Business Chameleon

This book amalgamates theory and practice into short thought-provoking stories. In principle, you can start reading the book at any point, and you can put it down whenever you like. One story takes only a few minutes, so you can finish it whatever important and urgent tasks await you according to your planner. And if, under the impact of reading the stories or due to some oddity of life, an idea worth noting down occurs to the reader, he can do so on the Pro memoria pages. This way the book will become an ever-expanding storehouse of useful experiences. 

Story : How much is the strategy worth?

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I cannot say that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was my favorite reading; on the contrary, when I first came across it at the age of eight I didn’t even read it through – I did not understand it and I was bored by it. Nonetheless, I will now quote from it, because I myself could not put what I want to say more eloquently: 

“Alice stood at a crossroad in Wonderland. Startled by seeing the Cheshire Cat sitting on a bough of a tree a few yards off, and she asked it: ‘Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’ ‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to’, said the Cat. ‘I don’t much care where’, said Alice. ‘Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,’ said the Cat.”

Are strategy and objectives important for a company? The answer, the essence, could not be summed up better than acknowledging what the Cheshire Cat said. If you know where you want to get to, it is not irrelevant at all which direction you should go, or what to do and how to do things to reach your destination.

The bigger a company, the more energy it allocates to the development of various charters, codes and strategies – I have the impression that the big ones maybe more than is necessary, and the small ones less than might be required. However, the Cheshire Cat’s retort is quite clear. You have to know the answer to the question of where you want to get to.

If you have no goal, you can go any way; yet if you do, this will show you the right direction, in the same way as a lighthouse guides a ship. In the context of globalization and intensifying market competition, it is even better if each and every employee knows/is aware of the goal. If such objectives can be made the desired personal goals of all individuals concerned, too, this is guarantee enough for the common efforts being made to attain the objectives.

Express the objectives in an understandable way and make them accessible to all. Make your message short, concise and comprehensible. The employees should know where the “ship” that they are on is heading. They have to know how to make decisions, as appropriate, to promote the effective and efficient activities of their company. And if this is achieved, make recognition a lasting experience, in acknowledgement of the “fun” of team work; if it is not achieved, there will be no experience of feelings of shared happiness over the company’s successes, either.

It is important to make it known to both employees and business partners, or even the broad strata of society, why the company was formed, what long-term objectives it has set itself and what values it has opted for. It is not sufficient solely to indicate the goal – the desire for it and the joys associated with it should also be awakened. Let it be a positive memory to all if objectives are met. If they are motivating, if people adopt them and the experience of shared success after a successful period of time warms their heart, it is only then that they can be expected to undertake any extra work (e.g. voluntary overtime, for example, a call to a customer outside business hours if a problem occurs, or collaboration over the weekend to help each other out), which will make the company more permanently successful. This is why I chose Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s words: if a leader manages to raise the desire of the crew to attain certain goals, no greater guarantee is needed for setting out on the path of implementation with confidence. You may have a dream – but you have to dream with the team to be certain of success.

In the early 90’s, the managers of a small electronics office equipment company had a dream. The opening up of the economy had created new opportunities both domestically and in neighboring countries. This encouraged them to expand their activities. Since at that time it was possible to acquire massive stocks of second hand office equipment at an incredibly low price, it seemed a good idea to sell those in Romania and in the Ukraine. The company repaired and sold electrical office technology. Their business strategy was built on long-term customer relationships. “We guarantee the operation and, if necessary, the replacement of office equipment. You can concentrate on your core activity”, they told their business partners. The employees were not salesmen but, basically, technical staff and technicians; yet regular client contact and smooth repair services implied very strong bonds, so much so that the company won 99% of the electrical office equipment tenders from its former domestic customers.

As for the foreign markets, the management set only sales objectives. They assumed that the technology that had already been replaced in the West would remain marketable and easy to sell at a sufficiently low price for a long time in the East. However, there were several errors in their calculations. First of all, they did not take into consideration the repair service requirements for the products concerned – which they could not satisfy. The biggest problem, however, was that there was no team abroad that would have accepted and also adopted their objectives and their ideas as regards achieving them. The people they hired were “transit” staff. The export manager of the electrical office equipment company gave up the business model that was a success at home and focused on sales alone in a mostly unknown and transforming market. That is, they had objectives, but not sufficiently elaborate ones, and the team members focused on their own welfare, not on the goals. I think I will not be revealing any secrets if I say that they were only able to sell a single container of goods abroad. The failure had three main causes. The first two have already been mentioned. The third is a strategic error: they failed to note that in a transforming economy everyone is looking for modern products and new ways of doing things. People in the countries lying to the east of Hungary had also had enough of second-hand items that were difficult to operate. This way of thinking determined to a large extent the decisions of the nineties.

It is the task and responsibility of the manager to define smart goals. SMART is also the acronym for the following attributes of the smart goal: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely. And don’t forget that successful implementation also requires a pinch of “longing” in the team as regards accomplishing goals.

    Implementation shows the value of our strategy!