Are Two Heads Better Than One?

The controversy surrounding Sir Stuart Green's stewardship of Marks & Spenser by combining the Chief Executive and Chairman role has resurfaced once again with shareholders up in arms that so much power resides with one man. They are right to be agrieved that anyone, however good, believes they alone can be relied upon to deliver superior returns for shareholders.

Any good CEO needs a good chairman - the two roles are different and necessary. Even small SMEs can benefit from the perspective an external chairman or mentor can bring to the company. It is widely recognised that a CEO can perform even better with a sounding board for his or her ideas. I would be with Sir Stuart in resisting having an executive chairman on board. Anyone full time in the role is simply going to get in the way operationally and loses that all important external perspective.

Similarly, I am not a fan of joint roles and responsibilities, which just serves to be divisive and confusing to other staff. If you have functional heads accountable for the performance of the company in that area then that focus is beneficial and good. Everyone needs to be part of the team, but in the end someone needs to do something to move things forwards in specific areas. I do hope that Sir Stuart is a good delegator because doing the work of two people (as soon as you can afford not to) ain't a smart move in business, however good you are.

Snow Report

‘Solutions for Business – funded by government’ is a package of business support to help companies start, grow and succeed. The launch event was fittingly held last Friday in a casino! Simon Hill from Yorkshire Forward explained how they have streamlined thousands of public-funded support products into a package of thirty. My take on it was that they have identified a set of product categories under which individual solutions would fit, which is not exactly the same thing! Like the fact that multiple inheritance in object-oriented systems is technically feasible, but not a good idea in practise, going forwards hybrid products that fit under two categories would disappear, which is perfectly sensible.

But let's remember this is just a conceptualisation of reality that dices and slices things to offer a palatable solution that hides complexity, maximised cohesion and minimises coupling (see my Keep it Simple Stupid post). For example, lets take business mentoring - it is valuable before and after investment but has been and probably will continue to be separated into investor readiness support and 'money with management'. And there's nothing wrong with that, but in another conceptualisation it could be brought together, but that would require closer coordination between organisations like Connect and the investment funds.

We all want things to appear as simple as possible, but as with systems biology, life introduces complexity as the thing evolves. That's not to say we shouldn't group together things - that's what an organ is. Eskimo's have twenty words for 'snow', because it's an important concept to them. Try telling them they don't need the other nineteen.