Boomerang Management

Boomerang Kids are adult children who move back into the family home, usually a sign of a weak economy. I loved Terry Bradshaw parading around nekkid in the Fish Room in Failure to Launch.

So here’s a new term, Boomerang Management, for when a former management team comes back and takes over because the current team isn’t getting the results desired. The beatings will continue until morale improves.

Often these “boomers” still have significant equity tied up in their former venture.

Frequency? I’m seeing better than one a month.

Outcome? Generally worse than existing. Times have changed, most groups have undergone a radical transformation, most of all the environment these organizations operate in has changed forever.

I was working with a group that got thrown back earlier this year. The former CEO came back from a long retirement with a secret sauce – outbound cold call phone solicitation to businesses! Enough of this social web nonsense! This was the core of the organization!

It took five weeks to hire four and fire six. They hadn’t counted on voicemail.

It’s an executive-centric business view, that the economy rotates around a prime mover with sufficient strength, knowledge, and skills. There’s some kind of echo from when the Pope arrested Galileo for saying the Earth orbits around the Sun.

No matter how hard the Pope protested, solar-centric was the only way the math worked.

Your Boomerang Management sightings?

Best Behavior

Jack and I were wasting time talking about how just when you create an overwhelming advantage, the game changes, rendering your advantage obsolete, from dinosaurs to asynchronous warfare. We looked at various leadership behaviors and the philosophies behind them, The Golden Rule, a little Game Theory, even Seth’s Game Theory.

Seems like the farther these theories get from practice, the more complicated they become. I suspect that is so when they don’t work, the inventor can say, “See, you missed paragraph 124, line 5!” as if that means anything.

We agreed that best behavior had to be small enough to be readily understood, easily applicable when we don’t know all of a situation, and communicable and believable by the winners in the organization.

Can’t be harnessed to a fantastic super-belief, has to make sense to the winners you meet.

Can’t be harnessed to a false ideal that doesn’t pay off regularly.

Can’t favor one side over another.

The success of this behavior has to be self evident to most observers.

Here’s our answer: Always behave as if a superior force is coming into play shortly.

When you have a process that works under those circumstances, you have something worth expanding.

Check out Blah, Blah Blog at the Web Managers Roundtable, on August 9, and BlogLab, coming August 16.