You Can Change Other People

CHAPTER 3POWER 1: OWNERSHIP: WHOSE SPREADSHEET IS IT ANYWAY?

Spencer,¹ the CEO of a technology company, was worried. The company's customer growth rate was too low.

So Spencer did some digging and realized that Marketing wasn't producing enough leads. History showed that a certain number of leads would predictably convert into customers. That conversion rate was steady, but the leads had dropped off.

The solution was straightforward: more leads, more customers.

So Spencer started nudging, cajoling, and probing to get better data from Marketing about leads. Weeks later, he still hadn't gotten a straight answer. In exasperation, he asked his Chief Marketing Officer, Octavia, to create a weekly marketing report and have it in his inbox by 10 a.m. each Monday.

When Spencer looked at the first report, his eyes glazed over. He was staring at a complex spreadsheet, complete with pivot tables, a dozen different background colors, and so much data that the key numbers were obscured by hundreds of unimportant ones.

In frustration, Spencer took 30 minutes and simplified the report to show just two columns: goal and performance against the goal. He then emailed it to Octavia, telling her that her report didn't distinguish signal from noise and that she should use his new one from now on.

He figured she'd be happy because the new report took far less time to complete and offered a much clearer picture of how things stand.

Is that how Octavia felt when she received his email?

Sadly and predictably, ...