In a post last week, we quoted Jim Rohn who said, “You can have more – if you become more.” Jim was surely speaking about personal growth, but we equated it to OSS needing to become more too, especially by looking beyond the walls of operations.
Your first thoughts may be, “Ohh, good idea, I’d love to get my hands on some of the CMO’s budget to invest in my OSS because I’ve already allocated all of the OSS budget (to operational imperatives no doubt).”
We all talk about getting more budget to do bigger and better things with our OSS. But apart from small windows during capital allocation cycles, “more budget” is rarely an option. Sooooo, I’d like to run a thought experiment past you today.
Rather than thinking of budget as CAPEX, what if we think of the existing (OPEX) budget as a “draw-down of utilisation” bucket? The question we have to ask is whether we are drawing down on the right stuff. If we’re drawing down to deliver on more operational initiatives, are we effectively pushing towards an asymptote? If we were to draw down to deliver something outside the (operations) box, are we increasing our chances of “becoming more?”
I equate it to “the developer development analogy.” Let’s say a developer is already proficient at 10 programming languages. If he/she allocates their yearly development budget on learning another programming language (number 11), are they really going to become a much better coder? What if instead, they chose to invest in an adjacency like user experience design or leadership or entrepreneurship, etc? Is that more likely to trigger a leap-frogging S-curve rather than asymptotic result from their investment?
And, if we become more (ie our OSS is delivering more value outside the ops box), we can have more (ie investment coming in from benefiting business units). It’s tied to the law of reciprocity (which hopefully exists in your organisation rather than the law of scavenging other people’s cash).
This is clearly a contrarian and idealistic concept, so I’d love to hear whether you think it could be workable in your organisation.
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