G. Michael Maddock and Raphael Louis Vitón on “The Brilliant Naysayer:”
Most every company has a Harold (or Harriet). Typically he has been with the company for 20-plus years. He knows more about industry norms, the company’s intellectual property, inter-office politics, and the CEO’s family than anyone in the building.
This is good stuff. I like to say that managing a project partnership like this is often times more diplomacy than anything else.
You must fight fire with fire. If you bring in Harold’s peers from parallel industries, they can share with him emerging technologies, new techniques, new discoveries, and new ways of looking at old challenges.
What’s a parallel industry? One that does the same thing you do but is no way competitive. Here’s an example. You’re in lawn care? You are offering products that protect and restore healthy grass. What companies offer similar benefits—but for different things? Makers of furniture polish and skin-care products. You invite experts from those fields who are just as technically qualified as Harold to help you.
We’ve done that through expert roundtables, lectures, field trips, and online techniques such as Webinars and virtual roundtables. The results have been nothing short of stunning. You might expect Harold to be offended or feel challenged by the import of outside expertise, but our experience has been that these techniques are invigorating and liberating for him. One of our Harolds left an expert roundtable with 27 pages of notes. Harold doesn’t feel threatened because these experts aren’t directly in his field.
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