Page 101 - Harvard Business Review, Sep/Oct 2018

if some units have particularly critical or scarce resources, their won’t die. This can happen even after funding has been offi-
load could be far greater. cially cut, because leaders may have their own deep pockets
Political logrolling. Executives tend to be strongly invested of funding and the decision-making power to keep their
in some “signature” projects and may garner resources for initiatives moving forward.
them through implicit agreements with their peers: “I will Unfunded mandates. In the world of politics this term is
support your initiatives if you support mine.” In the world of used when legislatures pass laws that require certain things
legislative politics, this is known as logrolling, a term report- to happen but don’t provide funding for implementation.
edly coined in 1835 by U.S. Congressman Davy Crockett as a Similarly, in business, executive teams often task their organi-
metaphor derived from the old custom of neighbors’ assisting zations with meeting important goals without giving man-
one another with the moving of logs. In organizations it agers and their teams the necessary resources to accomplish
leads to a pileup of promises to fulfill—and projects that just them. In one major acquisition in which we were involved, the

68 HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2018