In just about every Cold War-era thriller, there was the ever-looming threat of nuclear annihilation. Mutual assured destruction was no longer a guarantee of peace, because some rogue maniac general has locked himself in a nuclear missile silo with the keys to world destruction in his hands, and a bad encounter with the Mrs. Rogue Maniac General or some such in his head.
In each such movie or novel, the question always arose: “Who’s holding the football?”
What, then, is this football to which they refer? What is so important about this football? It’s not a real football, is it?
No, silly. It’s a briefcase. Usually a regular-looking Samsonite briefcase, only this one was specially armored and boobytrapped and was usually chained to the wrist of the person responsible for it. (Actually, in the classic graphic novel Watchmen Dave Gibbons – the artist – showed this case as being football shaped. And chained to Nixon’s wrist.)
What could be so important that there was such great concern about this silly briefcase? What was its cargo?
Only the secret codes needed to order the launch of America’s nuclear arsenal, that’s all!
Whoa, wouldn’t want to lose track of that, would we?
And neither do you. You do not want to lose track of your football.
Every business has a football. Granted, your football doesn’t contain nuclear launch codes, more than likely (and I apologize for any exclusionary comments, Mr. President). But in terms of your business, if you lose the football, it could spell disaster.
Because the corporate football contains the knowledge needed to run the company – the passwords, the alarm code, the order in which to reboot the server if it crashes, the location of the coffee filters… and of course the understanding of the customers and the products, and… As you can see, there may be several footballs in a company, and they are vitally important.
In many companies, the football isn’t even an external thing such as a briefcase – it’s shaped like a head. The head of the owner, founder, or longest-surviving denizen of the company. For each particular football in a company (and I promise, I will abandon this metaphor soon), there is one person who usually knows everything about that football.
Now, I used to ask “What if that person gets hit by a bus?” but someone told me that’s too negative. That’s true. So now I ask “What if that person wins the lottery?” Either way, that person will no longer be available to you and your company. And with him goes a whole bunch of incredibly important information.
Use outside consultants, and the risk increases – because you KNOW they are going away at some point.
So first and foremost, you have to get things out of people’s heads and onto paper or disk. You need the footballs in your organization to be in physical form. You need to have several copies of this information, and it needs to be secured in the same way a backup is – preferably taken offsite. The information needs to be updated on a regular basis.
And you have to develop your bench.
Never let one person be the only one who has or can get to the information you need to run the business. Make an information handoff meeting a regular occurrence on your calendar. We in the technology world don’t like single points of failure – if that one thing breaks, the whole system goes down. So make sure that the keeper of the knowledge has a backup person. Again, the backup doesn’t need to know all the information, but that person has to know how to obtain the information.
This process – putting information in a secure form at a secure location, and identifying primary and backup individuals to be responsible for that information – is the first part of succession planning. It is a vital element for reducing technology stress – and extends to the rest of business as well.
So who’s got the football? Be able to answer that, and save your world from destruction.
