The Greyhound Principle 575.1
Racing dogs are trained to chase a mechanical rabbit that always goes a little faster than the fleetest dog. This causes them to run faster than they otherwise would.
Companies that annually set overly ambitious performance objectives for their employees employ this greyhound principle. To a point, it works. Most people achieve more when expectations are set high.
The strategy turns negative, however, when firms chasing Wall Street’s rabbit continually set “no-excuses” double-digit growth goals without regard to market realities (including multiple competitors driving toward the same goals) or systemic understaffing (part of the “do more with less” philosophy). Consequently, many corporate leaders are caught up in a ceaseless upward spiral of stress.
Yes, the financial rewards for such success are ample, but the driving motivation is usually not greed, and certainly not job satisfaction. It’s fear. This can often morph into desperation, a dangerous mindset that in turn can spawn imprudent short-term decisions and outright cheating.
It’s unwise and unethical to ignore the business and moral implications of aggressive growth strategies that put executives under unprecedented, unrelenting, and unreasonable pressure.
On one level, it’s a matter of values. Work-life balance should be more than a rhetorical ideal. A good company cares about its people. The path to career success should not be littered with the ruins of failed marriages and neglected children.
On another level, it’s long-term self interest. Without an abundant and replenishing pool of talented and committed leaders, no company will succeed for long. The organizations that will pull away in the next decades are those that can attract and retain the best talent because they’re places where those people want to work – and that will take a lot more than money.
This is Michael Josephson reminding you that character counts.
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Comments
This is an excellent commentary. As you suggest, the "much easier said than done" concept applies here. It frequently feels impossible to swim against the torrent of demands for higher, faster growth. Our economic system is rigged this way and leaders in every sector seem to endorse hyper-growth goals, behavior and practices in the name of American competitiveness. Thank you.
Posted by: Jerry | July 18, 2008 9:37 AM
In the late '50s, the corporate culture in many companies changed from loyalty ("company to employees and employees to their company") to company emphasis on procedures expected to improve profit, even in very successful companies. Company loyalty to employees disappeared. The result: many erstwhile loyal employees who had helped over the years to make the companies successful espoused the company emphasis on increasing income by starting job- hopping to increase their own salaries. The companies lost large amounts of experience and increased their training costs greatly. Companies now cut employee and retiree benefits at will without concern for the effect on families. And they are not performing any better than they did under the old culture that was so much less stressful.
Posted by: John Kraus | July 18, 2008 11:11 AM
This Greyhound mentality also tears apart the inner fabric of a company by rewarding opportunistic behavior of individuals at all levels. I remember when I was at a company that was going through a merger. I intentionally included someone in my team who was afraid of being laid-off to provide them some cover.
This particular person then pushed me and the other team member out of the role, treated us as if we had no knowledge of the area that was our specialty, and then aggrandized all of the processes under their auspices. Management rewarded this behavior, never taking the time to "look under the hood."
Needless to say, I left that organization in short order - by choice. My loyalty to the organization was severely compromised and my trust in my coworkers and management was completely violated.
It should be no surprise that the organization has struggled with serial re-organizations, has a dispirited and unmotivated workforce, and a stock price that has suffered significantly while its competitors are growing. It is a place where, it could be said, "the beatings will continue until morale improves."
Posted by: Gary | July 18, 2008 11:25 PM
This is an important reminder for all senior business executives. Maintaining the balance between short-term return and long-term reinvestment frequently feels like an ethical question to managers, in that it requires relying on values that exist above or beyond the current business reality or pressure. This value-based "calculated stubborness" in the face of business pressures, while simultaneously remaining open to and embracing the discipline of market competition, best practices, and the bottom line, is a difficult balance to achieve, yet the best senior executives do so gracefully even through considerable ambiguity. Without that balance, however, we risk being inhumane in our pursuit of profit and losing our bench strength and competitive positioning for the future.
Posted by: Workafrolic | July 21, 2008 8:12 AM