Well, I started this blog and I haven't kept up with it. Shame on me. I've got a couple of stories to tell, believe me. I really want to promote this thing as well. I also really want to help other people stay out of bad situations if at all possible. If nothing else, if anyone can learn from my mistakes, then I will have accomplished something. That's the case if even I personally am a little slow in learning from them myself. :)
I just wanted to make a quick post today. You know how we have the phrase "too big to fail"? Go ahead and chuckle to yourself over that because it seems we really only use it after a company or someone else has failed that thought they were "too big to fail". It's kind of like today how whenever we talk about the Titanic it's almost always mentioned that it was deemed an unsinkable ship. I in no way mean to diminish, mock, or be insensitive in any way regarding that tragedy. But it's like the line from the Joe Nichols song The Impossible. "Unsinkable ships sink, unbreakable walls break". In this life we basically have a limited or set number of guarantees. You'll be born, you'll live an indeterminate amount of time, you'll at least be expected to pay your taxes (most of us anyway) and you'll die. Anything else is a crap shoot.
The problem I've noticed today is when companies start to think and act big and forget that they started small. I suppose with companies that have been around forever it's a fairly easy trap to fall into when the founder of the company is either well on in years or long since departed this life. But think about it. A person starts a company and works hard to establish their company as a trustworthy one. They meet a lot of people, shake a lot of hands. They work off of some type of a personal code or an established code regarding good ethical business. The employees they do hire, they stand behind and treat as actual human beings. I'm not naive enough to say or think that it was a perfect world and no one was ever fired or mistreated. But I have to believe that the companies that truly grew and became successful in the long term started off with that mindset. They had to. Even back then, it was a competitive marketplace at least to some degree. I'm sure there were some creative cheats who found a way to game the system at least for a little while. But overall if you wanted to succeed and grow and prosper, you had to be competent sure. But you also had to be honorable. If you weren't, people would take their business elsewhere.
I think companies today need to get back to having at least a bit more compassion, and not only for the feel good soft gooey in the middle reasons. The dynamics of the world and of the workplace are changing, and the companies , managers, and CEO's who stick to the mindset of it being all about the financial capital and budgetary bottom line may be left behind. I agree with Darren Hardy of Success magazine. The competitors for talent and market shares today are not just fellow members of the local chamber of commerce. It's the guy launching his business from his bedroom or his basement, not his board room. It's the woman with a talent and a brain who has a product or service that is in demand that she can produce and market on her time, not doing it for someone else while punching a time clock. Companies used to compete for the best and the brightest people. However, I think today the more they devalue their employees and look at them as numbers and disposable resources, the more they will lose out in the end. I'm not saying that a boy with a dream is going to start a company that puts say Microsoft out of business. But then again, to quote another part of that same Joe Nichols song, "I've learned to never underestimate the impossible".
The moral of the story is this. Managers and leaders of today and tomorrow, as again Darren Hardy mentions, are going to need to be experts in human capital, not just financial capital. They will need to learn how and know how to best utilize their people, to get the most out of them, to be empathetic toward them at times, and to create and instill leadership in others. I'm not a big network marketing fan or guru but the concept is a noble one. Bring people into your organization or group, teach them the business, invest in their personal success so you can help them grow. In so doing, you help your business or company grow and succeed. Companies that follow not that precise model but that general idea will flourish. Companies that have managers, executives, and CEO's holding on to their spot like grim death because they've "earned it" will lag behind at some point.
Success and growth is great. It's a product of our capitalist system, it's the American dream and American way. However, arrogance, rigidness, and even cockiness is deadly. The companies that grow big and let it go to their head are in a precarious position in the future marketplace. The ones who adopt a model of "we're doing it this way because we've also done it this way", it's a 50/50 proposition as to whether or not that will work today. As the saying goes, pride goeth before the fall. Companies that believe and become convinced that they are too big to fail generally are the ones who almost inevitably do.
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