideas that are within the norm, it is likely missing the unconventional but potentially
groundbreaking ideas, Barnett says.
If you find a system thats creating foolishness, there might be a chance of genius, he says. If
youre finding a system that never does anything foolish, theres no way you get genius.
Look for Arguments, Not Consensus
Likewise, when it comes to a competition between business plans, avoid the consensus pick,
Barnett says. What I want to see in a business plan competition is the plan that generates the
biggest argument. For example, when Irwin Jacobs founded Qualcomm, a maker of chips for
mobile applications, no one thought that the chips could be based on a controversial technology
called CDMA (or Code Division Multiple Access). It was a non-consensus idea and a controversial
business plan. But it succeeded, and now CDMA is one of the major radio systems used in
cellphones.
Trying to connect the dots (or game out all the possible outcomes of an action) is a recipe for
paralysis, Barnett says.
Look to Jobs own company for an example. In 2001, Apple Computer introduced iTunes. At the
time, Apple considered itself a computer maker and iTunes was merely a device to boost hardware
sales. But when music downloads skyrocketed, Jobs realized he could change the companys
direction by making iTunes a Windows application. Within two months, there were an additional
15 million downloads, and later Apple dropped computer from its name.
If Apple executives had connected dots forward to continue to focus on selling computers, they
would have missed this major opportunity, Barnett says.
Of course, managing for variance is not appropriate in every environment, Barnett says. The
person who flies my airplane? I want them to take off and land the exact same way every time.
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