You’ve no doubt heard that if you don’t get executive buy-in for CRM it’s going to fail. But is executive buy-in really all that important?
Let’s play fill in the blank. Read the following four paragraphs and complete the last sentence. Hint: Use the word “guillotine” in your answer.
There’s a problem the organization identifies as critical — critical enough to change the way things are done and challenge the entrenched interests in the organization, which have contributed, mostly indirectly and not maliciously, to the crisis. A plan to attack the problem is drawn up. It looks like it’ll work if it’s enforced across all departments.
Someone is put in charge of the effort. He runs into opposition from the entrenched interests, and it’s soon clear that he needs the authority of the chief executive in the organization to accomplish reform and save the organization.
The chief executive needs the vision, confidence and sense of urgency of what’s at stake to let it be known that opposition to the reform program will not be tolerated in the organization.
But the chief executive flubs it, saying basically “You do the best you can, but I’m not putting my neck on the line.” Hence reform is not implemented, entrenched interests win the day and, if anything, are more emboldened and inoculated against further attempts at reform, knowing the chief executive isn’t going to go to the mat for it.
The result is that ___________.
Done? Read to the end for the correct answer.
In the 1780s France, which is to say the court of King Louis XVI, identified a critical problem: They needed discipline over their finances.
The man they had in the job of Director-General, Jacques Necker, was probably the most gifted public financier of his day. He drew up a brilliant reform plan, and historians today generally agree that had the reforms been enacted the court’s finances would have had a good shot at regaining equilibrium and maybe the country would have avoided the bloodbath of the 1789 Revolution and subsequent Terror.
For reforms so far-reaching and fundamental Necker needed executive buy-in from the very top, King Louis XVI himself. Simon Schama, in his unequaled Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, writes that Necker, astutely, “had always argued that broad political support was indispensable to the success of any serious reform program.”
Indeed. “The king” is what was meant by “broad political support” in Bourbon France in 1780. Louis XVI needed to publicly back Necker and the reforms with the very power of the throne itself, since the reforms included measures designed to curb the privileges of the nobility and attack the little fiefdoms aristocrats had erected for themselves. Without muscular royal buy-in the reforms were not worth the parchment they were written on.
Let us know when this starts sounding vaguely familiar to how things work in your company.
A Protestant from Geneva, Necker was an outsider in the French Catholic court — he wasn’t even accorded the C-level title “Controller-General” which a man with his duties and powers normally would have been granted, but the slightly lower title “Director-General.”
He implemented some reform on the strength of that, but to really crack the core of the problem — the national budget and tax system — to cut across the departmental boundaries and entrenched interests, he needed de facto royal power.
And it’s not that Louis XVI was opposed to the ends Necker sought to achieve. “I wish to put order and economy in every part of my household,” the king, a man not given to demonstration or histrionics, told the Duc de Coigny one night, “and those who have anything to say against it I will crush like this glass,” throwing a goblet to the floor.
But Louis XVI lacked the vision and the critical sense of just how bad things really were, of the stakes in play, and didn’t buy in. In May 1781, Necker, his reforms frustrated by entrenched interests and a host of enemies made by his budget-cutting, asked the king to make him a member of the royal council for the power he needed to push reform through.
Louis XVI refused. Necker, knowing his was now a hopeless task, resigned, and with his departure went the last hope France had for solving the pain that had given rise to the reform effort — bringing its ruinous finances into line. As Schama writes, “The fiscal exhaustion… which in effect precipitated the French Revolution, was directly attributable not to Necker’s wartime funding of 530 million livres but to the peacetime loans of his successors, and to their wholesale abandonment of his economies.”
So let’s run over that again, shall we?
There’s a problem the organization identifies as critical — critical enough to change the way things are done and challenge the entrenched interests in the organization which have contributed, mostly indirectly and not maliciously, to the crisis. A plan to attack the problem is drawn up. It looks like it’ll work if it’s enforced across all departments.
Someone is put in charge of the effort. He runs into opposition from the entrenched interests, and it’s soon clear that he needs the authority of the chief executive in the organization to accomplish reform and save the organization. The chief executive needs the vision, confidence and sense of urgency of what’s at stake to let it be known that opposition to the reform program will not be tolerated in the organization.
But the chief executive flubs it, saying basically “You do the best you can, but I’m not putting my neck on the line.” Hence reform is not implemented, entrenched interests win the day and, if anything, are more emboldened and inoculated against further attempts at reform, knowing the chief executive isn’t going to go to the mat for it.
The result is that the organization totters on a while longer until rivers of blood flow in the streets and the chief executive, his ministers and associates are carted off in tumbrels to the guillotine where their heads are hacked off for the amusement of the crowd.
Has your organization gotten to that final sentence — yet?
This article originally appeared in the author’s TMC archive.
