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This article reprinted from the Austin Business Journal

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Whenever I work with clients, I often see teams and groups unknowingly engaged in an age-old debate. Many are concerned with process — the folks with spreadsheets, plans, and a checklist for everything. Opposite them are the talented, visionary folks who see what needs to be done even before it shows up — whether it’s on a checklist or not.

In some cases, these two groups complement each other’s abilities. A lot of the time, their inability to see value in each other tears the team apart, costing firms time and money. Make no mistake, you need both sides of the equation to succeed. Let me give you some examples.

When I worked for a large multinational publishing concern, one manager in another group was extraordinarily gifted at dealing with details. She was meticulous about process, about keeping communication lines open, and about creating the proper boiler room environment that publishing deadlines require.

She did things right, no question about it.

Unfortunately, she didn’t have her eye on the bigger picture. For example, whenever there was a book project that needed lots of art, she was on top of the process for outsourcing art. Every form was filled out, every contract signed and routed properly, and every illustration came back exactly to specification.

She worked closely with legal, manufacturing, and production — everyone was on board, and her project management notes were always crisp and clear. Trouble was, in most cases there was no need to hire an illustrator for every project.

Most of our projects used generic art, and we had untold thousands of images all piled up in a production storeroom. All we needed was a way to index the art so we could figure out what we could reuse. A simple database or spreadsheet could have saved this multinational hundreds of thousands of dollars every year…but we didn’t know what assets we had on hand.

In other words, this manager was obsessed with doing things right instead of doing the right thing, which was to spearhead the building of a simple database to track art.

Several years later, I was working for a multibillion-dollar behemoth that sells networking gear (you work it out). Their publication teams used sophisticated tools like Framemaker, XML, and Documentum. They were doing the right thing, to the tune of 250 staff technical writers producing reams of documentation every month. Consequently, the documentation CD they sent out to customers was filling up.

They were about to go to a second CD, which would add tens of thousands of dollars to the department’s expenses every month. Not good. My assignment? Examine the CD’s contents. Ten minutes after I opened the CD, I realized that there was something very, very wrong.

See, every publication had to contain various icons for “danger,” “caution,” “attention,” etc. Instead of using just one icon for each of these, the automatic publishing system was creating copies of each image for each technical publication.

With more than 4,000 publications using 10 icons weighing in at about 3K each, you ended up with 100 megabytes devoted to these little icons. That’s one-sixth of a CD! Why not just use one copy of each of the 10 icons? Eventually, we tweaked the output down to half a CD without loss of information quality. Five years later, the company is still shipping just one documentation CD.

We were all so busy doing the right things that we didn’t pay attention to doing things right. Again, the consequences would have been very costly.

One of our current clients is doing the right things and doing things right, and they’re reaping tons of rewards. They are a global medical equipment manufacturer. Their problem? They have a global sales force, but they were having a hard time tracking which salespeople had up-to-date marketing collateral.

They were spending a lot of money every year trying to crack this problem.

We built them a sales extranet that they could manage themselves. The marketing staff can build pages, upload PDFs, and digitize sales collateral as needed. They can track which salespersons log in and what they look at — in other words, they have an exact record of who downloads what, so they know exactly who has received the most updated information.

Consequently, this company has dramatically reduced the amount of time and energy devoted to maintain the information needed to drive sales. They’ve also cut their FedEx bill in half because most salespeople now just download a PDF version of the relevant collateral they need for an upcoming sales meeting. Having a click-by-click knowledge of what salespeople have downloaded from the extranet portal also allows the marketing staff to identify what the sales staff is currently pitching. This allows them to get in front of the sales curve by preparing more go-to-market materials to support the sales effort.

They can see the details and the big picture at the same time–they can do the right things, and do things right. It’s a tough act to follow, but being able to work out the details while maintaining a clear overall vision is achievable, and the rewards for many of our clients are amazing. Not only can they cut costs and go after new opportunities, but they can serve their clients, partners, and employees better than ever.

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