Learning to manage your organization's scarcest
asset Sitting on your desk right now is a proposal from
one of your department heads. It describes a project you would love to
undertake. It would enhance your company's competitiveness. You have the money
in your budget to approve it. You're turning it down. Why? Because apart from the money, it will cost
your organization something else—something far more dear than dollars. It's
clear that, in order to succeed, the project will demand attention. And that's something, unfortunately, you're flat
out of. By John C. Beck and Thomas H.
Davenport Outlook Journal, June 1999
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PDF Help Attention Two major forces are converging in the last days of the
20th century to create a management challenge you've never had to think about
before.
The forces themselves are well recognized and widely
heralded. One is the shift in all developed economies away from manual,
industrial labor toward so-called knowledge work. The other is the growing
problem of "information
overload" —a product of media proliferation, communications technology,
democratization of workplaces and other factors.
It's the convergence of these trends, however, that's
creating a new problem for organizations and their leaders: They must now, more
than ever before, become experts at
managing attention. They will need to understand, for instance, the difference
between capturing aural versus visual attention. Visual attention is captured
by the abnormal things that don't match the surroundings. Aural attention, on
the other hand, goes most readily to the familiar. A friend's voice is
recognizable amid the chatter.
In a fast-changing business environment, the key to a
company's continued success is its ability to mobilize quickly. Seizing
new opportunities and responding to new challenges requires an organization's
concerted focus.
But directing the attention of a large, diverse and
increasingly empowered workforce is not easy; just as in the marketplace, it
depends on cutting through all other claims on people's attention. Increasingly, managers
are using the tools of the "attention industries"—advertising, entertainment
and design—to better manage attention in the workplace. We may wait a long time
for the organizational equivalent of the Oscars, but managers will need to
become producers and directors for the information that really matters.
Management's first and clearest challenge is to capture
attention and direct it toward initiatives, tasks and behaviors that are
critical to company success.
Learning to capture attention starts with understanding
human psychology —what
gets people to take notice and, more important, take action.
But responsible managers also recognize that capturing
attention is only part of their job. No matter how fascinating the work at
hand, people have only so much attention to give.
Attention is totally lost if the senses are overwhelmed.
Pilots who tested heads-up displays in fighter jets with maximum visual
information not only lost the ability to pay attention to anything on the
screen, they also lost the ability to hear radio commands. Relentless
attention-getting tactics will only leave an organization exhausted—and
ultimately jaded—if it seems to people that their attention is being abused.
(Remember the boy who cried "wolf"?)
Beyond capturing attention, it's critical for management to
learn to allocate attention judiciously by
structuring its flow
and conserving as much of it as possible.
Attention must be carefully invested to yield maximum
business results. This implies, in turn, that ways must be found to monitor
attention—where it's going and with what effects—and to measure it.
In the words of Peter Drucker, you cannot manage what you
cannot measure.
If all this is beginning to sound like management of an
economic resource,
there's a good reason. Attention is, in fact, a resource in many
respects—probably the scarcest and most valuable resource organizations have to
manage.
It's no surprise, then, to discover that great business
leaders can be best understood as great attention managers. Think of people
like Akio Morita, Thomas Watson Jr., Percy Barnevik, Jack Welch, Robert
Goizueta. Now consider their ability to:
- Capture the sustained attention of many diverse workers and
allocate it to the areas most important to the company's success.
- Focus their personal attention on the information and other
input most critical to making excellent strategic decisions.
- Guide the attention of analysts, investors—and, of course,
customers—toward the company's competitive strengths.
Attention has been the key to their business success. Why
would you leave it unmanaged?
Did We Practice What We Preach? This piece looks different from the typical management
article for a number of reasons—first, because we knew the difference in itself
would make this piece stand out. Novel structure, graphics and type help us
pique your interest in a novel set of ideas. We're also trying to capture your
attention by scattering multiple "hooks" throughout the pages; the short length
of each self-contained block is designed to encourage you to dive in and sample
the content.
At the same time, we don't simply want to grab all your
attention; we want to help you conserve it, too. Although it's possible to read
only the 600 central words (a little more than 20 percent of this article) and
take away the major messages of the piece, the outtakes linked to the main
argument allow you to allocate your attention judiciously to the topics of most
interest.
Did it work? Let us know! The first 100 people to send an
e-mail commenting on this piece to john.c.beck@accenture.com
will receive a token of our appreciation. (Nothing formal, just pure fun—but
sure to help you get attention in a business meeting!)
John Beck is an associate partner and
senior research fellow at the Accenture Institute for Strategic Change. He is
also a visiting professor at the Anderson School of Management at the
University of California at Los Angeles. Dr. Beck has written extensively on
strategic management, globalization, leadership and organizational behavior. He
is based in Phoenix.
Thomas Davenport, director
of the Accenture Institute for Strategic Change, is a professor in the
Management Information Systems Department at the Boston University Graduate
School of Management. He is a widely published author and a speaker on the
topics of information and knowledge management, reengineering and enterprise
systems.
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