clair015

Most decisions in organisations require information. And we have to actively look for that information. We approach colleagues who have dealt with similar issues, are knowledgeable about the context, the customer or the technology, and try to incorporate their experiences and insights. Nowadays, in our “knowledge economy”, many companies have realised the value of this internal expertise and set up databases, accessible through the firm’s intranet, that we can access and search. But now the problem is – more often than not – there is just so much of it…! We’re swamped with information! How many databases can you access? How many documents can you read?! How many colleagues’ brains and wisdom can you electronically pick?! And this is actually not only a problem for the people looking for information. In many organisations the providers of knowledge get rewarded when others use their stuff, in the form of increased respect in the company, heightened status, and sometimes even in terms of...

Whenever I ask executives how they should make an organisation more entrepreneurial, more customer-focused or simply more profitable they virtually always come back with: “incentivize people”. Reward people for their ideas, their efforts and initiatives and they will deliver. But always, when I ask them, if you would be on a fixed salary, would you still do your best to come up with new ideas, be entrepreneurial and deliver the best value you can for your customers? And then the answer is, invariably, “yes I would, because I don’t do it for the money”. Then people say they like being good at what they do, initiate new things, and deliver customers the best they possibly can. But why do we always assume that other people are motivated – and motivated only – by money, and the way to get them to do stuff is by financially incentivizing them, but we? no we do things out of intrinsic motivation, because we want to do the best we can and contribute to the success of our firm. Is everybody ...

All these articles about what are the characteristics of a good leader or CEO always make me feel a bit sceptical. Sometimes even nauseous. It always strikes me, when I look into the history of a company and analyse its strategic development that they seem to need top people with widely different characteristics at different points in time. Take my favourite little English company; the model train maker Hornby. When they were in trouble about ten years ago, its board appointed a tough guy: Peter Newey. He slashed costs, rigorously cut in their portfolio and fired a bunch of people. He wasn’t the most popular guy on the block (he was wise enough not to live in the company’s home town Margate; he might have ended up with a knife in his back) but – be it in hindsight – people also respected him: it was what the company needed at the time, and it is doubtful they would have survived without him. But then Hornby hired a people guy: Frank Martin. The first thing employees told me about him w...

Recently, an executive – an ex-student – told me about his company. The company has a handful of competitors (it is a local business) highly similar to itself, and they’re all losing money in the current economic climate. Now one competitor – the worst-performing of the lot – has started to accept assignments for a fee below its cost price, just enough to cover its variable costs and at least earn back a tiny bit of its fixed costs. My ex-student asked me, “What can we do?” The answer isn’t easy. But it is of course a rather typical situation to be in. It happens in most industries in trouble; some bloody competitor – often the lousiest one of all – starts to sell below cost price, out of pure desperation. Actually, my ex-student’s company responded in a way that is just as typical: they said, “But their product is inferior; we deliver quality, and customers will always want to pay for that” (and stuck to their comparatively high price). But customers didn’t. And they seldom do. Even i...

My father was a young boy during World War II. He grew up in a small village in the Netherlands just south of the river Maas, which, parallel to two arms of the river Rhine, flows from East to West, cutting the country in the half. In 1944, while the Allied Forces were moving north, approaching the Netherlands from Belgium after having landed in Normandy, the barn behind his home served as a make-shift German army hospital, while their commanders took up headquarters in the family’s living room. When the German soldiers left, the barn filled up with wounded allied soldiers instead, and the German commanders at his dinner table were replaced with their english speaking counterparts. He never told me about what he saw in the barn. He did recall with fondness the sweets and cigarettes that the soldiers used to give him (he was 10 years old) – Germans and Americans alike. Anyway, he used to tell me about the operations that the allied forces conducted to get across the big rivers, trying t...