John Linton .....not as useful as they might once have been.
We have a week to complete the planning for the remainder of this financial year but we made little/no progress over the past seven days. In fact because of the involvement of other people this year we are falling further behind because of the need to wait endlessly for people new to the process to actually grasp that they have to do real work rather than present thoughtless and meaningless 'ideas' that have zero cogency and less research. Worse is their tendency to criticise well thought out concepts and plans based on their own non-research and therefore failure to understand that future plans can't be based on 'the past' except in the most general senses.
It was always going to be this way as Exetel's needs for more involvement from more people if the future of the company, small as it is, was to be entrusted to more of its employees which is a necessary path to be taken if Exetel is to continue to develop. Sadly that brave initiative is going to take longer than initially estimated. Which highlights the problem that companies of the awkward size of Exetel always confront if they wish to grow beyond the bounds of their founders ideas, and possibly more importantly, ideals. I mention ideals, not in any philosophical concept but as a hard core reality that if a commercial entity has objectives other than making as much money as possible then attempting to transfer planning, let alone management, to people who only ever worked for money adds a difficulty that 'normal' companies do not encounter.
I hadn't fully realised this particular difficulty until very recently and having thought about it I am coming to the conclusion that it is going to be a real problem.To find people competent to run a growing business in difficult times is never going to be easy. To find people who are prepared to sacrifice at least some of their personal financial ambitions to participate in a company that doesn't put financial achievement very high on its 'priority list' looks like being impossible - and quite rightly. So the issue becomes how to accommodate these diametrically opposed views? The simplest solution is to abandon the ideals on which the company was 'founded' to accommodate the desires of the people who now comprise the vast majority of the company - and that may well prove to be a way forward....at least for all but a handful of the longer serving people who believe that commercial entities have more responsibilities than simply making as much money as possible....laudable though that ambition may be in simple terms.
The problem this issue raises, in the event that it is a problem at all, is purely for a very few Exetel employees. However those few are very, very important people as they are at the very core of having built Exetel from the beginning and remain essential to the operation of the company today. For the first time it is necessary to consider whether the 2012 Exetel will be a company that they are happy to continue to work with anything like dedication they have delivered, day after day, over the past seven plus years. What would Exetel do if they decided not to do that? Any ten cent personnel management text book will provide simplistic, and totally vacuous, advice on this sort of issue so maybe I need to invest ten cents and solve my problem.
I think it is a far more seriously fundamental issue.....I somehow doubt it has a 'ten cent' answer.
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