Taking a helicopter view
Helicopter view of Piccadilly Circus, London (Photo by James Young)
I have recently passed the 11th anniversary of my time with ICDP as their Managing Director, and a few months ago was the 16th anniversary of me setting up IndeGo Consulting as my personal consulting business. A number of friends and colleagues were kind enough to send congratulations on the job anniversaries, which are much appreciated. However it did make me reflect on how the contribution that you can make personally changes over time - partly perhaps the inevitable result of the ageing process, but also (I hope) as the result of gaining what I am optimistically calling ‘wisdom’.
When you are younger and less experienced you tend to be task focused, down in the detail, and executing the tasks to the best of your ability. You are the engine room of the business, driving it forward, and learning in detail how that process works. Moving between tasks, functions or companies gives you the opportunity to develop a detailed understanding of business from an operational perspective, and hopefully you gain enough experience across enough areas to be able to join the dots and have the complete picture.
As your career develops and you gain seniority and management responsibility, you typically have staff reporting to you who take over the engine room, whilst you move on to steering the ship. What then matters is that your perspective must also change - if you keep getting dragged back into every detail you will inevitably drown, and the bigger picture issues that are potentially generating problems at the operating level will not get addressed.
I learned this lesson early on in my career when managing one of the factories of what was then called Edwards High Vacuum. We produced a range of complex high technology products, with the typical problems of having to coordinate the manufacture and sourcing of all the parts needed to hit the monthly build programme. I got dragged into the progress chasing rather than taking the chance to step back, and find a proper solution. Three or fours years later, when I was parachuted into a fairly chaotic situation at Coca-Cola Schweppes shortly after the two businesses came together, I therefore made a deliberate decision not to have a personal log-in to the stock and order system. I dealt with the major customers like Sainsbury and Tesco, but focused on the bigger picture to get the data, processes and systems stabilised, whilst the team handled the details.
Fast forward a couple decades and many other experiences later, and the lessons remain the same. When you are acting as a non-executive director, with a Board Meeting every month or two, doing short consultancy assignments or acting as an expert witness on complex arbitration and court cases, you need to be able to identify and then focus on the areas that matter, out of a mountain of data. All that prior experience is distilled into being able to quickly focus and prioritise, to sort the wheat from the chaff, and deliver valuable insights and opinions to the shareholders, client or court. You should be earning a premium fee, but that premium reflects a decades long learning experience. It is about taking the helicopter view, but still being able to pick out the details that matter.