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EVALUATION AND EVOLUTION

We use technological metaphors a lot these days, because they've become part of the common coin of business parlance, and because they provide a nice scientific aura for concepts that are, after all, only related to those mundane creatures, human beings.  So I've been talking about feedback and tracking mechanisms, and earlier I mentioned the post-game films that we used to watch in the National Football League to track our individual and team performance - another high-tech metaphor that illustrates the need for constant reassessment.  For a change, consider a biological metaphor.

Scientists disagree as to why the dinosaurs - those hugely successful beasts that ruled this planet for 100 million years - suddenly vanished from sight. But whether it was a diminishing food supply, climate change, or some unknown catastrophe, one thing seems clear:  the giant lizards went out of the picture because as a species they were unable to adapt to some critical new variable in their environment.  

Many species are like that.  There are probably as many species that now exist only in fossil form as there are species that are now thriving, and the reason for their extinction - the particulars aside - is always at root the same.  They can't adapt.  They're constructed a certain way, and that way fits in with the geography at a certain place and in a certain time, and when things change, the animal (or plant) that has been suited so well for its ecological niche suddenly doesn't fit any more, and disappears.

Businesses, sports teams, and other organizations that are composed of human beings are like living organisms in this sense.  They come together at a particular time and in a particular place to perform certain functions, and they thrive as long as they can adjust to dramatic changes, internal or external.  In the business world we're constantly threatened by changes in foreign competition, a shifting market base, worker expectations, the tax laws, and so on.  We either learn to Evaluate and react to these changes, or we go under.

At least we have the choice.  We're one up on the dinosaurs in this regard.  Since the organizations we manage are composed of relatively intelligent creatures, and since we have access to enormously sophisticated and very rapid feedback about environmental changes, we have the opportunity to adapt - to change the way we live our organizational lives - before we are done in by the threats. Unlike the dinosaurs, we can use the feedback we're getting.  We can Evaluate.  And we can modify the systems we're using so we can become more competitive, more productive, better performers.  

In other words, not only can we evolve, but we can direct the course of our evolution. Like an NFL team looks at the films of last Sunday's performance to do better next Sunday, we can use the feedback we have available to us to increase the motivation of our people, jockey into better position against the competition, and continue to evolve.

It's a sad, but unavoidable, fact of modern business history that the only time most businesses do that is when it's nearly too late.  It's the old story of the roof that only "needs" fixing when it's raining.  In fact it needs fixing even when the weather reminds you of Death Valley, but most of us still prefer to wait until there are Niagaras in the living room, and then to cry, "Where the hell did that come from?"

We could all use a little more trouble.  It gets us off our duffs.  It gets us sitting up straight, sniffing the wind, saying, "Where's that storm coming from?"  That's why I think that the best thing that's happened to the American automobile industry in the past fifty years is the so-called Japanese invasion.  For the first four or five decades of the 20th century, the fatcats out in Detroit were getting pretty cocky.  They had gradually lost that entrepreneurial spirit, that willingness to take risks, and trust people, and trust your instincts, that made this country great in the first place.  And they were getting that fatal disease: Know-it-all-itis.  Once you get that disease, you think like a brontosaurus.  You start to imagine that nothing can hurt you.  And pretty soon you're in a museum.

The Japanese changed all that.  They made the fatcats wakeup.  You know what General Motors - the fattest of all the fatcats - did?  They acquired a computer-research company, Ross Perot's famous EDS, so they could track the market better.  So they could keep abreast of the changing environmental conditions in manufacturing and data-processing and accounting and marketing and supplies.  In short, so they could Evaluate what they had been doing wrong, and take steps to fine-tune the system.

It remains to be seen, of course, whether they, or any of the other industrial giants, will use that same sophisticated approach to "how the systems work" to the single most important feature of modern business life: how the people who work for you feel.  If GM puts its new EDS database to work on getting its own people to perform - if it uses its enormous Evaluating skills to generate Involvement and plot Consequences and develop teamwork - the trade deficit might start to plummet overnight.  If not - if they demonstrate that machinery is more important to them than the folks who run the machinery - then it doesn't matter how much they learn about compression ratios and robotics.  They're still going to be thinking like old Bronto.

No matter how expert you are at what you do, you still need Evaluation.  The best managers and the best players already know this.  Back in 1965, when Jack Nicklaus won his first Masters tournament, golf legend Bobby Jones remarked, "Palmer and Player played superbly, but Nicklaus played a game with which I'm not familiar." Part of that unfamiliarity, I think, is Nicklaus's incredible precision, the way he seems to leave nothing to chance.  And that doesn't happen by itself.  Jack is known in golfing circles as a man who won't take the basics for granted.  One of his staff members is a spotter whose job is to constantly review his boss's basic moves, and Pinpoint where they can be improved.  That's an intelligent use of Evaluation - and you can see where it's gotten Nicklaus.

The leaders are constantly checking, constantly reevaluating their performance, and the performance of their team members, to see how they can do it better.  That's what makes them leaders.  I hope that the principles in the past five chapters have shown you how that can be done in the context of real people management.  I hope it reminds you of Bear Bryant's great comment:  "I watch the films when we've won. To see what I've done right."

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