Circa 2006, a green junior executive is in a departmental meeting. The Executive Director states that the department just receive a 50 million dollar cut to the budget.
She then challenges the team to come up with creative ideas and ways to continue to be effective despite this event. The green junior executive thinks to himself – great timing – because he had been kicking around an idea for some time and just had not told anyone.
This was his shot so it would seem. You see his idea was to take one existing application that the company had already developed and was actively using and integrate it with another application that the company had also developed and was actively using, put a few processes around it, and voila, you have a solution that cost about 10k and 4 weeks to implement.
This solution had the potential for an annual cost savings of $5 millions dollars!
So he gathered the materials to support his idea. He got feedback from his colleagues and mentors within the business and created a good business case.
He took this presentation to the Executive Director and she loved it! She green-lighted it for implementation immediately. The bandwagon types came out of the closet and were happy to help lead the initiative, now that it had attention.
Shortly thereafter – someone from the Financial Office – stated that this idea would not and could not work and it was not feasible. The reason being that it was too expensive and the numbers were not correct. He further advised that there was more opportunity elsewhere in the project. These happened to be areas where everyone else was already looking.
What the CFO didn’t know was those numbers had come from his very office and were provided by one of his staff. Crazy right? In the end, the CFO was successful in shutting down the idea just as it was beginning.
What was not shared with the department – but was shared one-on-one with the green junior executive much later – was that the real reason for de-railing the project was that it would have uncovered other elements in the business that were not being managed properly by the CFOs office.
It had nothing to do with the validity, promise, or potential of the idea. It had everything to do with office politics and non-merit, non-logical conditions of a corporate / office environment.
That junior green executive was not surprised that this happened but was frustrated. He couldn’t understand why a good idea was being shuttered for no good reason.
That junior green executive was me many years back and one of the lessons I took away from that was that coming up with the idea is only a part of the challenge. Finding the right culture where you can get sponsorship from senior leaders for such ideas is equally important.
