John Linton .....how hard can it be?
We have done some of the review work required to begin thinking about what changes need to be made to the current year's financial plan and therefore what changes we need to make to our operations by January 1st 2012. It is a hard slog that requires a lot of thought and some sort of ability to 'read' what, if anything, is changing in the market places in which we operate and in each of our people's desires and abilities to deal positively with those changes - a much more difficult thing to do despite the much closer ability to observe what is happening - assuming you bother to take the time. Changes in the market are not easy to read because even the acutest observer can only see the results of actions taken by competitors well after any changes have been made.
Similarly changes in personnel attitudes towards their jobs and their employer can only be seen by their immediate manager and inexperienced managers seldom have the abilities, or often the inclination, to do that. The quality and dedication of the people employed in any commercial enterprise is always what determines the success or failure of any company. Almost all small companies succeed because of the dedication of the founder(s) of that company and the close knit nature of the working relationships between the early employees and the founder(s) as the company grows. It is inevitable that as any company grows that early dedication to 'group' success is gradually eroded and 'group success' is slowly replaced by personal success/reward which is an entirely different situation which needs entirely different motivations and management. Few small companies ever develop the abilities to grow throw that phase of commercial life.......they never have the extended management capabilities to make the change.
Personally, I have never been able to understand very much at all about the planning processes that ensure the delivery of the optimum results achievable by a diverse group of people in constantly changing markets although I have been directly involved in those processes for almost three decades and observationally involved in them for another. Like any semi intelligent person I can understand that future performance is somewhat directly related to past performance and that all future forecasts have to take in to account the actions and ambitions of current and future competitors and that all future performance will depend on the individual desires and abilities of the people within any group at the various times in the future planning period - but that's about as far as I can go. I understand, better than most, that is not really an adequate level of understanding to actually produce an optimum 'plan'.
So, I always dread these processes which, of necessity, I spend a significant period of my life being involved in. Apart from the huge responsibilities involved, the sheer volume of data that needs to be looked at, and if possible at least partially understood, is massively tiring - especially to an aging brain - or what remains of it. When changes are as constant as they have been for quite a while now i n the communications industry the task of making sense out of what is happening, and therefore what any company should do, sometimes appears to be impossible. I wonder how other people manage to make sense of all the information they need to digest and come up with the ongoing plans they obviously continue to do. There is only one, depressing, conclusion you can reach to that question. However .....
My current conclusions are that Exetel will need to grow at a faster rate than we have achieved, on average, over the past three years and that for that to happen we will need to operate very differently to the way we operate currently. That is the end result of almost two weeks 'thinking' - or more exactly - the latest two weeks of thinking in a chain of such sessions over the past three years. Just how to bring that about is not immediately apparent at the moment, at least to me, but it needs to be 'worked out' over the coming month. Shouldn't be that hard.
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