Lesson 3: Be Pragmatic
By the time I arrived at SAP, a lot had changed in my career. I’d gotten lucky in the previous years and managed to build credibility that I’d never had before. That success reinforced one of my most naive beliefs; I still thought that all of the business world’s hard problems could be cracked inside of an elegantly built excel model. I believed that a perfectly crafted slide should change the course of a business.
Robin Manherz changed all that for me. Robin showed me what it means to lead a real organization.
Robin is an unassuming leader. She is warm, open, and always looking for the best in people. She cares about what makes them tick. At the time, she was just leaving a post running sales operations for a $7 billion dollar business. At that time, I’d expected someone in that role to be consumed with the numbers. She wasn’t. She obsessed over the results. But she really only cared about the actions that created the results, not the measurement that would predict it.
Our relationship played predictably. A challenge would arise and I would hand her a beautiful presentation filled with numbers. I’d explain the exact right way to do something and she’d listen. Then, she’d ask a very simple follow up. “How are we going to do that?” I didn’t know more often than not.
In the Spring of 2013, I presented Robin an analysis about SAP’s sales process. Armed with a mass of data, I’d proven that we should be investing in a new type of inside sales program. Instead of objecting or agreeing, she bought me a plane ticket and sent me to one of our inside sales offices with a stopwatch. My accomplishment? After a week of conversations I’d learned I was completely wrong. Why? My elegant analysis told me what was happening — but not why it was happening.
I didn’t understand the operations on the ground. And that meant my recommendations wouldn’t have led us anywhere.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the Supreme Court Justice, is fabled to have said, “I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.” Every analyst that does brilliant work on a data set — absent on the ground observation — risks simplifying on the wrong side of complexity. You just don’t know what you don’t know.
Robin knew that having a target isn’t valuable at all if you can’t possibly get there. As an operator, you have to be pragmatic. You’ve got to understand how the business actually works. You have to understand what motivates your people. You have to understand the operation. A great insight with an impractical plan for execution accomplishes nothing.
For those of us blessed with immensely talented teams that can develop the most nuanced strategies, it’s easy to forget that being pragmatic is often far more impactful than being elegant.
