SATURN DEVOURING HIS SON
KEY FACTORS FOR FAILURE
Every time someone tells me their latest bright idea for a business venture, Trías de Bes comes
back to my mind with his hilarious book, The Black Book of the Entrepreneur, in which he
describes, based on his experience, the key factors of failure that entrepreneurs make.
The author says that, in general, failure is due to human and mundane motives, completely
emotional and derived of illusion and fear.
When I read it a few years ago, I was struck by his strong assertion that any idea can be valid:
there is nothing new under the sun, what is different, what leads to the success or failure of a
business project or venture, is the way the idea is introduced, that makes it different.
It is true. Any concept (a search engine like Google or Yahoo, a chain of hamburger or chicken
restaurants, a tablet or a computer) can succeed or crash depending on the operation model
that is defined and, indirectly, on the people who run it.
Measuring the talent
Organizations are as imperfect as the people behind them. Fortunately, or not, decades ago
someone assumed the need of having the best professionals in a company in order to ensure
that the definition and control of the operating model was the one that guaranteed continued
success. There emerged the fight for talent, the need to maintain and develop successful
managers in the companies and the mystery of how to evaluate them.
In recent weeks, following the announced changes at the helm of Microsoft, the debate on the
valuation model of the company’s employees has been revived, already described by Will
Oremus in 2009 as “the poisonous employee ranking system that helps Microsoft’s decline.”
The truth is that this model is based on the one used by General Electric (GE) for decades –
and by dozens of top-level American multinationals – with minor adjustments. This model, the
annual assessment of employees, forces companies to classify employees into different groups
according to the values (percentages) of a Gauss bell, or vitality curve.
Thus, simplifying, 10% or 20% of top performers get a very generous bonus or compensation,
and the 10% or 20% that falls at the end of the bell curve (low performers) are forced to leave
the company, this is known as ‘rank or yank’.
Those of us who have experienced a similar method know that it can become the image of
Saturn Devouring his Son (the famous painting by Goya). They value you as a manager when
nobody taught you to be so, or when metrics respond to quantity, and not quality.
For example, no one appreciates the talent wasted by managers with low, or no emotionality at
all. The three main reasons why someone leaves a company, why talent is lost, are:
• The person does not believe in the mission of the company, in the common goal, in the path
• They don’t like or don’t fit in with their co-workers – feeling like the ugly duckling or black
swan
• When they have a boss who makes their life bitter
