One thought that keeps turning up again and again in reading about businesses and individuals alike is the need to recognize and compensate for weaknesses. Anyone who has read various of the excellent books on this subject coming out of the Gallup organization (Soar With Your Strengths; First, Break All the Rules; etc.) will know what I am talking about.

As Peter Drucker noted in The Effective Executive (Chs. 3-4), managers must capitalize on an individual’s strengths in order to make him productive. Drucker goes so far as to declare that “Organization is the specific instrument to make human strengths redound to performance while human weakness is neutralized and largely rendered harmless.” (Ch. 4, p. 75)

In other words, as Drucker clarified and the Gallup books have backed up with extensive studies of top performers, part of the essence of management is using strengths to advantage while compensating for weaknesses. This practice of compensating for weaknesses applies at a lot of different levels, and the need to do so persists over time, yet I keep running across examples of this having been forgotten.

Perhaps the latest example is Dell Computer. Computer Reseller News had a good cover story on Dell last week, highlighting the serious service and quality problems that seem to be plaguing the vendor. Never well-liked at CRN, especially when Dell would run down the role of value-added resellers and the channel, these quality problems are certainly not news to CRN readers. Yet it seemed to take Dell management a long time to get the message.

What makes the situation interesting is this article notes how many buyers are now aware of the problems and taking their business elsewhere. Since this has been going on for some time now, and months have passed since the DellHell fuss, I can’t help wondering why Dell is only finally starting to make some changes.

Back when people ridiculed the idea of selling PCs direct, the argument was that Dell was asking the buyer to trust it an awful lot to buy sight unseen and without a local dealer available for service. Back then, it was clear where Dell’s weakness was - without a local presence they needed some way to demonstrate to the buyer that they would be there for them, both at the time of sale with initial quality and support and later for service.

In other words, perceived trustworthiness was Dell’s weak spot, and a good reputation was key to compensating for it. Back then PCs cost quite a bit more, which cut both ways since there was more money to be saved, but also more risked on a relatively unknown vendor. In Direct From Dell, Michael Dell observed (p. 24), “One of the biggest barriers to selling direct was that many potential customers had a perfectly understandable fear of shelling out $4,000 to a company they’d never heard of without a physical store … Quality was another big differentiator. … So we dedicated more resources toward designing PCs that were compatible with IBM’s and had the highest-quality components.”

The point I’m trying to make here is that every person, every business, every product has weaknesses, and we must always keep these in mind and watch them closely, the way North Korea watches the DMZ or NATO watched the Fulda Gap (or Europe today ought to be watching demographics). Somewhere along the way Dell obviously stopped watching their weak point and now they are paying for it.

Another example from the area of technology is the PDA. Interest in PDAs is supposedly drying up, as cell phones become more capable. I don’t buy it. The real problem is that Palm, the prior leader in the field, has lost sight of the product’s natural weaknesses.

Back when Palm was introducing the first viable PDAs, it was clear that the small screen and lack of keyboard were serious drawbacks. To compensate for the lack of screen real estate, Palm made a simple operating system and easy-to-use applications that required a minimum number of taps to do something. Unlike Apple’s Newton, Palm used Graffiti handwriting recognition that was much more reliable.

Somewhere along the way Palm, while spawning Handspring and spinning off PalmSource and then gobbling up Handspring, lost sight of these weaknesses. They were slow to improve screen quality, and keyboards have been put on only a few of their models. In the meantime Blackberry, which put a priority on a usable keyboard, has taken much of their market. Even the relatively simple Sidekick, with a wider screen and a keyboard, has done well.

The cameras and other stuff Palm has put in their PDAs are nice, I guess, but there’s been little progress on addressing the weaknesses of the form factor. Even though screens have improved, most still only show the same dozen lines as the early ones. At the same time, quality of Palm’s PDAs, especially the Zire line, has really declined, whereas before that was a strong point.

To sum up, whenever someone’s in charge of something, it’s key that they determine where the weaknesses are and apply some generosity in those areas. The weaknesses must be identified, and then a commitment made to apply substantial, ongoing resources to compensating for that weakness and bringing it up to at least an adequate level. Once accomplished, a manager must never presume that things are fine, but always keep clear in their mind where those weak spots are, and keep watching to catch problems early when they arise.