Seriously, who is running your business?
No Eyed Deer?
Helping companies to improve their resilience to disruptions is a tremendous privilege and probably ranks amongst the most important and interesting work that anyone could do.
Better yet, with several great books and documentaries now clarifying how CEOs, Banks and Governments destroyed generations of capital and wealth for the majority of the world’s population; it seems like people are beginning to wake up to the reality that resilience is more important than short-term profit (unless it’s you that’s in the position of making several hundred million then retiring to study ethics on a private island!).
On a more depressing note, I had not realised just how badly organised and managed many companies are! I thought some of the government departments were ropey but private companies (including FTSE 100 firms) seem to “wing-it” on a daily basis, relying on the spoils of previous years and high capital barriers to entry to keep them in business from one season to the next. This of course explains why we continually see household name companies in the mire for basic errors of governance and management that you’d get sacked for if you committed them as a junior manager.
Some recent sins that I’ve come across as examples:
1. Not having an organizational diagram (family tree) or structure – how the hell do you expect an organization to function efficiently if people don’t know their own and others’ roles and responsibilities? How on earth can anyone “on-board” quickly into your organization (permanent, interim or consultant) if you can’t show them the basic structure of your organization – or people’s contact details! It beggars belief.
2. Employees not knowing what the purpose of the business is – another basic “schoolboy type” error as Blackadder would say. So many people doing the wrong thing right, caught up in the thick of thin things, attending endless meetings without an objective and buried in email. This lack of focus is costing companies millions in lost profit but also squanders talent and encourages passive resistance to change programmes whenever someone finally tries to improve the business. Worse yet, before or during a crisis, how do you prioritise actions to recover what matters most if you don’t know what that is?
3. Not knowing the numbers – employees (especially directors) not knowing the basic numbers for their area of responsibility. How much profit do you make (gross or net) per hour/day? What are you fixed and variable costs? If you don;t know this then how can you put together a business case for investing in mitigations against loss of revenues? Through charisma alone? Come on – you’re not Barack Obama.
4. Not having induction or continuation training for employees – whether it’s induction training to focus staff on the goal and accelerate leadership transitions to avoid disempowering everyone beneath the new manager or just keeping the workforce up to speed with MS Office so they don’t take five times as long to address an e mail, you’ve got to train and maintain your human capital – if you aren’t doing it, you can be assured that others are. As they say – if you think training is expensive, try not training.
5. Not keeping good records – again, another basic process that is routinely omitted. Whether it’s ICT departments that have no drawings or records against which to reconstruct their networks and systems or HR departments that can’t prove who’s had core safety training, both are going to bite you in the butt when the chips are down. If it isn’t written down, it never happened is the HR mantra. As for ICT, the indispensable man who is the only person that knows how to rebuild the server/system/software will invariably croak or leave for a better offer – or simply take too long to recover your system; taking the firm down with him. And don’t start me on fantasy DR “plans” that have never been tested.
6. Hiring numpties – what is it with organizations that they continually hire people who cannot do the job that they are being paid to do? Despite the ridiculous overload of bureaucracy invented by “HR” and other geniuses to reduce risk and ensure they get the right person, they repeatedly and transparently do not – and then they leave their erroneous hires in place to wreak havoc to cover their cock up. This disease extends to the hiring of interims as well as permanent staff, and starts with a manager that doesn’t know what they want, who refuses to consult the market for help and advice because of “procurement rules”, who is then “helped” by a junior HR monkey to write a job description and person specification that only Jesus could satisfy (which is wrong for the task anyway because neither the client nor advisor knows what they want) with the result that roles are filled with people that tick all the boxes from their one or two week course but can’t organize a booze up in a brewery. The alternative to this of course is the big name hire where the manager defaults to a big four consultancy to cover his/her @ss and pays double the rate as an insurance policy.
7. Missing the opportunity to learn – I’ve lost track of the number of “learning organizations” that trot out the buzz phrase but fail to follow through. Why would you hire an expert and then squander the opportunity to surround them with as many people as you can to suck their brains dry for the entire time they are at your firm? If Mark Knopfler came to stay at my house for the weekend I’d be certain to have sore fingers by stand-easy on Saturday morning and make sure that he had everything he needed to maximise the knowledge transfer in that short time. I’d be making videos, asking questions and inviting all of my mates over for breakfast, lunch and dinner – not putting him in a cleaning cupboard at the end of a corridor and expecting him to get by with a ukulele and five-penny piece for the 15 minute “board meeting” when we’d scheduled time to discuss the guitar masterclass.
I could go on but I think the point is made. Success is rarely an accident. Failing to prioritise, plan and communicate; measure and continuously improve based on experience will guarantee poor results and eventually business failure. The pace at which that happens is accelerating. If you aren’t able to tick off these basic management points as complete then it’s likely that “the first thing you know, will be the last thing you know”.
Step 1 in developing a business continuity management system is “understand your business”. You’ll be surprised how valuable that element is alone – but of course, you probably don’t think you need risk management, disaster recovery or business continuity planning….
@Veterus
24 May 2011
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