Are you a gatekeeper or competition enabler?

If I were hiring a business manager, I would ask candidates to explain whether they view their role more as a gatekeeper for the organization or an enabler of competition?

Gatekeepers decide what the organization does and doesn’t do. They view themselves as the judge of the competition and their ideas usually win, at least in terms of what the organization does, not necessarily in the marketplace.

Competition enablers are open to let good ideas come from anywhere. They create systems that try more ideas and let the best ideas earn their way in our out.

They understand that customers are the best judge of this competition.

Leaders of highly innovative companies like Google, Amazon and even McDonald’s have tended to be competition enablers.

Mature businesses that struggle to stay relevant, tend to have gatekeepers in charge.

Think of Blockbuster as Netflix offered to partner with them. Blockbuster leaders could have easily said, you know this doesn’t seem like something customers would want, but let’s try it and see, because we could be wrong.

Instead, they acted as gatekeeper and said no, customers don’t want to wait for their movie to arrive in the mail. They want to be able to come in on Friday night and pick one out.

By the time they realized they were wrong enough, it was too late.

A common comeback to that is, but that Netflix deal was probably one of dozens of decisions Blockbuster faced and the rest didn’t work out. How would they be able to predict that this one would?

That’s the beauty of being a competition enabler. You don’t have to say no and worry about picking right or wrong.

You just have to ask, how can we try this so we can find out? Can we do it in a small test?

It’s a lot like picking stocks. You can do a lot of analysis and invest all your money in 2-3 stocks and hope for the best. But most folks learn that strategy banks more on luck than skill, because no amount of analysis can turn up information that simply isn’t known, yet.

A better strategy is to spread the bets out more, knowing you can always be wrong.

And, for every example that you can give of someone who did well picking 2-3 stocks, I can give you 10 more who did not.

I’ve worked for several mature businesses that struggle to stay relevant. The Board never realizes the root cause is that they keep hiring gatekeepers instead of competition enablers.

Another thought on the 1-in-10 chance of success

On Naked & Afraid, participants who take a lot of pride in their experience at fishing or hunting think they can beat the 1-in-10 odds of getting food. They might believe their experience and know-how improves their odds to the 1-in-3, for example.

In the business world, managers think they can similarly improve their chances of succeeding with their smarts and/or experience.

Neither are good at assessing odds.

Both are correct that their know-how does increase their odds, but it improves it to 1-in-10.

Someone without the same know-how might have even lower odds of succeeding, maybe 1-in-20 or worse.