The big management lessons from the SVO's implosion
What to learn from the SVO's collapse under charges of racist campaign advertising? Opp Now co-founder and ex-SVO PAC member Christopher Escher takes a look at how bad business practices may have contributed to the debacle.
by Christopher Escher
* Don't centralize too much power at the top--empower leaders and managers all across your organization.
* Don't let a small clique speak for the whole company--get broad input from all the stakeholders on your team.
These are basic modern management nostrums, the sort of thing you read in every popular business book. But as we have witnessed from last week's faceplant at the SVO, not everybody got the memo.
I offer this as someone who served as a trustee at the SVO PAC from 2016 to 2018. I resigned in despair at what I perceived to be the systemic lack of professional management practices at the organization, especially when it came to outbound advertising and marketing material (full disclosure: I spent 20 years in local high tech marketing and communications}. Last week's (purportedly accidental) posting of race-baiting photos on their website sadly validated my concerns: it's clear that the SVO continues to be inexcusably sloppy in how it goes about creating and disseminating its campaign material. And that sloppiness increased the risk--or perhaps made inevitable--that a process mistake would go unchecked, and widespread (and legitimate) public disillusionment and criticism would follow.
So let me offer the new management and board at the SVO a couple of quick--and relatively easy--fixes to the structural problems that landed them in these deep waters.
1.) Establish a creative review process that's serious, professional, and deeply concerned with your brand's values. When I was at the SVO, as a PAC trustee, we were not allowed to influence nor approve the campaign material for which we raised money. A small coterie of staffers and mysterious out of town consultants controlled everything. We did not see the material until it went public. And when that team ended up creating material that offended or was inaccurate, the SVO would offer squirrelly apologies, move onto the next campaign., and the PAC would take the heat. Solution: create a wide-ranging, formal review process, in which stakeholders from different parts of the SVO manage the whole process of material creation, from first creative brief, through treatment iterations, and final approvals.
2. Limit the powers of the office of the CEO. Nonprofits and other organizations with lots of volunteer contributors often run into this problem: paid staff thinks they run the show, stiff-arm ideas from trustees, and create a CEO or Executive Director with sweeping, founder-like powers. It's an upside down management model, as these organizations should see the expertise and energy of their volunteer board members as an asset, not an annoyance. When I was at the SVO, the executive committee even proposed a Code of Conduct resolution demanding that trustees pledge to not intrude upon staff work with ideas and recommendations.
We have seen, sadly, what happens when staff is freed from such interference.
Solution: actively engage trustees and volunteers into positions of formal consultants for the lines of business, treating them as members of the team with clearly defined roles and responsibilities.
A respected chamber of commerce is vital to Silicon Valley's business and political climate. The SVO failed to embody basic business practices in how it ran its political campaign activities, and is now reaping the whirlwind. Let's hope the new, chastened SVO will be a model for professional business communication, not a laughingstock.
Christopher Escher is a co-founder of Opportunity Now, an educational website focused on examining free market solutions to Silicon Valley policy issues.
Follow Opporutnity Now on Twitter @svopportunity.