One often tends to separate business life and philosophies from ones personal life, leading us to live life in what we believe to be separate silos. But are there really separate silos in the lives we lead? As I was thinking about this I wandered in and out of the personal and the professional realm.
I was with a personal friend DY , who was lamenting the sudden changes in his life caused by the illness of his brother who is suffering from a nervous system disorder. He said that his life was enveloped in sadness to see his brother who was very vibrant and independent reduced to needing assistance for even the simplest of tasks. The thing that really made me think was when he said that his life was paralysed by the pain he felt for his brother, and that he could not visit his brother since it pained him terribly.
Knowing DY for a long time, I also knew that he was a grandfather of a beautiful one year old; he has a son who is rising his way up the world rankings in tennis, has a wonderful family. And, he is a successful entrepreneur. Yet he felt paralysed. And in the bargain, his grand child was not getting to know a really wonderful man, he was increasingly being uninvolved in his sons life, and he was unable to be supportive to his ailing brother. In his quest to find meaning in his life, DY has forgotten to enjoy the journey of life.
In professional life too, people often get focused on goals, and forget that the journey needs to be cherished, with a lot of lessons to be learnt along the way. As the world faces serious economic crises, the successful organizations are the ones that can enjoy the journey. What I mean by this is that organizations that get paralysed by fear of failure will not succeed. Scare mongering in an organization is typically the tool of the conniving or the stupid.
This is the time to invest in your competencies and core areas of the organization. This is the time to fight the desire for too much control by a few individuals and organize the company into smaller blocks with more leaders who are closer to the core of the business. This approach allows many different experiments and levels of risk to be taken at an atomized level, while ensuring no single block or atom can bring the company down if a wrong approach is taken.
Unfortunately in many companies the effort of tackling a recession gets hijacked by support functions that do not cater directly to customer, product strategy, or technology. As groups in companies directly involved with revenue generation, product development and product and market strategy get busy in tackling the challenge of growth from the front lines of the business, support groups with best intentions start driving what they believe is efficiency. Hence the importance of an effective executive who understands the business and is not preoccupied by any one or two functions of the business is important to ensure that the appropriate balance exists. Some examples of good intentions leading to decisions those are bad for business;
1. A large consumer and health care company decided to cut costs via consolidating IT infrastructure and applications for the more than 12 business units they have in a centralized operation. The great intention that drove this action was to avoid duplication of roles like business analysts and programmers. And to negotiate best prices with service providers to the world wide facilities. Very good intentions, however the results to the business were negative.
The support managers for the infrastructure group optimized on “cost” alone, and were accountable only to "saving cost". This resulted in choosing a service provider that had bad coverage in some of the fastest growing geographies and the business managers had to deal with the lost opportunity cost, with poor connectivity for over 12 weeks. While the support group was successful, the business suffered.
The decision to centralize the applications group resulted in the decision being made by the support managers that all the SAP applications would be standardized uniformly for all the bsuiness units to manage upgrades and SW maintenance more cost effectively. Again great intentions, but the impact on the business was negative. When a lot of the back office order taking and supplier related software was standardized for a business that deals with customers and suppliers from as varied a background as soaps, and sanitary napkins to perishable edible products to pharmaceuticals, the standardized ordering and inventory control application caused more people to be hired in the warehouses and distribution centres than was previously required, but the support team with the centralized software considered the implementation a success. The problem gets accentuatedd when the players and the score keepers are the same people.
2. The CFO of a successful technology company decided that the best strategy to grow was to change the compensation system of the sales team, and convinced the sales leadership that it was a good idea. As an experiment the company started in one of the geographies to give a large additional bonus for every percentage point of revenue inachieved above the 5 year CAGR in that g territory. The initial results were great the sales team in the particular geography was doing well. However, a year later, looking into the details, it was found that 82% of the growth over the CAGR came from contracts negotiated with existing global customers to buy from the said geography. This resulted in broken relationships with customers and internal organizations of the company. The CFO actually announced the success of this experiment, and suggested worldwide change in compensation schemes. Fortunately people closer to the core of the business took the lead in understanding the dynamics and had the final say .
The examples of good intentions with bad results are many. A bad economy is the time to differentiate your organization and your skill sets from the rest. This is the time to enjoy the journey, know that there are no shortcuts and grow personally and in business by providing value to your customers, your organization and to your personal life. Hopefully DY will learn to provide the tremendous value he can deliver to his family.
1 comment:
I work for a leading electronics components company with plants and R&D centers around the world. Our director of Quality insisted that all the plants follow a particular step in the process. That step was purposely modified for our plant in SE Asia and S. America by the local team because the original process did not suit the local environmental conditions and caused the products to have issues . With best intentions, the quality director insisted that there can be no change in process in the world wide process. he also pointed out the cost increase caused by the modification. So we went ahead with the new directive and It resulted in a $3.8M recall of the products. The quality director left and is a senior person in another company and were left to clean out the mess!
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