Yesterday I had an interesting lunch with Professor Howard Davies from Polytechnic University Hong Kong and Jacques Kemp, CEO ING Asia/Pacific. Professor Davies uses the TPE (Towards Performance Excellence) in his courses as an example of a “strategy by design”.
Like Dutch all-time greatest soccer mind and player, Johan Cruijff, outside the field famous for his self-created proverbs, adages and sayings, once concluded that ‘every advantage has its disadvantage’, also TPE can be looked at from pros and cons angle. Professor Davies, for example, sometimes asks his students what would happen with TPE in a shock situation, say US$ value halves in a couple of days. Would it be an advantage or disadvantage to have TPE as strategy execution framework?
An interesting question, hinting towards a similar worry Alain LeCouedic from Boston Consulting Group (BCG) had when he interviewed me last week: does TPE affect creativity?
When there is a framework, there is suspicion; after all, people are free-thinking creatures. The environment is unpredictable. A ‘template’ would be best in a stable situation, not in US$ shock scenarios where out-of-of-the-box thinking would be the best bet for a solution – as is the spirit of many TPE counterarguments.
I would now, also motivated by some findings of University of Chicago professors Thaler and Sunstein (Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, Yale University Press) that a well designed architecture does not affect people’s freedom. On the contrary, it would counterforce the tendency of people, as proven time and again by behavioral sciences, to choose the irrational, emotional or simply stupid lose-lose scenarios.
Think of this, if you have ever walked through London Hyde park, New York Central park or the gardens of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, definitely the first question that would come up would not be something like: “I want to cross the grass here and now”. On the contrary, it is a pleasure to walk around on the paths in one of those well designed parks.
During the discussion with Professor Davies, Jacques Kemp mentioned his philosophy on leadership, of which part is that you need to organize yourself to be able to do all you need to do with 80% of the time. The other 20% is for unforeseen, shocks or opportunities.
TPE frees up time. It allows you to be creative. It allows you to seize opportunities or respond to (US$) shocks because you are not wasting time solving ambiguities. I guess, as Cruijff might say, that’s to people lacking creativity or who are comfortable in the mists of non-performance-excuses, the bad side of this good news.
DGN
PS. An interesting case study on TPE can be bought on Harvard Business Online.
