An interview with management consultant Lanny Goodman of Management Technologies. Goodman explains how a company should be designed to satisfy its CEO's personal needs.
Face to Face
Forget strategic planning. Your first order in starting a company, says Lanny Goodman, is to design your business to satisfy your needs
Dynamic. Controlling. Masters of their own economic and personal fates; inhabitants of a world shaped to their very own liking by their very own despotic hand. Does that sound like the business owners you know? According to conventional thinking, it's what entrepreneurs typically look like: people who arrange their lives exactly the way they want them, just because they can. But Lanny Goodman of Management Technologies knows better. And, probably, so do you.
Over the course of 25 years Goodman has owned more than a few small businesses himself--working as a jeweler, a sail maker, and a personality profiler--and for the past 15 years he's played consultant to company builders who have discovered what he himself learned all too painfully through his own personal experience: a business is a demanding, heartless thing, and it can steal your life. It can steal your life, that is, if you let it. And how not to let it is what Goodman teaches.
We met Goodman on the conference circuit, where he is one of those rare instructors everybody ends up talking about during breaks around the coffee station--where, not infrequently, CEOs succeed at cornering the man himself for an ardent, on-demand seminar. Even in a crowded hallway, Goodman isn't hard to spot. Now 49, he's six and a half lanky feet tall (give or take), with jar-lid spectacles, a ponytail 12 inches down his back, and a pocket full of his own herbal tea bags for just such impromptu occasions. He's a missionary, so it's not tough getting him to talk.
His management specialty is strategic planning, but what attracts and provokes the business owners who hear him is a single principle, his bedrock belief: "The sole reason for your company to exist is to meet your needs." Your needs. Founders in his audiences react as though they've been slapped. What does he mean?
What Goodman means isn't quite as plain as it sounds. Based on his intuition and his experience--both as a company builder and as a longtime adviser to entrepreneurs--he has concluded that nothing nourishes a company so much as aligning its business aims with its owner's personal ones. And, conversely, that nothing starves a company like keeping those aims at odds. So he proposes a disciplined strategic-planning process that starts with personal strategic planning--something that business owners, he claims, are uniquely positioned to do. Unlike wage earners, business owners can ask-- and get to act on the answers to--four basic questions: What do I need and want out of life? How can my company help me accomplish that? What would such a company look like? And how do we get it to look like that?
Those questions drive the process Goodman leads his CEO clients through, a process usually commencing with two days in Goodman's ochre-and-sage-colored, adobe-walled offices in Albuquerque. Although it's possible to map out an organization's future in a concrete, methodical way, Goodman says that it's the very first--and seemingly most obvious--step that company builders don't get. It is when they master the art of what Goodman calls "creative selfishness" that company builders can get on with the business of building a company. Inc. executive editor Michael Hopkins spoke with Goodman at his offices.
Inc.: You've said that the sole reason for an entrepreneur to own a business is to satisfy his or her own needs. Is that news? Aren't these people already better than most at taking care of their own interests?
Goodman: Absolutely not. They're horrible at it. Listen to what they say even if they do think they have conscious plans and goals: "I want to grow 10% a year." "I want to take the company to the next level." Who cares? Explain to me why that matters. Ask most CEOs for that kind of explanation, and they can't give you one.
Inc.: What do they say?
Goodman: Too often, nothing. By the time a company gets past start-up and establishes that it can survive, most founders are so used to being reactive that it doesn't occur to them to reflect on their own. Conventional wisdom would have us believe that the company has a life of its own and we're all there to serve it. I don't buy that argument, but that's how we're taught. We're taught to be good soldiers--to serve others and sacrifice ourselves. I say poppycock; it's a bad model. When you assume a company has an independent life of its own, you too easily fall into the trap of dedicating yourself to the blind pursuit of sales or market share or some other manifestation of "progress" without ever stopping to ask the question, Why?
Inc.: But in some very concrete and overwhelming ways a business does have a life of its own. There are employees, investors, customers, and a local community that the company is part of--a whole range of people who have a stake in your company and want something from it, which means from you. Doesn't a founder have an obligation to them?
Goodman: Yes, but the founder's first obligation is to himself or herself. Part of what people don't get is that if that obligation isn't satisfied, none of the others can be satisfied, either. Not really. Not over time. But even before considering the consequences for others, what's wrong with thinking about what we get out of the businesses we start? If it's my ball and bat, it's my game. And if I'm not getting my needs met, I'm going to take my ball and bat and I'm going to go home.
Inc.: We've heard CEOs say those very words. You think they don't mean them?
