Research Chiefs Too Quick to Point Finger
I’m mortified to report that leading indicators reveal that my column is not as competitive as it once was in the global marketplace of ideas.
After years of painstaking research, it appears that Japanese journalists are finally generating innovative, cost-effective columns that are quickly capturing worldwide mind share. European columnists, working in close concert with their governments, are churning out high-quality prose that has readers everywhere enthralled.
I’m worried--so I’ve rigorously examined my competition. I’ve put myself and my writing though the hell of introspection and now feel confident that I know what the problem really is.
Without doubt, the problem is my editor. He’s a nice guy but he’s far too short-term oriented; he’s caught up in daily news and misses the bigger pictures. He doesn’t allocate the necessary time, resources and money to do the column right. He lacks the editorial vision I think the column really needs for it to be a truly world-class competitor. Hey, folks, I’d really like to do a better column, but my hands are tied.
Does this sound like the whining of a finger-pointing weasel? You bet. But my self-serving rationalizations are scarcely different from those of the artful dodgers who run research and development in America’s top industrial companies. A newly released National Science Board/Industrial Research Institute survey, “Potential Causes for the Erosion in U.S. Technology Leadership,” asked more than 200 leading research managers why America’s technical edge was getting dull.
The answer? “The overwhelming majority of IRI officials participating in the survey held general management practices and external financial pressures responsible for the erosion in U.S. technology leadership,” said the report.
Wrote one survey respondent, “At issue are general management practices and the external financial pressure to produce significant profit increases year after year. There is no understanding of the R&D; process (in terms of) dollars, commitment (and) time by general management. Today’s earnings drive a CEO’s decisions, not tomorrow’s promises.”
In other words, “Hey! It’s not my fault . . . the problem is with my boss and the green-eyeshade boys in finance.” Surveys like this are far more revealing than they perhaps intend. What appears to be a damning indictment of top management ignorance and Wall Street greed is really the verbal wigglings of executives trying to cover their posteriors.
Admittedly, the argument that “My boss is a moron” is tempting beyond endurance. Far too frequently, the boss is a moron. Who would deny that many American CEOs have done a superlatively lousy job of encouraging innovative research and development? Who could rationally argue that “external financial pressures” don’t matter to top management?
But so what? Life is tough all over. If you are a senior manager running research and development, it’s your job to be productive despite the obstacles. If the chief executive doesn’t understand a new process, explain it. If financial capital is tight, figure out ways to leverage the organization’s intellectual capital. If the senior R&D; person can’t effectively explain, persuade or produce within the general management and external financial restraints, then he should resign. To piteously bleat about the shortcomings of others is both tasteless and pathetic.
It’s not as if this survey didn’t give these executives the chance to point their fingers at the mirror. They were given five categories to choose from--general management practices, federal technology policy, external financial pressures, technology management practices and a changing global technological environment--to explain the reasons for America’s competitive decline. The one category that reflected their own management abilities--technology management--was ranked fourth of the five. Only federal technology policy was ranked lower.
Is it possible that what’s holding the R&D; folks back are the harnesses of top management and cheap capital? Sure--who doesn’t want more money and more support? But if you talk to people in corporate R&D;, you’ll hear plenty of complaints about their own management practices. You’ll hear about squandered resources, mismanaged priorities, the inability to communicate fluently with either internal or external customers and a dozen other problems.
In fact, it just might be possible that capital and top management support would be more readily accessible if these R&D; people were doing a better job themselves. Just a thought.
A truly useful survey would have done more than just ask these executives to rank obstacles; it would have asked them to list what efforts they made over the last few years to overcome them. Are companies creating interdisciplinary new-product teams? Are they forming more collaborative ties with universities? Are they conducting special seminars for the executive committees? Everybody knows we have problems; what everybody needs to know is how bright companies are beginning to address them instead of assigning blame for them.
This NSB/IRI survey inspired me to conduct a survey of my own. Just for kicks, I asked our library to conduct a comprehensive NEXIS search through newspaper, magazine and newsletter databases--ranging from the Los Angeles Times to Business Week to Inc. magazine--to find how often top American managers were quoted as saying that they were at fault for their organizational screw-ups. The librarian crafted several search-nets to comb through millions of words to capture an executive who was honest and gutsy enough to say, “It’s my fault.”
Out of tens of thousands of business articles over the last five years--years marked by failed mergers, record numbers of corporate bankruptcies and U.S. industry consistently losing market share in several critical industries--only a bare handful of stories could be found where executives explicitly acknowledged their own responsibility for failure.
I can’t say the results surprised me--any more than I can say the National Science Board/Industrial Research Institute survey results surprised me. They certainly disappointed me. Frankly, I think they should also disappoint the entire R&D; community.
No one should excuse the spinelessness of chief executives and their boards. Similarly, no one should ignore the indexed impatience of Wall Street’s institutional investing harpies. But their existence doesn’t preclude innovation--it only makes it more difficult. By blaming forces beyond their control, America’s top research managers confirm they are more interested in passing the buck than making one.
