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Isms Part 2 of a 365 Part Series: Obsticulture

It was a dark and stormy night, actually it was clear warm and I was stuck in traffic on the bridge over the Columbia River heading from Portland into Washington. While the HOV lane was available it was moving only slightly faster that the DOA lane of single drivers in their shiny metal boxes.

The driver, let’s just call her; Driver 8, asked about my latest foray into working with a company that has arguably world class technology and is stuck the revolving door of needing a step by step plan in order to go to market. Without the plan, there is fear something else may happen.

“Well, how are you going to help them?” Driver 8 inquired with all the familiarity of a 15 year partnership (grumble).

After several minutes of me making the mistake of thinking out loud and using an impressive string of forward looking phrases, motivational quotes, and promising that my impressive “ism” vocabulary insures this client “field level traction” for sales, Driver 8 turns to me and dead pans;

“Ibid.”

So we started at the end of the beginning for this client. After battling for corporate survival, and making it through, the management team, I refer to them as “the management team,” hired a solid CFO and went out and pimped for a first round. They got it, added to investor suits (the clothes not the legal stuff) to the board, and added another board member who would side with the management team in case something happened that was necessary but not what they wanted to do, so they could override the new money.

As Driver 8 and I profiled the management team and the current state of affairs, I was striving for a one word adjective that is an accurate descriptor of the current corporate culture.

Now I strive for this with any engagement and the “this” is a one word MashUp that describes the overriding proclivities of the management team and the negative effect it can have on the company. The goal here is to get the management team to behave in a manner opposite the Mashed Up “ism.” This new "ism" is used as a compass by a the management team to avoid going in that direction. This took about 5 minutes of focus when it hit me;

“Obsticulture.”

Yup, that is it; Obsticulture. This “ism” is defined as follows; “The process by which a start up cannot get out of its own way, for whatever reason, to drive to success.”

While Obsticulture centric organizations differ in ailments, the overall disease is the same; creating internal barriers to success. The barriers can be real, say the inability to invest in the right level of presales support, or imagined, my personal favorites like; the company imagines a scenario where they will get run over by a competitor if they do not work in perfect concert with them. I often hear this expressed in terms of sweeping generalizations "We have to solve this or the earth will cook itself!" or fear of starting a war with a competitor; "They can crush us with a 30 second phone call to..."


Breathe.

For example, if a member of the management creates a mental scenario that a meeting is not warranted because there is not written agenda that is Obsticulture.

Now I am all for a written, specific, rigid, check box style agenda, and I am also 22.5 year old (see: About Me) and often the overall goal of a meeting is to discuss how to work together more specifically. The last meeting with an agenda I witnessed had about 8 hours or preplanning between 3 people and the agenda did not survive the first ten minutes. The goal was reached, but the preplanning was mostly wasted cycles as the customer wanted to talk about business issues and not block and tackle.

The net here is often by fear, naïveté, or control issues a company culture will create literal and perceptual obstacles to growth and it is a real problem, very real. In the case of this client, they are in denial about these obstacles as they have created a scenario where the messenger is best shot so the Obsticulture is not changed.

Anyone else got Obsticulture examples?


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