What’s the C-Suite reading these days?

C-suite reading stuffI had the dubious pleasure of reading through MASTERING R&D COMPETITIVENESS IN 2030+ by Lea Thomas Smith, Denis Trost, Moritz Krogmann, Janina Pohl, Felix Prem (3dSE Management Consultants), which is a document about how to chart the roiling waters of the business climate of 2025. The following are some stream-of-consciousness notes I took while reading through it.

Being a bit obvious

The presentation is fast out of the gate: The executive summary screams at you to PANIC because YOU ARE MISSING OUT.

No. Stop doing that. FOMO is be resisted and coolly evaluated. You only need to “rethink radically” if you’re doing something wrong. Just because you’re moving, doesn’t mean you’re improving.

The most important thing is to know where you are relative to where you want to be. “focusing specifically on high-impact projects” is kind of a no-brainer. Who “vaguely works on low-impact projects”? With statements like that, you have to be careful not to equate “high-impact” with “only focus on the short-term”.

“Manage your resources in a very efficient manner” is classic “easier said than done” and also incredibly obvious advice.

OMG we should be totally not wasting time! Who knew?!?

Thanks for your deep and wise insight, 3dSE!

Be pragmatic

The hard part is in determining what “wasting time” means.

The statement “speed beats perfection” is quite dangerous, especially when completely unqualified or framed. This is equating “disruption” with “good”. Remember Chesterton’s Fence. Always.

What does speed even mean? I think a much better way of formulating the advice would be to be pragmatic. Pursue perfection but be prepared to temporarily accept intervening milestones. Always be ready to accept an intermediate milestone as ‘final’ if your customers are satisfied.

Always be ready to accept an intermediate milestone as ‘final’ if your customers are satisfied.

Evaluate whether perfecting a “good” product is higher priority than making a different, but just as good product in a different field or for a different purpose. Moving from one milestone to another shouldn’t be considered a foregone conclusion. You have to reevaluate the whole plan to see where resources are best invested. Don’t be fooled by sunken cost, but also be willing to see that you’ve built something useful that is worth improving.

Once you have this mindset, you will automatically design useful milestones that are “basecamps” on the way to a “peak”. You may never get to the peak, but you can train your people to enjoy the journey. Wait, why is that important? Because your want to keep people inspired and engaged with work that has many potential outcomes. We want to harness the power of perfectionism for good. Perfectionists are great! They’re only a problem when you can’t change what they think “perfect” is, … and it’s not what you want it to be.

Know what “good enough” means to you

When a paper like this writes, “companies that fail to drastically shorten…”, then this is consulting speak for “hire us or you’ll be driven out of business by a competitor that did hire us.”

Take a deep breath and think about what a reasonable time-to-market is and whether it can be shortened. This document assumes that companies have the feeling that they’re leaving efficiency and, therefore, profits, on the table. Therefore, when you read it, you’re meant to feel like you’re inadequate.

Instead, think of it as a checklist of practices that you should consider: Are you already doing them? Are you doing them enough? Did you used to need to do them more than you do now? Could you tone it down now?

The document is written as a marketing document for consulting services. It will not admit that the reader might not need 3dSE’s advice. That would be beside—or against—the point.

Just imagine that you’d already read this document and had followed its advice. On a second reading, you’ll still feel like a failure because it doesn’t discuss when you’re good enough. Remember what the point of this document is: to sell 3dSE’s services. And remember what you’re trying to get out of it: benefitting from the sage advice of business-consulting experts who’ve published a free document online to entice you into finding out more. If you treat it as a checklist and determine that your company is already in a position to evaluate its position on the efficiency and effectiveness spectrum, then the document on its own is quite useful.

The death of layout

Just on a side note, what kind of maniac makes a document like this landscape mode? For God’s sake, there are reams of research that say that 70-80 characters is the optimal reading width and this bloody document is twice that. Throw me a bone, man.

Move fast and…?

“fast, autonomous decision-making”: Hmmmm. This is so much easier said than done. You don’t want to be a control freak, but man there’s a lot of wiggle room here. Autonomous decision-making might also just be startup-like, pivoting, diva-driven “planning”.

This document is, so far, kind of an empty buzzword-salad.

Change the mindset

Any use of AI-based tools necessitates a change in mindset, a change in attitude toward testing. Because these tools are capable of producing so much information, we must engender a mindset where people are constantly thinking: is this what I wanted? Is it good enough? How do I know? Which test do I use to verify the output? Am I eyeballing it? If I don’t have a test or I have a weak one, can I justify that? What if I’m wrong? What’s the risk?

We need to increase frustration with inefficiency, engender an affinity for efficiency. Always be annoyed by your process and tools when they “fail” you, instead of just accepting it. People need to change their mindset to be active participants in the configuration of tooling and process. This is not just advice for developers! Everyone should learn to think this way.

A good front-office example that is very salient to working in Switzerland (or any multi-lingual context) is: is the spelling and grammar-checking in your most commonly used tools configured to support your in all languages? Even when you switch languages line-by-line? Did you know that this is already possible? That you should, in fact, demand that this works, as an absolute minimum?

Compliance and security

“Electronics & high-tech devices: Stricter ethical and legal requirements and the pressure to leverage AI technologies, pose challenges in maintaining compliance while integrating new technologies in products or processes.”

I’m honestly not sure how “entrepreneurial culture” is going to address this type of problem. It seems more like it might exacerbate it.

“Ensuring cybersecurity has become a critical challenge as machinery becomes more connected.”

Well, yes.