Herdsmen are wise people. The cattle can lack enough grass to keep them healthy but do not worry so much during the dry spell. They get worried when signs of rainfall begin to appear. Reason? Immediately rain falls, it is only cattle that are standing that manage to walk, any other becomes too weak to even stand up. When thunder roars and rain drops begin to hit the dry earth, every herdman is seen rushing to the cattle pen, to help his cattle stand up. Big companies and organizations in the year 2008-2009 were under a litmus test that financial Gurus termed as credit crunch. Many companies reported decreased turnover and where the company could not afford to be in business, sacked its employees without any benefits. It was a great opportunity for companies to determine how prepared their Chief Executive Officers were to provide solutions to problems that their companies got exposed to. Are Chief Executive Officers taking the roles of mentors and moulders into their hands or are they there, to accept company strategies that will just leave the company dead when it finds an obstacle on its path of growth, expansion snd development?
Managing business into the future is like driving perishable goods to the market. Any simple mistake like delay costs loss of revenue to the company, lack of enough money to pay employees, lack of products for the market which makes dealers to source products from other businesses that are able to deliver products regardless of their size and reputation. Chief Executive Officers are drivers of vehicles termed as companies to a destination defined by the company mission statement, value statement and goal statement. As a driver, CEO's cannot know the condition of the road ahead. The road to the market may not be defined and may still be under construction. As employee of the company, the CEO had never found a road under construction in his career and does not have enough fuel to go back and use another road that help him to deliver value to major customer. Who is to blame? The road construction engineer? The CEO for not carrying out analysis on the road to the market? The market for not establishing communication networks before opening into business? The planners of the road for not awarding the tender of road construction to a company that could have completed the road works fast? It is nobody's mistake. It is a revolution that tests preparedness of managers to their tasks.
Do companies prepare for their future management, growth and development? Yes, they do. They plan for tomorrow. Do they plan to fail? No, everything is made to ensure there are no chances of failure. Where is the problem? Lack of focus, lack of control, lack of efficient communication tools. They are prepared to handle any problem that they may face but are not ready to face it! That is a sad blow to corporate image of a company. Managers to Directors and CEO's all say happily, "our systems are functioning withing normal margins to handle anything that may be out to test our disaster readiness or preparedness". Yes, Nobody denies and the evidence proves so. But where are the systems when a problem occurs? Do the protocols and procedures stop being followed when a disaster happens? What is the outcome of the problem? Loss and prove there is no system in order.
Does management lose time to manage its resources? Does company planning have a fictional time dimension? Company management into the future no longer subscribe to any future plan. The management is hard focusing on efforts to prevent past mistakes it made from being repeated in the present. There is actually no competitive advantage that a company can talk about. It is only consumers that have TRUST on the company, not because they like the products but because they have been with the company for long even if they have not been buying products or services from it.
THE BUSINESSES MAY BE MANAGED WELL BUT who will manage them in the future? The team that qualifies to manage the business into the future does not have ability to go beyond where its own mentor advised. If the mentor informed the mentee that the only way to get to a destination of the company is by road, with aim of maximizing profits and minimizing costs, that will be the mentality of the mentee when he or she assumes the office of the mentor. There may be an alternative where the business delivers its products or services without gaining any profit in order to retain that customer which is far against corporate ethics of maximizing profit margins. Unfortunately, the company cannot outsource CEO's, it has to rely on its own crop even if it has the lowest trust in it. It has fought battles to train them and gone extra miles to give them high salaries to reduce staff turnover. Getting a Turn-around-manager for any company is hard. It is risky too to lose the ones that the company has because that may affect its shares and stock prices. Like a family setup, the company values its own crop because, like a child, the company cannot steal human resource.
Its time for companies to have resources directed into the future planning of the business in order to reposition the business to survive during its time of high profits and times of low or negative profit. Careful management of resources like people, money, energy and time will determine which companies will still be in business in the very competitive business climate where the consumer has preferences that companies are trying hard to satisfy. The future of business competitive edge is on knowledge drive as a product of critical thinking skills and not adoption of learned techniques of mediating problems. The business organizations, as far as they try to keep track of their consumer preferences, should understand they are serving a consumer who behaves like a married man. Yesterday, he loved his bride for her hair but today, he has seen another quality in a woman that he desires to have. Tomorrow, he will read yet another incredible quality and will require other men to know and test the value of the quality that he has strategically laid down. Being in business is about chasing the preferences of the customer and predicting what the customer is likely to value in your product or service. Otherwise, as a driver, the road ahead is under construction. If you have no tents to camp, or enough fuel to go back, you will die at this spot waiting for the road to clear.
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