Two seemingly disparate items converged for me this morning:
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My wife and I have been watching the HBO series “The Wire” on DVD
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As we watched The Wire, my wife and I both relished in the business and leadership skills shown by Stringer Bell, the COO of the street drug operation. Not only did he brilliantly develop his logistical coverage based on JIT principals, but he endeavored to move up the supply chain to buy in volume and control his supply contracts, and negotiated exclusive territories. He set up his sales and marketing organization hierarchically, assuring that young employees who had shown potential moved up the ladder and were mentored for leadership. He branded his product (“Buy the Blue Packets!”) so he could command a premium for his goods. Finally, he established an industry consortium of other distributors to work together on common issues.
Of course, it all finally collapsed when his CEO, Avon Barksdale, wanted to return to the old ways of doing things, and conflict arose. CEO trumps COO, every time. He was removed from his position, however, in a way that is not too common in today’s legal enterprises…
The BBC article profiling the Prison Entrepreneurship Program (PIP) moves the fiction of The Wire into reality. "They don't all understand risk management as well as they should because they all got busted when they came to prison, but when it comes to execution and marketing - they get it,” comments Catherine Rohr, founder of the program. "It wasn't just their potential, it was their proven abilities", she says.
Likewise, think about The Sopranos as a company, and you see some cracks in Tony Soprano’s management abilities. He didn’t delegate very well, and certainly let friendships influence his candidate selection…
Whether we as business managers realize it or not, we often notice common business practices when we watch movies and episodic series on television. At first, I thought it was done to appeal to a broader demographic, but now, I realize that successful crime enterprises are in fact, just businesses when you come right down to it. True, they have some interesting challenges that we don’t have to deal with (murder and mayhem), but generally, the successful ones follow the same business principals we do.
The only separation is ethics…and with what we are hearing from Wall Street and businesses today, I wonder how big that chasm actually is…
“Leadership is like a haircut: If you look like you just got one, it wasn’t a good one.”
--- Anonymous