a job rather than the cause of it. Realizing this frees us to focus on the things that really matter.
For many of us, one of the easiest mistakes to make is to focus on trying to over-satisfy the tangible trappings of professional success in the mistaken belief that those things will make us happy. Better salaries. A more prestigious title. A nicer office. They are, after all, what our friends and family see as signs that we have “made it” professionally. But as soon as you find yourself focusing on the tangible aspects of your job, you are at risk of becoming like some of my classmates, chasing a mirage. The next pay raise, you think, will be the one that finally makes you happy. It’s a hopeless quest.
The theory of motivation suggests you need to ask yourself a different set of questions than most of us are used to asking. Is this work meaningful to me? Is this job going to give me a chance to develop? Am I going to learn new things? Will I have an opportunity for recognition and achievement? Am I going to be given responsibility? These are the things that will truly motivate you. Once you get this right, the more measurable aspects of your job will fade in importance.
CHAPTER THREE
The Balance of Calculation and Serendipity
Understanding what makes us tick is a critical step on the path to fulfillment. But that’s only half the battle. You actually have to find a career that both motivates you and satisfies the hygiene factors. If it were that easy, however, wouldn’t each of us already have done that? Rarely is it so simple. You have to balance the pursuit of aspirations and goals with taking advantage of unanticipated opportunities. Managing this part of the strategy process is often the difference between success and failure for companies; it’s true for our careers, too.
Honda Takes America … by Accident
Back in the 1960s, Honda’s management decided to try to gain a toehold in the U.S. motorcycle market, which had historically been dominated by a small number of powerhouse motorcycle brands such as Harley-Davidson and some European imports, like Triumph. They strategized that by making motorcycles comparable to those made by these competitors, and selling them at significantly lower prices (at the time, Japanese labor was very inexpensive), they ought to be able to steal away 10 percent of the motorcycle import market from the Europeans.
Doing so almost killed Honda. In the first few years, it sold very few bikes—compared to a Harley, a Honda seemed like a poor man’s motorcycle. Worse, Honda discovered that its bikes leaked oil when subjected to the long drives at high speeds that were typical in America. This was a real problem; Honda’s dealers in America did not have the capability to repair such complicated problems and Honda had to spend what precious few resources it had in America to air-freight these faulty motorcycles back to Japan to fix them. In spite of the problems, Honda persisted with its original strategy—even as it was draining the U.S. division of virtually all its cash.
In addition to the large bikes it sold, Honda had initially shipped a few of its smaller motorcycles to Los Angeles; but no one really expected American customers to buy them. Known as the Super Cub, these bikes were used in Japan primarily for urban deliveries to shops along narrow roads that were crowded with people, cars, and bicycles. They were very different from the big motorcycles American enthusiasts valued. As Honda’s resources in Los Angeles got tighter and tighter, it began to allow its employees to use the Super Cubs to run errands around the city.
One Saturday, a member of Honda’s team took his Super Cub into the hills west of Los Angeles to ride up and down through the dirt. He really enjoyed it. In the twists and turns of those hills, he could work out the frustrations that had driven him to the hills in the first place—the failing big-bike strategy.
The next weekend, he invited his colleagues to join him. Seeing the Honda guys having so much fun, other people in the hills that day asked where they, too, could buy one of those “dirt bikes.” Though they were told that they were not available in America, one by one, they convinced the Honda team to order them from Japan.
Soon after, a buyer for Sears spotted a Honda employee riding around on a little Super Cub and asked whether Sears might sell it through its catalog. Honda’s team was cold to the idea, because it would divert them away from their strategy to sell the larger bikes—a strategy that was still not working. Little by little, however, they realized that selling the smaller bikes was keeping Honda’s venture in America alive.
No one had imagined that was how Honda’s entry in the U.S. market would play out. They had only planned to compete with the likes of Harley. But it was clear that a better opportunity had emerged. Ultimately, Honda’s management team recognized what had happened, and concluded that Honda should embrace small bikes as their official strategy. Priced at a quarter of the cost of a big Harley, the Super Cubs were sold not to classic-motorcycle customers, but to an entirely new group of users that came to be called “off-road bikers.”
The rest, as they say, is history. The chance idea of one employee releasing his frustration in the hills that day created a new pastime for millions of Americans who didn’t fit the profile of a traditional touring-bike owner. It led to Honda’s wildly successful strategy of selling the smaller motorcycles through power equipment and sporting-goods stores, instead of traditional motorbike dealers.
Honda’s experience in building a new motorcycle business in America highlights the process by which every strategy is formulated and subsequently evolves. As Professor Henry Mintzberg taught, options for your strategy spring from two very different sources. The first source is anticipated opportunities—the opportunities that you can see and choose to pursue. In Honda’s case, it was the big-bike market in the United States. When you put in place a plan focused on these anticipated opportunities, you are pursuing a deliberate strategy. The second source of options is unanticipated—usually a cocktail of problems and opportunities that emerges while you are trying to implement the deliberate plan or strategy that you have decided upon. At Honda, what was unanticipated were the problems with the big bikes, the costs associated with fixing them, and the opportunity to sell the little Super Cub motorbikes.
The unanticipated problems and opportunities then essentially fight the deliberate strategy for the attention, capital, and hearts of the management and employees. The company has to decide whether to stick with the original plan, modify it, or even replace it altogether with one of the alternatives that arises. The decision sometimes is an explicit decision; often, however, a modified strategy coalesces from myriad day-to-day decisions to pursue unanticipated opportunities and resolve unanticipated problems. When strategy forms in this way, it is known as emergent strategy. The managers of Honda’s beachhead in Los Angeles, for example, did not make an explicit decision to completely change strategy, to focus on the low-cost Super Cubs, in an all-day strategy meeting. Rather, they slowly realized that if they stopped selling the big bikes, it would stem the cash-bleed needed to cover the cost of the leaky-oil repairs. And, one by one, as employees ordered more Super Cub bikes from Japan, the path for profitable growth became clear.
When the company’s leaders made a clear decision to pursue the new direction, the emergent strategy became the new deliberate strategy.
But it doesn’t stop there. The process of strategy then reiterates through these steps over and over again, constantly evolving. In other words, strategy is not a discrete analytical event—something decided, say, in a meeting of top managers based on the best numbers and analysis available at the time. Rather, it is a continuous, diverse, and unruly process. Managing it is very hard—the deliberate strategy and the new emerging opportunities fight for resources. On the one hand, if you have a strategy that really is working, you need to deliberately focus to keep everyone working together in the right direction. At the same time, however, that focus can easily cause you to dismiss as a distraction what could actually turn out to be the next big thing.
It
