“Doing the Right Things” vs. “Doing Things Right” #9...
Two KPIs that can never both be met: the R&D chief wants 50% headcount growth, the finance VP wants fixed costs down 15%. Most managers respond with “doing t...
> TL;DR: The R&D chief demanded 50% headcount growth; the finance VP demanded a 15% cut in fixed costs. The two targets are mathematically incompatible. Most managers' first instinct is “doing things right”: communicate, present data, prove the contradiction, and negotiate the numbers down. But when your bosses have no intention of talking, that road dead-ends. The way out is “doing the right things” — decode the real force behind each number, accept a bounded cost, and aim your energy where it truly matters. Dividing targets is avoiding judgment; decoding is where a manager's value lives. Two Orders, One Deadlock When he was Vice President of Product R&D for the China business unit of a well-known international company, he ran into a deadlock nobody could untie. That year, the division president who oversaw product R&D demanded a 50% increase in team headcount, while the finance VP simultaneously ordered a 15% reduction in fixed costs. Put the two orders side by side and grade-school arithmetic settles it: they are mutually exclusive — adding people necessarily raises fixed cost, and cutting cost necessarily means controlling headcount. This is not a difficulty problem; it is a math problem. Yet each boss delivered his...
