Career Corner
Lindborg
Planning Ahead
Apply business strategy concepts to your career path
The quality profession has been
most successful when its work has been
seen as strategic. When TQM became
a strategic imperative for competitive
advantage, for example, celebrity CEOs
became cheerleaders, quality maturity
was measured by more vice presidents for
quality at the corporate table, and academ-
ics such as David Garvin traced quality’s
history from inspection to customer-
focused strategy.
To revisit strategy in a time of greater
uncertainty, I recently interviewed Walter
Kiechel, formerly the editorial director and
senior vice president of Harvard Business
School Publishing, and managing editor of
Fortune. He is the author of The Lords of
Strategy,1 a meticulously researched anal-
ysis of how key figures in consulting and
academia shaped thinking and practices
in business strategy. In my interview with
him, Kiechel shared important insights
and good advice on career strategy.
Henry Lindborg: To what degree
66 QP • www.qualityprogress.com
BY Henry J.
were the “lords of strategy” influ-
enced by the quality movement? How
is it now seen by strategists?
Walter Kiechel: While most of the ear-
ly lords had been trained as engineers—
Bruce Henderson, founder of the Boston
Consulting Group; Fred Gluck, who
brought strategy to McKinsey and Co.;
and Michael Porter, a reknowned Harvard
Business School professor—much of their
early work and thinking really got going in
the late 1960s. A lot of the most important
thinking was pretty well developed by the
early 1980s, when the quality movement
really got cranking. They were aware of
the work of [W. Edwards] Deming and
[Joseph M.] Juran, but they thought of
themselves as concentrated on the micro-
economics of their clients.
In the mainstream until the 1990s, a
lot of the strategy firms didn’t think of
themselves as performing operations man-
agement or consulting to improve factory
efficiency or quality. And the firms that did
weren’t considered top-drawer
thinkers on strategy. These days,
[major] players are doing much
more operations work, and I
think they’re quite willing to
pick up insights from the quality
movement, if still with a bit of
condescension.
I think that mirrors the
practice within a lot of compa-
nies in which the people making
strategy—while intellectually
acknowledging the importance
of quality even as a factor in
successful strategy—still tend
to view quality specialists as just
that—specialists—and not neces-
sarily representing a function that
needs to be at the top management table.
HL: Some of my colleagues have
proposed that the future of quality is
enterprise risk management (ERM).
How do you see ERM fitting into fu-
ture strategic thinking?
WK: Every firm caught up in the global
financial crisis—as well as the strategy
consultants who advised them—seems
to agree they all did a lousy job of risk
management. But while there’s more
appreciation of the need for risk man-
agement—just as there was after 9/11
at many companies—I’m not sure that
many companies have yet found a way to
organize around that need. Some have a
chief risk officer. My impression is that
many of these people come from finance
backgrounds, while others consign it to
functional specialists, such as the folks in
charge of managing supply chains.
HL: With the advent of the ISO
26000 standard on social responsibil-
ity, quality professionals have taken
notice. What priority are strategists
giving to corporate social responsibil-
ity (CSR)?
WK: I think strategists give an occa-
sional tug of the forelock toward CSR, but
mostly they’re concerned with how to de-
velop or maintain competitive advantage
in a world that seems to them increasingly
competitive with new players coming in
from countries far and wide and cutting
prices like crazy. A few companies want to
talk about what they’re doing about CSR,
but I’ve yet to see more than one or two
that publicly talk about giving it priority
over increasing returns to shareholders.
HL: Because you’ve traced the “big
ideas” in strategy, do you have any
advice for those of us trying to under-
stand the value and practicality of new
approaches to business thinking?
WK: I think companies ought to be
scanning all the time for new ideas these
days—just as they should be looking for
new market opportunities—because the
days of lasting competitive advantages, or
being able to thrive by just doing what you
used to do, are gone for most enterprises.
What has happened in the last 20
years is that there seem to be fewer big
ideas in the sense of ideas that apply to
all industries and all companies. Similar
to consulting firms or business school
faculty, ideas have become more industry
or function-specific—the notion of which
I think many quality specialists would find
completely understandable and congenial.
It’s at the frontiers of your own industry or
function that you should be concentrating
your efforts to monitor the traffic in ideas.
HL: What reading materials do you
suggest to someone trying to grasp
strategy?
WK: In strategy + business magazine,
I wrote a piece on seven chapters of
strategic wisdom to introduce the topic.2
A recent book on strategy that has some
powerful insight is Richard Rumelt’s Good
Strategy/Bad Strategy, which provides
3
useful distinctions between the two, plus
some fascinating points of leverage to
think about while forging good strategy.
HL: Many quality professionals
see consulting as a career path when
they’ve retired or been downsized.
What advice can you offer would-be
consultants?
WK: Here are three main pieces of
advice:
1. Think hard about what your distinctive
offering is going to be, what kind of
consulting help you can provide that
learning from lindborg
Henry J. Lindborg has offered career advice to QP readers since 2001. Check
out Lindborg’s previous columns by visiting the Career Corner archive under
the “Departments and Columns” tab at www.qualityprogress.com.
Some of the best strategy
comes from figuring out what
you do well.
others can’t, and how you can sharpen
that offering as much as you can on the
way to retirement.
2. Figure out if there’s a way you can con-
sult part time while still holding your
full-time job—even if it’s just consulting
on a nonprofit basis as a volunteer or as
part of a community activity. If you’re
trying to transition to a new kind of
full-time activity, it really helps to have
tried it out and dipped your toe in the
water before taking the full plunge.
3. The most important asset you can
bring to a new career as a consultant
is a list of clients all lined up and ready
to go. This can be tough to develop
while you’re still working for someone
else, but if you’re above board about it,
particularly with your employer—who
just might want to be a client—there’s
no better launching pad.
HL: Is there a useful approach for
applying strategy to careers that’s
good for personal and organizational
thinking?
WK: Some of the best strategy—per-
sonal and corporate—comes from figuring
out what you do well, your “distinctive
competence” to be highfalutin about it and
then looking for situations in which you
can put that competence to work.
Discovering your special gift is usu-
ally a matter of much trial and error, at
least from what I’ve seen. Very, very few
people know in their teens or 20s what
they’re particularly good at or what they
most enjoy doing that can earn them a liv-
ing. But with any good corporate strategy,
you need to be willing to experiment, try
what might seem to be wild possibilities
and possibly fail without beating yourself
over the head. It’s empiricism—seeing
what actually works—which I would think
would appeal to quality specialists.
HL: Is there anything else you’d
like to add from a career perspective?
WK: Much research indicates that
probably the No. 1 predictor of job satis-
faction is whether you like the people you
work with. I’d add to that: Do you respect
them?
It helps if you can find one mentor—or
a dozen of them—along the way, some
of them with expertise concentrated in a
particular area. If you’re smart about it,
your mentor may be 20 years younger than
you are and of a different gender.
One good test of your progress through
your career, or lack thereof, is asking
yourself at the end of every working day:
“What did I learn today that’s new?” QP
REFERENCES
1. Walter Kiechel, The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellec-
tual History of the New Corporate World, Harvard Business
School Press, 2010.
2. Walter Kiechel, “Seven Chapters of Strategic Wisdom: A
Shortcut to the Big Themes in the Conversation About
Corporate Strategy,” strategy + business, Spring 2010,
Issue 58, Feb. 23, 2010, www.strategy-business.com/
article/10109?gko=70983.
3. Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Differ-
ence and Why it Matters, Crown Business, 2011.
HENRY J. LINDBORG is executive
director and CEO of the National
Institute for Quality Improvement,
which provides consulting in strategic
planning, organizational development
and assessment. He holds a doctor-
ate from the University of Wisconsin-
Madison and teaches in a leadership
and quality graduate program. Lindborg is past chair of
ASQ’s Education Division and of the Education and Training
Board. He also chairs the IEEE-USA’s Career Workforce Policy
Committee.
October 2011 • QP 67