Keith Jackson died last week. He was universally recognized as the Voice of College Football and announced college football games for over 40 years. According to his obituary in the New York Times (NYT), Robert A. Iger, the chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, said of Jackson “For generations of fans, Keith was college football”. Jackson was “remembered for his love of the game’s pageantry and his Georgia-rooted, country boy flourishes on autumn Saturdays.” He certainly understood breakthrough strategies on the football field.
Jackson, who was the National Sports Media Association’s Sportscaster of the Year five consecutive times, from 1972 to 1976, was partial to his Southern roots in his lingo, pronunciation and enthusiasm for the game. He had a breezy style and he said of it, “Never be afraid to turn a phrase. If you can say something in such a way that’s explanatory, has flavor and people can understand it, try it. If it means quoting Shakespeare or Goethe, do it.’’ His two top remembered phrases were “Whoa, Nellie!” and “‘Dad gummit”. He also “christened the University of Michigan’s cavernous stadium at Ann Arbor “the Big House”; he relished broadcasting the Rose Bowl game, “the granddaddy of ’em all”; and he admired the enormous linemen, who were “the Big Uglies in the trenches.””
Finally, Jackson’s greatest call, came from the greatest college football game of all-time, the 2006 Rose Bowl, when Texas Longhorn Vince Young scored on the game’s final play to bring the National Championship Trophy home to the University of Texas. (See YouTube clip below.)
Throughout the years of his college football game callings, Summer and Winter Olympics, work on ABC’s Wide World of Sports; play-by-play call of the inaugural season of Monday Night Football; myriad of work in pro and college basketball and auto racing, was the humanity. I thought about that golden voice and all that humanity when I read a recent article in the MIT Sloan Management Review, entitled What Sets Breakthrough Strategies Apart, by Teppo Felin and Todd Zenger. In it the article made the case that innovation is a combination of well-crunched numbers and novel yet well-reasoned theories.
The authors are concerned with the over-reliance on big data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) by business leaders to make decisions for them. They believe “Composing valuable strategies requires seeing the world in new and unique ways. It requires asking novel questions that prompt fresh insight. Even the most sophisticated, deep-learning-enhanced computers or algorithms simply cannot generate such an outlook.” The authors succinctly state “In setting strategy, deviation in judgment is a feature, not a bug.” [emphasis in original]
The authors note, “It is tempting to believe that the right evidence and the right analysis will yield the right strategy. But just as customer surveys seldom lead to breakthrough products that capture the imagination of customers and markets, substantive strategy-making requires that we see well beyond the available data.” They cite to Edwin H. Land, founder of the Polaroid Corp., who said, “every significant invention … must be startling, unexpected, and must come into a world that is not prepared for it.” They believe it is “no different for managers seeking to advance valuable new functional strategies — supply chain solutions, product development ideas, or marketing strategies. Paths to substantive value creation emerge from those capable of envisioning a reality that others simply can’t imagine.”
I found this to be particularly useful for any Chief Compliance Officer (CCO) or compliance practitioner. There are basically three steps to the authors process which I believe every CCO who wants to make a strategic change in the way which their organization views compliance must go through. The first is you must think like a scientist, starting with a problem then a theory to solve this problem, most appropriately for a CCO, “a theory of value creation. This theory then becomes their unique perspective and point of view about the opportunity they see.”
As a CCO you will understand there will be inherent resistance, as there is with any new theory. Here, the authors believe, “the path to gaining others’ support and resources depended on selling their theory through a compelling logical narrative.” As a compliance professional, you “will likely face similar resistance in selling your novel theories. But clarity of assumptions, persuasive logic, and persistence are key to breaking through this resistance.”
Further, you will have some key points to bring forward at the next phase of testing your theories. First is that “valuable theories are novel. As discussed above, they are built around novel beliefs and often try to solve previously unrecognized problems. Second, valuable theories are simple and clear. They indicate clearly what problems to solve and experiments to run. They also make it easier to spot solutions others have overlooked.” Finally, such theories usually have “broad and general application” meaning they can solve a variety of problems, some of which are not identified at the start of the projects. Yet this is often a key result of any such theory.
Now consider the simple theory that a robust compliance program can save a company money from the cost of an internal investigation, potential enforcement action with attendant fines, penalties and post-settlement costs. My theory is that a robust compliance program makes a company operate more efficiently as financial controls operate as compliance controls. This not only can they prevent fraud but also waste, while bringing greater business efficiencies and, at the end of the day, greater profitability. Fortunately, there is now a body of work by Ethisphere and Trust Across America documenting the above average economic performances of organizations which operate ethically and in compliance with anti-corruption laws such as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) or UK Bribery Act.
As a CCO, you will always have to work on more and greater risks, with less resources than are optimal. I thought of Keith Jackson for the power, passion and persuasion he brought the announcer’s booth as an analogy of what you must do as a compliance practitoiner. You can bring all of those to your role as a CCO and with the framework laid out by Felin and Zinger, you now have a way to think through your approach to innovation. Never forget as a compliance professional, you are only limited by your imagination.
To see a YouTube clip of Keith Jackson’s greatest calls, including Vince Young’s winning touchdown in the 2006 Rose Bowl, click here.
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