*cluck*cluck*cluck* Who Are You Afraid Of, Ya Big Chicken?

I bet you’re not trying to be No.1. I bet you’re making excuses. I bet there’s someone in your company, or in your industry, who OWNS you. They’ve got the Midas Touch, and you’re niggling about process documents and sweating out a 15 percent improvement. No? A new study on professional golfers suggests otherwise. Call it the Tiger Effect; it says in the face of a dominant force, people play for second place. They play it safe.

From Slate.com. 

If money motivates, then the prospect of winning the top prize should bring out extreme effort in golf. But when Tiger is playing and you’re not Tiger, you face a depressed prize schedule. If you assume Tiger is going to win, then the top prize available to you is $864,000 rather than $1.44 million. That beats the heck out of steak knives, but it’s significantly less than the winner’s take. Second place—among players who are not Tiger—gets $544,000 rather than $864,000, and so on. While Tiger certainly doesn’t win every tournament he enters, he does frequently shift the reward schedule for most of the field.

 Which made me think of this damn-the-doubters article by HP CIO John Soat, published in Information Week:

…technology managers must realize that a radical IT transformation is the only way to achieve significant and lasting results. Trying to pick and choose among various and equally pressing IT priorities — server consolidation, application portfolio management, rationalizing IT resources — is a recipe for failure. “Choosing is losing,” he said. “You’re going to guarantee you’ll never get finished. The incremental fashion just doesn’t work.”

A deep dive into a company’s technology infrastructure will help open a technology manager’s eyes. Some of the 1,240 IT projects Mott cataloged at HP during a 30-day review weren’t slated to be finished for 20 years. “If it takes 20 years to finish, it can’t be that important,” he jokingly pointed out.

So I guess the question we have to ask ourselves when we hedge and compromise: who are you afraid of? Is there a force in your industry or company so dominant that whispers tell you, “Lay up in front of the bunker. Don’t lose your lock on 3rd place. You’ll look like a chump if plunk it in the sand.” 

Last story: I met with this guy who used to work at a major footwear company, and he told me a story about their rise to power. “You could create a huge splash, change the conversation, blow a titanic hole in your budget and be rewarded with a promotion. You could come in at half the budget while barely make a ripple, and be exiled to the warehouse.”

The culture of his company said the halo effect of radically better work wipes away your sins. I think it’s a culture to which every marketing organization should aspire. No? Who are you afraid of?