In a discussion related to a Strategic Review of my school’s research function, the issue of individual and organizational ambition arose. I thought this was an interesting discussion and think it reflects well on the key to the research strategy over the last three years. As I have repeated many times, our ambition was to solidify our position just below the top five research institutions in the UK. In the last REF much was made of our top 10 positioning but the reality was that we were 16th when it came to the quality of research outputs (as opposed to our very strong position w/r to impact case studies). What our ambition implied was a very different approach to not just what our research output goals were but how we perceived ourselves vis-a-vis a set of comparator institutions. You will never have heard me discussing the Russell Group or any set of local competitors as what mattered to how we perceived ourselves. Our benchmarks were always global. Don Argus, who was the Chair and Director of many a board, including BHP-Billiton, once told me that most companies make the mistake of using role models and benchmarks from their own industries. His view was that excellence has universal characteristics and that by just doing benchmarking against those just like you was a prescription for regression toward the mean both in terms of performance and in how you thought about who you were and what you did. It might satisfy your organizational ego to be the best in some area of activity but once you are the ‘best’ there where do you go next?
To implement these ambitions, I outlined a three stages approach to changing what we do in managing the research function at the business school. In addition, I used a simple model that implied that Value of Research Outputs (VRO) = Intellectual Quality(IQ)*Resources(R)*Influence(I); where Intellectual Quality (IQ) is driven by the talent of the faculty (who we hire), Resources (R) where what we did in terms of money, time and other things to resource people, and Influence (I) was how we projected that to key stakeholders (where we published, how we interacted with the business community, etc.). The point of this model was that you needed all three — IQ, R and I — if you were missing any, the VRO was nil. From the standpoint of my role and the research office team, we could mainly drive (R) and (I), as we had no control over hiring and promotion policies or the admission of PhD students. Hence, we operated very much like a coaching staff that did not choose the players. To drive (R) and (I), we have very very dramatically increased our resourcing and influence while doing what was possible to enhance the IQ of those hired by the divisions.
However, ambition is not just organizational. You cannot have an ambitious organization without ambitious individuals. This requires hiring and promoting individuals who seek true excellence and want to be at the pinnacle of their fields of endeavor. It also requires people to stand up and guide them and serve as role models. When I taught executive MBAs in Australia, I had groups where 80-90 percent were employed by multinationals (hence they worked in subsidiaries). I asked them what the role of their subsidiary was within the MNC and got the usual mix of motherhood statements. I then asked them to describe their CEO and the Top Management Team (TMT). At that point, they realized that the role of the subsidiary was very much linked to how their CEO and TMT saw themselves and why those specific individuals were in those roles.
I then asked the Executives what it meant to be ambitious. Some viewed ambition as a bad thing — reflecting ego and greed where ambition and integrity where viewed as trade-offs. Most, however, understood that ambition was important as a self-motivating mechanism and could be aligned with being a person of integrity. I was then able to use the class to come up with a series of characteristics of ‘good’ ambition. What was clear was that ambition reflects a future looking orientation. The past was important but it was viewed simply as a prologue to the future. What was past was past and what got them to where they were was something of a ‘sunk cost’. A second aspect was that there was an acceptance that what ‘is’ and ‘what’ has been should not constrain what was possible. In other words, the ambitious know that both they and their organizations must change and that what strategists call ‘path dependence’ was something to break through and not accomodate. One student said something that stuck with me for many years — “most organizations are so embedded in their past that they can only embrace change when that change implies that nothing and no one will change”. In a highly competitive world, path dependent change is a prescription for mediocrity — the superior have their positions eroded by the more aggressive and ambitious, while those in the middle and bottom simply solidify their positions. What was interesting was the split between the executives who believed to be ambitious you needed to have a plan and those that view ambition more philosophically and opportunistically. As I have seen both work, my strategy w/r to the research office was that we plan to shoot for very ambitious targets — and hence the need for lots of data and benchmarking and transparency w/r to both the data and what it implied — while at the same time being very ‘venture’ driven by taking advantages as quickly as possible for opportunities that arose — and being prepared to experiment with things that may not ever work out.
There are both personal and organizational lessons in this. For PhD students and junior members of the academic staff it highlights the need to never become complacent in your career or allow your career to be dominated by what you have done but what you are capable of achieving in the future. Your career should be more than a history lesson where you are constantly looking back and attempting to preserve your ‘legacy’. For the organization as a whole it highlights the importance of having the right people with the right resources and the appropriate philosophy to go beyond incremental improvements. It also requires that those in more senior positions reflect a culture of significant ambition that reveals to those younger and less experienced what is possible from being attached to the organization.
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