“Everybody should have a voice, but not everybody should have a vote.”
That’s what Tom Fishburne told me when I asked him about ways that organizations could harness the creative potential of their teams without getting bogged down or distracted by the wealth of ideas that groups come up with.
Fishburne’s view was that, to put it one way, you should be collectivist when it comes to idea generation but autocratic when making decisions about what is going to end up in the final product, campaign or message.
The Wiki-Wall and the Hard Call
While today Tom makes his living from drawing cartoons, he cut his teeth in the consumer product trenches at General Mills, Dreyer’s/Nestle and method. At method, the concept of vote vs. voice gelled for him.
There, he said, they had something called “The Wiki-Wall.” When teams were working on projects, they would brainstorm on this wall (which, I believe, was actually a whiteboard) and, when the session was over, leave the results up for a while and allow anybody to add anything they wanted.
In this way, everybody got “a voice” in the process.
Eventually, of course, the project had to move to the next stage and that meant someone had to sift through the voices and make “the
hard calls” about what was going to be in and what was going to end up on the cutting room floor. Such decisions were not made by committee but by the select few who had a “vote.”
I believe that the necessity of separating voice from vote is not only critical within the marketing function, but for the business as a whole.
You Need A Decider
It would be nice, I suppose, if all businesses ran like the hippie co-op I lived in in college. There, we made all decisions by consensus. That meant that if even one person out of 40 disagreed with a decision (to cook meat in our strictly vegetarian kitchen, for example), then it wouldn’t happen.
Unfortunately, this sort of decision-making process can be very time consuming (house meetings were hours-long), which may pose problems in rapidly evolving business contexts and environments. More importantly, however, such an approach is ultimately more about ensuring group cohesion than about producing things that are going to be shared with or sold to the world.
Because business happens at a certain velocity and because a business is there not to serve its employees but the community at large (or that segment of the community it thinks of as its market or customer base), I believe, you need someone whose responsibility is to make sure that things get done and that they meet the needs of their intended audience.
You need a decider.
“This Is Not a Democracy”
I once worked for a CEO who time and time again pointed out the undemocratic nature of business. Being of the hippy persuasion, naturally, I chafed at this notion, but now, as I enter the autumn of my years (a doctor referred to me as “middle aged” last week!) I am beginning to see the wisdom therein. Strong, decisive leadership makes a difference.
While every business must certainly pay heed to local laws and government regulations, no one really tells them what to do. No one tells them what to make, how to sell it, or to whom to sell it. In this regard, businesses are on their own.
That means, however, that all direction must come from within. Do you need to be responsive to customers? Of course. No customers, no business. Do you have to treat your employees right? Yes. No employees, no business.
But just as you have to serve your customers and provide for a happy, productive team, you also have to have leadership. Someone needs to set the direction, ensure that customer needs are front and center and, above all, make the hard calls. While I’ve seen situations where a business was led by a group of three or a partnership of two, this only worked because they acted as one.
Because, frankly, if more than one person is responsible for making critical business decisions and hard calls, no one is.
If you’d like to hear my entire conversation with Tom you may listen here or download the mp3 and listen at your leisure. You can also subscribe to the Marketing Smarts podcast in iTunes or via RSS and never miss an episode! Also, Tom will be presenting at our B2B Forum in October—use the code “SMARTB2B” to save $200 on registration!
