Golden Copy: Walking the Line With the Pied Piper

One of the plot points in the latest season of the HBO comedy series Silicon Valley has the lead characters' start-up, Pied Piper, taken over by a more established and experienced CEO (played by Stephen Tobolowsky, whose name you may not know, but whose face you probably recognize from numerous comedies).

The veteran CEO decides that the company's advanced compression engine, which is computer code and engineering that allows more rapid transmission of greater volumes of content, including streaming video, should be put into a box and sold to industries to add into their server farms, rather than made the basis for an online platform as its designers intended. It turns out that the market for such a platform is far more valuable than the market for an engine sold in a box.

Although the twists and turns that lead to the nerdy protagonists getting their way again and ousting the CEO are played for comedic value rather than drama or documentary, this story arc from Silicon Valley illustrates a point that Ron Lee, chief information and operations officer at MUFG Canada Branch, made at the Toronto Financial Information & Technology Summit this week.

Lee cited a statistic from recent research conducted by McKinsey and the Harvard Business School, that 60–90 percent of strategies fail to execute. "Executives want to understand why projects that were so cut and dried at the beginning get so delayed, get canceled or get beaten by their competitors," he said. "If you use traditional methods such as scorecards and APIs, they usually point to the same handful of culprits: budget, people, systems and culture. But the underlying cause is that the strategy and planning never considered these things in the first place. These are critical mistakes when decision-makers who can't walk the walk decide not to include those who can."

A finer point in the Silicon Valley example is that Tobolowsky's CEO character states that the company stock price would be best served by producing the box product, but it turns out that he doesn't have the knowledge of the market and the best use for the technology that the engineers who are "walking the walk" automatically have.

For C-level data operations executives who are planning data governance and setting up reporting systems to comply with regulation, there is a relevant lesson from Lee's point and the story from the HBO show. Listen to the data managers and technology staff who are "walking the walk" with the users of the data.