John Linton .....or like Vince Lombardi quotes are they just tired and discredited 'flim flam' dredged up from the 1970s by light weight "consultants" and other charlatans?
As I 'tidied' up the coming year's business plan yesterday morning I did the 'swot' analysis that various 'outsiders' always think is important (bank's, new major suppliers, governments) but that I have never been able to see any value in. I see no value in a swot partly because Exetel is very small and partly because our business and the marketplaces we address constantly change and would defy any analysis of which I am capable. In any event it took me less than 20 minutes to complete though, for the first time, I did spend the majority of that time on the 'key personnel loss/required' topic. What would we do if X, Y or Z left the company and to get project A,B or C completed on time who would we need to hire. In previous years I have just answered 'none' and 'none' to these questions giving them no thought.
However, I was talking with a business acquaintance late last week who was bemoaning the fact that two of his 'key' senior sales managers had recently left his company to work for his major competitor and he thought that would damage his future sales forecasts. I have not often been involved with such issues, in fact I have only been involved in quite small companies for the majority of my commercial career, and I wasn't able to be either even vaguely sympathetic (I didn't understand the situation) nor could I offer any sensible comment because I couldn't comprehend any set of circumstances where an individual employee could be a loss if they valued another company's opportunities as being of greater value than where they were - obviously someone would make a change if there career opportunities/rewards were greater somewhere else - sort of blindingly obvious I would have thought.
I didn't think any more about it until I read this earlier this morning:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124604332970762289.html
and realised that 'no compete clauses' for key employees are still alive and well in the USA.
The closest I've personally come to such a situation was some years ago, perhaps many years ago would be a better description, when I was involved with building a company in what was then a unique way and built it to a level where it was quite successful. We had several competitors who were multinationals and one company that was Australian. The Australian company obviously thought that at least one aspect of what we were then doing would be beneficial to them and hired a 'personnel agency' to approach people they considered to be our key sales personnel in several capital cities and even some larger country towns to work for them. In the event two people left us (our Brisbane and Melbourne branch managers) who took with them our five, for their day, very detailed operational and sales training manuals which as immediately following events showed were of more interest to the hiring company than the people themselves. It was all a storm in a teacup as it turned out but it seemed to be a big deal at the time.
The two people we 'lost' were immediately replaced by us from other people eager and grateful for the unexpected 'promotion' who subsequently did an even better job in the positions than the people they replaced. Of the two people who were 'head hunted' - one lasted less than 3 months the other lasted around a year with their new employer before the company that 'head hunted' them decided they were better off without them - or perhaps it was the other way round.
I did learn one major lesson from that incident though and have applied it subsequently which is something that the majority of other more sensible people learn much sooner in their business life. That lesson was, obviously, never build any part of your business that is any way reliant or dependent on its ongoing success on any individual person - not because you can't 'trust' individual people but because it's an inevitability that any individual person's growing needs, as time goes on, cannot be guaranteed to be met by any organisation no matter how it grows or what ever changing opportunities it develops.
Another lesson that I didn't have to learn in business (having learned it as most people do during your school days) was that people who do well (immensely well) at one company in a 'senior' position don't always, in fact very seldom, do as well when, for all the right reasons, they move to another company to progress their careers. Obviously some, genuinely talented people do, but most don't for the equally obvious reasons that most people's success in business is a combination of their own knowledge, skills and talents plus the products, pricing, assistance and relationships they are part of within their working environment - none of which 'move' with the person. I suspect the IBM case I cited was more to do with the deep knowledge of IBM's future planning the person had than his undoubtedly multiplicity of other talents though the deception he appears to have practiced to technically void the 'no compete' clause in his contract seems to attribute some less than desirable personal characteristic to him....
....which is my main point....that if people want to leave one commercial company to join another there is nothing that can be done to prevent that occurring and nor should there be....which comes back to my starting point that any commercial entity shouldn't base any aspect of its continuing operations on either people it currently employs or on the basis that anything that is important to its business won't become 'common knowledge' sooner rather than later.
So is Exetel's future planning likely to be impacted by the 'unexpected' loss of one or more of its key personnel? Probably. Do we need new key personnel to make some things happen? Possibly. Are we going to plan for those two eventualities? No - there is no time to do that in any meaningful way. Is this lack of taking the swot topic seriously going to negatively impact Exetel's abilities to meet its FY2010 business targets? I don't know but I have no more time to think about it.
...and that's always going to be the issue with 'swots' - there is no realistic way of sensibly defining the possible problems let alone 'planning the solutions for them'.
I hope nothing really bad happens to us in FY2010 but if it does we'll deal with it as we always have.