200 Leading with NLP
fail-safe. It is designed so that if it does go wrong the damage
is minimised and localized; it is designed to be safe-fail.
A balance of freedom and order means giving people re-
sponsibility for their work and not trying to control them or
making rules to cover every eventuality. A manager who
makes a lot of easy decisions every day about what people
should do is doing too much controlling. The more com-
mand and control, the less possibility of inspiring leadership.
The edge of chaos is where the wholeorganization needs to
be, so some parts of the business may be more structured
than others. For example, the accounts department will need
more structure than marketing, manufacturing more than
research and development, yet the totals will balance overall.
I saw a very interesting piece about some ongoing re-
search that seems to validate these ideas. Eliot Maltz,
Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of South-
ern California, and Ajay Kohli, Professor of Marketing at the
University of Texas,^4 carried out a study of 788 managers
from manufacturing, research and development and finance
departments in 265 high-technology companies. They
looked at how well the marketing departments were able to
communicate their ideas to other departments. The number
of contacts was crucial. When the marketing managers had
fewer than 10 contacts a week, their information was not
used well by the other departments, and the marketing man-
agers did not understand how to give the right sort of
information at the right time and in the right way. Too few
contacts did not communicate the information in the best
way. So were more contacts better? Yes – but only up to a
point. Results were good from 10 to 25 contacts a week, then
the effect levelled off. The research also showed that if the
marketing managers communicated with their colleagues in
other departments more than 40 times a week they ran the
risk of having their work undervalued and subsequently
ignored. Too much communication is just as bad as too lit-
tle. The research also found that 50 per cent of the
non-marketing managers felt that they had too little infor-
mation from their marketing colleagues and only 5 per cent