Tag: Business

There is no divine right of success in business. It used to be that if you got a Chrysler or GM dealership and were moderately competent (okay, even moderately incompetent) you could pretty much guarantee a nice living. It used be that lawyers and CPA’s at big firms didn’t get laid off. It used to be that becoming a doctor would guarantee success if you didn’t screw up too often. If litigation hasn’t killed that idea, universal health care will. It used to be that was hard to lose money owning the sole newspaper in a major city. Phone companies and yellow pages yellow pages have also joined the list of slow death industries.

It seems like the mean time between unstoppable and out of the game is getting smaller. It took a long time for newspapers and phone companies to be irrelevant but MySpace has already rocketed, peaked higher than the value of a slew of newspapers and is sliding down the chute toward irrelevance. ebay managed to kill newspaper classifieds (with help from Craig’s List), put a dent in phone companies with Skype and is now hitting big bumps. Don’t be surprised to see ebay slowly slip from the from the average person’s radar pretty fast.

There is no divine right of success in business. It takes constant creativity and flexibility. Now more than ever complacency will kill a business. Fast. Andy Grove was right. Only the paranoid survive.

Several of us recently were lamenting the replacement of confrontation with generic communication. Specifically, we were discussing those situations where people deal with an individual issue by addressing the group. For example, when a passenger boards an airplane with their identification in hand, I’ve seen the gate agent stop the boarding process to make a general announcement to all passengers that they don’t need their ID to board. This isn’t effective communication. It’s a smack down.

Another example is when an employee questions an expense report policy and the response is to simply reissue the policy to the whole company. Don’t insult us, we can read. We’re trying to understand.

Dress codes are another example. Rather than confront an improperly dressed employee, managers reissue the dress code and hope the right person gets the hint. Unfortunately, an awful lot of properly dressed people feel that this is directed toward them and companies end up offending a whole group.

In most cases I attribute this to cowardice. People are unwilling to confront the individual and address the specific issue so they make blanket pronouncements and hope folks think it was targeted at them. Instead, one of two outcomes results. Either the target individual is blissfully unaware that this communication is targeted at them so the rest of the recipients are simply insulted or the individual gets the hint and feels that everyone else knows that they were the target. This gives companies the double whammy of really annoying one individual AND alienating everyone else. Good Job!

Get up off of your behind and go have a conversation for heaven’s sake!