CRM Dogma Explained:“Executive Buy-In”
by David Sims,
Contributing Editor, Customer Interaction Solutions
You’ve no doubt heard that if you don’t get executive buy-in for
CRM it’s going to fail. But is executive buy-in really all that
important? Let’s play fill in the blank. Read the following four
paragraphs and see if you can complete the last sentence. Hint: Use the
word “guillotine” in your answer.
There’s a problem the organization identifies as critical — critical
enough to change the way things are done and challenge
the entrenched interests in the organization, which have contributed,
mostly indirectly and not maliciously, to the crisis. A
plan to attack the problem is drawn up. It looks like it’ll work
if it’s enforced across all departments.
Someone is put in charge of the effort. He runs into opposition
from the entrenched interests, and it’s soon clear that he
needs the authority of the chief executive in the organization
to accomplish reform and save the organization.
The chief executive needs the vision, confidence and sense of
urgency of what’s at stake to let it be known that opposition to
the reform program will not be tolerated in the organization.
The chief executive flubs it, and says basically “You do the best
you can, but I’m not putting my neck on the line.” Hence
reform is not implemented, entrenched interests win the day
and, if anything, are more emboldened and inoculated against
further attempts at reform, knowing the chief executive isn’t
going to go to the mat for it.
The result is that ___________.
Done? Read to the end for the correct answer.
In the 1780s France, which is to say the court of King Louis
XVI, identified a critical problem: They needed discipline over
their finances.
The man they had in the job of Director-General, Jacques
Necker, was probably the most gifted public financier of his
day. He drew up a brilliant reform plan, and historians today
generally agree that had the reforms been enacted the court’s
finances would have had a good shot at regaining equilibrium
and maybe the country would have avoided the bloodbath of
the 1789 Revolution and subsequent Terror.
For reforms so far-reaching and fundamental Necker needed
executive buy-in from the very top, King Louis XVI himself.
Simon Schama, in his unequaled Citizens: A Chronicle of the
French Revolution, writes that Necker, astutely, “had always
argued that broad political support was indispensable to the
success of any serious reform program.”
Indeed. “The king” is what was meant by “broad political
support” in Bourbon France in 1780. Louis XVI needed to
publicly back Necker and the reforms with the very power of
the throne itself, since the reforms included measures designed
to curb the privileges of the nobility and attack the little fiefdoms
aristocrats had erected for themselves. Without muscular
royal buy-in the reforms were not worth the parchment they
were written on.
Let us know when this starts sounding vaguely familiar to how
things work in your company.
A Protestant from Geneva, Necker was an outsider in the
French Catholic court — he wasn’t even accorded the C-level
title “Controller-General” which a man with his duties and
powers normally would have been granted, but the slightly
lower title “Director-General.” He had implemented some
reform on the strength of that, but to really crack the core of
the problem — the national budget and tax system — to cut
across the departmental boundaries and entrenched interests
he needed de facto royal power.
And it’s not that Louis XVI was opposed to the ends Necker
sought to achieve. “I wish to put order and economy in every
part of my household,” the king, a man not given to demonstration
or histrionics, told the Duc de Coigny one night, “and
those who have anything to say against it I will crush like this
glass,” throwing a goblet to the floor.
But Louis XVI lacked the vision and the critical sense of
just how bad things really were, of the stakes in play, and didn’t buy in. In May 1781, Necker,
his reforms frustrated by entrenched
interests and a host of enemies made
by his budget-cutting, asked the king
to make him a member of the royal
council for the power he needed to
push reform through.
Louis XVI refused. Necker, knowing his
was now a hopeless task, resigned, and
with his departure went the last hope
France had for solving the pain that had
given rise to the reform effort — bringing
its ruinous finances into line. As
Schama writes, “The fiscal exhaustion…
which in effect precipitated the French
Revolution, was directly attributable
not to Necker’s wartime funding of 530
million livres but to the peacetime loans
of his successors, and to their wholesale
abandonment of his economies.”
So let’s run over that again, shall we?
There’s a problem the organization
identifies as critical — critical enough
to change the way things are done and
challenge the entrenched interests in the
organization which have contributed,
mostly indirectly and not maliciously, to
the crisis. A plan to attack the problem
is drawn up. It looks like it’ll work if it’s
enforced across all departments.
Someone is put in charge of the effort.
He runs into opposition from the
entrenched interests, and it’s soon clear
that he needs the authority of the chief
executive in the organization to accomplish
reform and save the organization.
The chief executive needs the vision,
confidence and sense of urgency of
what’s at stake to let it be known that
opposition to the reform program will
not be tolerated in the organization.
The chief executive flubs it, and says
basically “You do the best you can, but
I’m not putting my neck on the line.”
Hence reform is not implemented,
entrenched interests win the day and,
if anything, are more emboldened and
inoculated against further attempts at
reform, knowing the chief executive
isn’t going to go to the mat for it.
The result is that the organization totters on
a while longer until rivers of blood flow in
the streets and the chief executive, his ministers
and associates are carted off in tumbrels
to the guillotine where their heads are
hacked off for the amusement of the crowd.
Has your organization gotten to that
final sentence — yet?
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