Marketer here and this is so spot on. So many companies that I have worked for have had founders that just didn't seem to understand metrics as well as they thought they did.
Huge spread sheets with % and pivot tables and week on week breakdowns BUT no one could tell me much about what all that data meant. Apart from the fact that everyone had their own explanation it was just useless information to be fair. Churn, CAC, amongst various other 'hot' metrics.
In the end, most of these companies took a couple of years to realize that these metrics which Unicorns write amazing blog posts on are either BS or just not made for them. So much frustration was felt because a manager read a TechCrunch article about how X (with 100's of millions) did this and achieved something spectacular.
I don’t know if there’s a phrase for this phenomena but I see this a lot and it really bothers me, where leaders get “too” inspired by management or process ideas from blogs.
It almost never works out and then the leaders blame teams for incorrectly following whatever the process was rather than accepting that almost every org is somewhat unique so adjustments to strategy need to always be made.
Isn't this just plain cargo cult management? They read someone claiming some process is the best, proceed to monkey the process and then get surprised when the imagined results don't materialize.
This sentence also describes the vast majority of startups - "It’s when we imitate behaviors without understanding how they work in the hope of achieving the same results. Naturally enough, it’s not something that works."
I remember when that goddamn Steve Jobs book came out. For a good while every founder and CEO suddenly thought they were some kind of product wizard and started trying to imitate Jobs’s hands-on micro-detailed product design meddling.
I'm starting to wonder whether you could reliably predict management behavior at large corporations by tracking the bestseller biographies that came out. Or being current with HBR.
This is a very interesting idea. Now I'm getting curious to see how this could be put into action.
Whilst probably not as beneficial as predicting behaviour, there could be a startup version to find the origins of buzzwords. Then try to predict how management will potentially push that company forward using these buzzwords or references to external sources.
Spot on, it's infuriating to deal with. There's a lot of time spent reading blogs and quoting some flavor of the month founder and then essentially trying to replicate as much as possible.
One of my consulting roles got terminated early (1 week before I was about to terminate it myself too) because a Growth Hacking agency with a loud speaking founder turned up, told the founder that my work was not good (an agency saying that there's problems across the board - who would have thought that huh?) only for them to be fired 1 month later and an outcry across social media for 'real growth hackers' and not promising the world from that same founder.
Bearing in mind this founder also had the latest Apple products because it was a must...
> So much frustration was felt because a manager read a TechCrunch article about how X (with 100's of millions) did this and achieved something spectacular.
Because they did this and (coincidentally) achieved something spectacular :)
Huge spread sheets with % and pivot tables and week on week breakdowns BUT no one could tell me much about what all that data meant. Apart from the fact that everyone had their own explanation it was just useless information to be fair. Churn, CAC, amongst various other 'hot' metrics.
In the end, most of these companies took a couple of years to realize that these metrics which Unicorns write amazing blog posts on are either BS or just not made for them. So much frustration was felt because a manager read a TechCrunch article about how X (with 100's of millions) did this and achieved something spectacular.