Two conmen sell an emperor a suit that does not exist, and every adult lining the street claps as he walks past wearing nothing. It takes a child to say it. That story plays out in real businesses more often than most founders realise, and this is what it costs.
The emperor’s new clothes problem
The conmen tell the emperor that only a fool cannot see the suit. He cannot see it either, but he is not going to be the one to say so. So he puts it on and walks through town with nothing on, and every adult lining the street claps and tells him how good he looks, because not one of them wants to be the fool.
Then a child says it. He is not wearing anything.
The founder nobody would contradict
An ecommerce company, team of about twenty. The founder was locked in a legal fight with one of his suppliers. It was costing him money, and it was costing him more than money. You could see what it was doing to him, and it was pulling the whole business away from the things that actually mattered.
His team were right behind him. Go get them. You’ve got this. They’re in the wrong and everybody can see it.
Every one of them was clapping at the parade.
So I said the thing nobody on the team was going to say. You are both dug in, this vendor is many times your size, and there is a reasonable middle ground sitting there. Mediate.
He did not take it. He kept fighting, lost the case, lost a lot of money in legal fees, and lost the time and opportunities that money and attention could have bought him instead.
What that year actually cost
Say a business profits two million a year, a rough number just for the maths. Divide that by two thousand working hours and the founder’s time is worth about a thousand dollars an hour.
Now count the hours spent on the fight. The lawyer calls, the documents, the evenings lost to it, the mental space it took up when he could have been thinking about anything else.
That is not a legal bill. That is the most expensive person in the business spending a year on a fight he was told not to have.
Disagree and commit
I disagreed with his call. Once he made it, I committed to it anyway, and supported him through the fight I had told him not to have.
That is not a contradiction. You can tell someone the truth and still back them once they have decided. The job was never to be right. The job was to say it.
What the person running your operations is actually for
Three things, and they get harder as they go.
- The first is simple. They take the cheap work off your desk before you ask for it. Not send me a list. They watch what is eating your week and they move it on their own initiative.
- The second is that they make sure you actually know what is happening in your business. The real numbers, the projects that are moving and the ones that are not. Not a report you will never open, but a rhythm that puts it in front of you without you having to go looking.
- The third is the one almost nobody does. They tell you the truth in private, just the two of you, door shut. Here is where you are hurting the business.
Everybody else on your payroll has a reason not to say that. You sign their pay. You built the thing. Nobody wants to be the fool in the crowd. So the person in that seat has to be willing to be the child in the story.
Telling you does not mean you will listen
This is the part most people get wrong. You might hear it and do the opposite anyway. That is still your call to make.
Their job was never to control what you do with it. Their job is to say it, disagree and commit, and then support you either way.
The test
Think about last month. When did the person running your operations tell you something you did not want to hear? Not a problem they brought you. Not bad news about a client. Something about you.
If you cannot think of one, you have one of two situations. Either they can see it and have decided it is not worth saying to you, or they have stopped looking.
Neither of those is a hiring problem. You are standing in the street in a very expensive outfit, and everybody is clapping.
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