Job myopia (not a vision related term) occurs when employees focus so heavily on the standard goals and practices of their job function that they improve the work of the organization. Harvard Business School professor Ted Levitt coined the term “marketing myopia” about 50 years ago, and while this myopia can certainly apply to the marketing function, functional myopia can also apply to every job within an organization.
One definition of a “professional” is a person who pays more commitment to the standards of his or her profession than to the goals of the organization for which he or she works. And sure, that’s often a good thing. For example, we want our physician to practice good medicine rather than blindly following the guidelines imposed by the HMO. Likewise, we trust a Certified Public Accountant to adhere to the standards of the accounting profession rather than “fixing the books” of a business or client.
But, in many cases, adherence to functional or group standards can adversely affect the overall objectives of the organization. Here are some examples from my own experience along with others I’ve collected over the years from a variety of organizations.
-
In the 1980s, when I worked at Digital Equipment Corporation, I started a project to create a “Network Pre-Sales Manual”. The project is designed to create a loose envelope containing a variety of materials, created by many different groups within the company, that would provide a compendium of one source of information for network sales and pre-sales professionals. The audience for this project was very enthusiastic about the idea and the material was developed in record time – until it was time to produce the material. (Today, we were putting everything online very quickly, but at the time, we had to count on handing out a hard copy.) While I was getting calls every day asking when it would be ready, I could only reply that it was ready “in production”, It took seven months before the first copies were distributed. When I asked the production staff why it was taking so long, they told me the company asked them to go out to bid on every component of the notebook: folders, spine, front cover inserts with title, print and print tab dividers for each section, and assembly and packaging of the notebook. Once they had the lowest bid for each component, they had to wait until each component was produced before assembly and packaging. After completing the task, I asked them to go to any one vendor of their choice and ask how much it would cost that single vendor to do the complete task as well as how long it would take that vendor to complete the task. The answer came back: The vendor could have taken 6 weeks to do the full job and the cost would have been 0.45 cents more than using multiple vendors. The difference of $0.45 per notebook (at a total cost of $43.00 delayed getting this valuable information to the people who need it by 5-1/2 months! This is functional myopia!
-
My company sought to enter into a strategic partnership with another company, a partnership that would greatly benefit both companies. The new product to be developed by joint effort will lead the market. Executives from the two companies were so excited about starting and operating the partnership that they reached agreement on the basic terms very quickly. Then, they handed the project over to their lawyer to put it all down on paper. Lawyers spent five months arguing about insignificant word changes, and by the time they had put every “I” in and skipped every “T”, another competitor had hit them on the market. The CEOs blamed themselves: “We should have known from past experience that lawyers would run these kinds of ‘spitting contests’ because that’s what lawyers do. Instead of just handing it over to lawyers, we should have told them it was done in 30 days” .
-
The metalworker had to order a special ingot to create parts for an airline. The company’s purchasing agent went to their suppliers for the ingot and found that the best price they could get was for blocks of the ingot weighing 500 pounds, so they ordered those blocks. This is what buying agents do – they find the best price for the materials the company needs to purchase. The problem was that the parts to be created with this alloy were too small and the amount of time it took to cut the large blocks and the amount of scrap material created in the process reduced the profit margin for these parts by more than 50% of the margins that would have occurred if they purchased the material in 2-pound blocks (But 2-pound blocks will cost 5% more per pound than 500-pound blocks.)
-
A company’s customer service call center was getting very poor reviews from customers. Complaints pour in every day. “I have three questions. The service representative answered the first question and then hung up.” “Your rep scrambled during the call, and I didn’t understand anything they told me. When I tried to ask for a better explanation, she asked me to read the manual.” The company hired a new call center manager and the first thing the new manager did was provide several days of customer service training. Almost immediately, customers’ response turned around: “I don’t know what you did, but your rep was great and took the time to make sure my issue was resolved.” And the call center staff was even happier: “The training was great. It’s very nice to be able to really help customers with their problems.” The changes continued for about two weeks, until a delegate conducted his annual performance review. “I’m afraid I can’t give you a raise this year,” the manager said to the employee. “I was just reviewing performance stats for the past two weeks. It averaged 5.5 minutes per call, our benchmark is calls answered in less than 3 minutes.” It didn’t take long for word to spread through the call center and for every delegate to go back to old behaviours, they could get calls answered in less than 3 minutes.
In each of these cases, employees were adhering to the standards of their own groups, and in each case, those standards did not always lead to optimal performance for their companies.