ah Resentment

How To Kill A Company Posted (admin) in Blather on May-6-2009

When people get laid off from a talent driven Company, Management must believe people walk out the door, lay down and die. While that would be convenient, what actually happens is the skills stay in the market doing exactly what they did before, servicing the same clients with (more than likely) higher efficiency and less cost. I’ve seen it dozens of times. Talent gets put on the street and next thing you know, there are fewer clients coming to the Company they got laid off from. For most of these skilled individuals, they used to have a job. Now, they have a mission.   Their mission is to fuel a death spiral brought on by short sighted Management whose singular goal is to keep the balance sheet positive. There’s nothing wrong with cutting fat, but you have to do it right. The first rule of business, especially in an entrepreneurial startup, is to do good work. Profit is a side effect of doing good work. As a startup grows, financial controllers who enter the scene later don’t see the “good work” side of the balance sheet. The P&L statement is a monolithic entity subject to being manipulated to keep the number on the bottom black. What suffers is the soul of how good work built the company and the absence of that understanding will eventually start the spiral.   When a business is unable to capture enough work to remain profitable, what should happen is Management ought to engage itself in deep, honest introspection. What are we doing wrong? Why are we encouraging our clients to go elsewhere? What is so inefficient in our process that we can’t lower our costs? Are we charging clients for our inability to work efficiently hoping they won’t figure that out? Are we milking obsolete processes instead of replacing them? Are there internal forces acting upon their own agendas compromising the future of our business? Is demand for the general business we’re in declining or are we just not doing the work to remain relevant?   If your Company’s leadership has the hubris to believe “we can do no wrong”, bringing any of these questions to the table is a big mistake. No leadership wants to hear anyone saying “Turn the fucking wheel, there’s an iceberg ahead!” If you’ve got egos to contend with, all they’ve heard is that you’ve just called them idiots. That will never fly and they won’t even look for the iceberg. If anything, you’ll get blamed for placing the iceberg there. They’ll brand you as “negative” and advertise to the rest of the staff that listening to this nonsense will lead to frowns from above. When the axe falls, the squeaky wheel will get replaced. I maintain thatnot listening to this nonsense will lead to financial collapse and many other people losing jobs needlessly.   If a Company puts financial people in charge of operations, they had better be really smart and have the ability to see beyond the spreadsheet. Many cannot. Excel is probably the most dangerous tool in business today. Upper management needs to have intangible matters tracked and quantified, which is the function of a financial analyst presenting data. All it takes to kill a Company is an aggressive middle manager without knowledge of what the Company actually does sitting behind a spreadsheet, particularly if they have personal visions of grandeur. The numbers conjured up by this myopic twit lead to uninformed decisions, ignoring warnings from others with years of experience. When the method of making things look more positive results in “oh, here’s a big number to eliminate”… and trusting that things will take care of themselves is a bad idea. As long as upper management trusts this individual, blinding stupidity may follow - with more layoffs of talent instead of deep introspection. Oh, things will take care of themselves alright.   Here are some tips for staying ahead of the game, no matter if you’re talent or a Company trying to stay in business: Reinvent yourself all the time. Your most intense competition should be your next great idea. Check yourself on whether you’d buy your own services and apply that to your clients’ way of thinking. Keep up with technical changes. Old, comfortable ways of doing things become artificial expense. Never fall in love with a Company or Technology. They won’t love you back. Always look for “A Better Way”. If you don’t, someone else will.

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For my first entry,

I'd like to establish the pronunciation of Henninger.

This is something that plagues me EVERYDAY and I never say anything, for fear of coming across as a brat.  It's Henn-ing- ER.  Like singer. No G pronounced. no grr, no gher,  not Henn-Na-gher, just a simple, ING (like sing) and the err.

Got it?