Functional myopia (not a vision-related term) occurs when employees focuses so powerfully on the goals and standard practices of their work function that they sub-optimize the work of the organization. Harvard Business School Professor Ted Levitt coined the term "marketing myopia" some 50 years ago, and spell this near-sightedness for certain can apply to the marketing function, functional myopia can also apply to every function inside an organization.
One definition of a "professional" is a person who pays greater adherence to the norms of his or her profession than to the goals of the organization for which he or she is working. And, for certain, this is often a good affair. For example, we want our doctor to practice good medicine rather than blindly follow the guidelines obligatory by an HMO. Similarly, we trust a CPA to adhere to the standards of the accounting profession rather than to "fix the books" of his or her employer or client.
But, in many cases, the adherence to functional or group norms can adversely affect the overall goals of the organization. Here are some examples from my own experience on with other examples I have collected over the years from a wide variety of organizations.
- Back in the 1980s, when I worked for Digital Equipment Corporation, I initiated a project to create a "Network Pregross sales Handbook." The project was designed to create a loose-leaf binder that contained a wide variety of materials, created by many different groups inside the company, that would provide a single-source compendium of information for networking gross sales and pre-gross sales specialists. The audience for this project was very great about the idea and development of the materials was done in record time - until it was time to produce the materials. (Today, we would put it all on-line very quickly, but back then, we had to depend on distribution of hard copy.) While I was acquiring calls every day asking when it would be ready, I could only answer that it was "in production," and it actually took seven months before the first copies were distributed. When I asked the production staff why it took so long, they told me that the company required them to go dead set bid on each component of the notebook: the binders, the spine and front-cover inserts with the title, the printing of the documents, the printing of the tab-separators for each section, and the assembly and promotion of the notebook. And, once they had the last-place bidder for each component, they had to wait until every component was produced before assembly and promotion. After the job was done, I asked them to attend any single seller of their choice and ask what it would have cost for that single seller to do the complete job besides as how long it would have taken that seller to get the job done. The answer came back: it would have taken that seller 6 weeks to do the complete job and the cost would have been $0.45 cents more than the costs using triple sellers. The difference of $0.45 per notebook (on a total cost of $43.00, delayed acquiring this valuable information to the people who required it by 5-1/2 months! That is functional myopia!
- My company wanted to enter into a strategic partnership with another company, a partnership that would greatly benefit both companies. The new product that would be developed by the joint effort would lead the market. Executives from both companies were so eager to get the partnership up and running that they reached agreement on basic terms very quickly. And then, they turned the project over to their lawyers to catch on all down on paper. The lawyers spent five months tilt over inconsequential word changes and, by the time they had dotted every "I" and crossed every "T," another competition beat them to market. The executives infernal themselves: "We should have notable from past experience that the lawyers would get into these types of 'spitting contests' because that's what lawyers do. Instead of just handing it off to the lawyers, we should have told them that it had to be done inside 30 days."
- A metal-working company had to order a special alloy to create parts for an aerospace company. The company's buying agent went to their suppliers to source the alloy and found that the best price they could get was for 500-pound blocks of the alloy, so they ordered those blocks. This is what buying agents do - they find the best price for the materials the company inevitably to purchase. The problem was that the parts that were to be created with this alloy were very small and the amount of time it took to cut down the large blocks and the amount of scrap material created in the process reduced the margin of profit for these parts by more than 50% from the margins that would have occurred if they had purchased the materials in 2-pound blocks (but the 2-pound blocks would have cost 5% more per pound than the 500-pound blocks).
- A company's client service call center was acquiring extremely poor ratings from clients. Complaints poured in every day. "I had three questions. Your service rep answered the first question and so hung up." "Your rep hurried through the call, and I didn't understand anyaffair they told me. When I tried to invite a better explanation, she told me to read the manual." The company hired a new director for the call center and the first affair the new director did was to provide several days of training on client service. Almost immediately, the response from clients turned around: "I don't know what you did, but your rep was fantastic and took the time to make certain that I got my problem fixed." And the call center staff was even happier: "The training was great. It is so nice to be able to really help the clients solve their problems." The changes lasted for about two weeks, until one of the reps had his annual performance review. "I'm afraid that I can't give you a raise this year," the manager told the employee. "I was just reviewing your performance statistics for the past two weeks. You were averaging 5.5 proceedings per call, and our standard is to get calls answered in to a little degree 3 proceedings." It didn't take long for word to spread crosswise the call center and for every rep to return to the old behaviors, where they could get the calls answered in to a little degree 3 proceedings.
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