This article was written as the closer for 2010 even though we didn’t go to press last week.  It will also serve as the opener for 2011. This is an opportunity to wish all my readers a New Year that brings better things than 2010. I truly appreciate your reading. Writing in itself has no value if there’s nobody reading. Otherwise, it becomes like a beautiful painting which nobody sees.
Let’s review 2010 with snippets of the diverse themes that we’d shared:
On Bransonian Lessons (18th January 2010)
An accident can be the beginning of a business: Not every business is based on a carefully thought out business plan. Branson’s experience with an airline and a music store gives credence to this fact. For the airline, it was accidental. For the music business, it was delving into the unknown.
Recognition and exploitation of opportunities should go hand in hand: Accidents occur to trigger businesses but it is the ability to recognise opportunities and the readiness to grab them that translates an accident into a business venture. Consider what happened with the first Virgin Airways flight. Branson recognised the business opportunity of chartering a plane and exploited it.
On Culture and Environment (8th March 2010)
How can I be at work and have access to haircuts, massages, laundry and carwashes? Well, let’s stay with Google to understand how culture and environment enable the release of creative juices. These are the words of Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt:
“The goal is to strip away everything that gets in our employees’ way. We provide a standard package of fringe benefits, but on top of that are first-class dining facilities, gyms, laundry rooms, massage rooms, haircuts, carwashes, dry cleaning, commuting buses – just about anything a hardworking employee might want. Let’s face it: programmers want to program, they don’t want to do their laundry. So we make it easy for them to do both.”
On Creativity (3rd May 2010)
Man’s response to whatever the disorderly or chaotic is always creativity. Creativity gave us electricity, telephones, automobiles and airplanes. These tools have become integral components of business and life. What would top CEOs do without jets or commercial flights to take them to their destinations? Think about how the telephone has evolved and what is possible today with telephony. Cars have become treasured pieces for taking us from point to point. It’s difficult to even contemplate business without these and other life-transformers. At the heart of their emergence, was the need to address some disorder.
On Clarity of Vision (24th May 2010)
Clarity of vision is imperative for execution success. In fact, you might say the success of strategy implementation begins with the clarity of the vision. It is difficult to generate commitment to a vague destination. An unclear vision implies the absence of what to communicate to those who are supposed to execute. Once the vision communication leaves the recipients with more questions than answers, then execution will suffer. The fact that people cannot commit to what they don’t understand sums up the value of clarity.
On Employee Exits (30th August 2010)
Yet, in situations of stable employment, the periodic search for greener pastures cannot be ruled out. When this occurs, gaps emerge which cannot always readily be filled. Many recruitment managers are measured by the time it takes them to fill vacancies. While they are busy with the search for replacements, knowledge has left the organisation and voids are there to be addressed. Peter Senge states with great validity that “Organisations learn only through people that learn”. This statement also explains the feeling of loss when a valuable employee leaves an organisation. Such an employee has acquired knowledge - some of it directly funded by the employer – and upon leaving, leaves with that knowledge. What has been learnt cannot be extracted from the brain of that employee!
On Quality Voids (18th October 2010)
The first implication of quality voids in the secondary sector is that one event can lead to a serial problem. Being largely process-based, the organisations in this sector face the risk of process failures. These failures are usually localised but affect all other aspects of the process. Take a bottling process as an example. If at the beginning of the process, the wrong ingredients are fed into the chain, then all the other parts of the chain (and in truth) the whole chain are automatically defective Call it a chain reaction. In the course of this series, I’ve mentioned the Toyota recall case, in which one defect became a global serial issue for the company. Recently, BMW - another top name in the automobile industry - retrieved many cars from the market, also as a result of manufacturing defects.
On The Glitzy Disguise (20th December 2010)
The glitz of the corporate world is alluring. The glitz often serves as a massive disguise for the sleaze. Business is an excellent tool for the transformation of humanity and the creation of wealth. Still, it has it dark sides which we will do well to recognize and if possible, avoid.
Happy New Year!