Bozos in the Boardroom

There’s hardly a sales manager in the world who hasn’t disagreed with top management. Squabbles over forecasts, marketing campaigns, compensation, and even territories can be a real pain for a sales manager who just wants to make the numbers. But what about cases where top management is so utterly clueless that they’re constantly making decisions and taking actions that make it harder to sell? What do you do when you find yourself selling for blockheads in the boardroom?
I personally encountered this problem when I was a marketing manager at Digital Equipment Corp in the early 1990s. Granted that’s a long time ago, and Digital has long since been merged out of existence, but at the time Digital’s top management had stumbled, missing the PC revolution and then missing the transition to standard computing platforms like Unix and Linux. The attitude of top management was so arrogant that, when confronted with reams of customer data showing that Digital’s strategy was off-base, the company’s then-CTO famously reported: “Our customers don’t know what they want.”
Although at the time Digital obviously faced some significant challenges, there were still highly effective sales teams moving millions of dollars of equipment. I remember one former district sales manager telling me that his main job was to “isolate the sales reps from the insanity at the top,” a process that entailed “intercepting directives from corporate headquarters and keeping the sales teams focused on listening to the customers and figuring out how to turn our products into viable solutions.”
The marketing organization to which I belonged was certainly not helping matters. The main activity was preparing presentations telling top management that nothing was wrong and that their numerous strategic blunders were actually smart moves. For example, there were elements of top management who still believed – ten years after PCs hit the market – that they were only a passing fad. As a result, marketing kept on sending the field marketing brochures that read as if PCs didn’t really exist in the corporate world. Needless to say, these materials simply ended up in the trash.
High tech firms aren’t the only organizations that suffer from arrogant management. Brad Finn was the division executive responsible for the Mootsies Tootsies brand’s Maxwell Shoe, a $200 million-a-year wholesaler. “Maxwell valued people who could think and act independently,” he explains, “We created an entrepreneurial corporate culture that had proven highly successful with consistent year-to-year growth in a highly competitive market.” In 2004, however, Jones Apparel Group, a $5 billion clothing giant with a very different kind of corporate culture, acquired Maxwell Shoe.
“I was bit apprehensive when I found out about the merger,” says Finn, “But I decided to do my best to make the transition as painless as possible for the employees working under me.” Initially, the potential access to a large company’s resources intrigued Finn, but the honeymoon was brief. “I knew that there was a major problem when the woman who then ran Jones’ footwear division told me, point blank, that ‘we don’t want any *#&%@ mavericks around here.’” Says Finn, “It was then that I knew that, whatever strengths the company might have, they were a poor match with the company that they had just acquired.”
“I tried my best to work with them for about six to eight weeks, but after a while I could see that my efforts were a waste of time,” he said, “I don’t believe in conducting a lot of internal meetings, and those guys were all about reaching consensus on every decision, even if it meant losing out on important opportunities.” While that approach was appropriate for the kind of business and customer relationships that were pre-existing at Jones, Maxwell’s customers often needed quick decisions in order take advantage of rapidly changing fashions.
Finn decided to leave, even though Jones’s top management told him that they would activate a non-compete agreement barring him from working in the shoe business for a year. “It meant taking a pretty significant financial hit,” he said, “But it was worth it to get out of what was clearly an unworkable situation.” Unfortunately for Jones Apparel, many of Finn’s peers left the company as well, seriously degrading the value of the acquisition. “This business is all about relationships and the history that comes from doing business with people for a long time,” Finn explains. “I estimate that, a year later, sales were down by about 25 percent from where they had been before the acquisition.”
Although they worked in very different industries, there are some similarities between how Finn and Wurster addressed the problem of essentially clueless management. First, they both made an effort to work with top management to reach some sort of accommodation for the requirements of the sales group. Second, they both did their best to protect their team from the worst excesses of top management. And they both eventually concluded that it would make more sense to leave rather than to continue to beat their heads against the wall.
Marnie Thomas, formerly a district sales manager at Bristol Myers, took a completely different approach. At one point in her career, she found herself working for a vice president of sales who had some odd ideas about motivation. “At one sales meeting, he told us that, when we went out to sell, we should ‘rape and pillage and leave no wounded,’” she explains. “I remember wondering at the time whether he had noticed that most of the sales managers were female.” Worse, she knew that being overly aggressive to the company’s customer base would have resulted in cancelled orders. “If we had followed his advice, in a couple of months we wouldn’t have had any customers left.”
Thomas’s approach was simply to continue with business as usual until the offending executive moved on. “I figured that it was only a matter of time before his boss figured out that the guy was a clown,” she says. However, she admits that there was some danger to this approach. “For all I knew, the big boss himself had his own private collection of orange-colored fright wigs,” she says.
The worst part of waiting a bozo out, however, is that you have to grin and bear it while the bozo is still in power. That’s no big deal if you’ve got a lot of patience, but it can be wearing when the waiting turns from weeks to months and (gulp!) even years. Worse, there’s another danger that comes along with the “grin and bear it” strategy, according to Thomas. “If you do it too long, you might discover that the only way to keep that big grin on your face is to slap it on with greasepaint,” she says.
– Geoffrey James