A faster horse

Henry Ford is reported to have remarked ‘if I had asked people what they wanted they would have asked for a faster horse’.

Henry Ford had a vision.

His vision required a massive paradigm shift.

The paradigm shift required him to completely re-think the ‘horse business’.

The conventional thinking of the day was that if you need to get from A to B you need a horse.

Henry Ford believed he had a better way and subsequently went on to pioneer the ‘automobile business’.

If he had waited for consumer demand he might still be waiting because they were all still very much in the business of buying horses (the horse was so deeply entrenched into the consumer’s psyche that early automobiles were known as ‘horseless carriages’).

So what he did was to create a breakthrough product and completely changed the rules of the game.

He had a vision and the conviction to bring it into reality.

One struggling manager that I worked for conducted a series of focus groups only to disappointingly report to his Managing Director that… ‘the members provided no real insights into what could be done to turn the business around.’

The manager had no idea what should, or could, be done with the business before he conducted the focus groups. He wanted the members to tell him what he needed to do.

With all due respect to that manager it is not the member’s job to provide strategic direction for the business. It is your job to have a vision (and the capacity to get your people behind it) and the strategies and tactics to execute it.

If you do not have a vision and the strategy and tactics to accomplish it you have no business taking on the role of manager in the first place.

If your only strategy is to have the tail wag the dog it is time to look for another job.