Positive Principles Newsletter
July 2007
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Key Quotes:
“Reality is always
your friend.”
- Dr. Henry Cloud, integrity: the courage to meet
the demands of reality
“It's not hard to find the truth. What is hard is not to run away from it
once you have found it.”
- unknown
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This
month's tip – Seek
Problems.
As a
researcher, Jim had no equal. He could find new formulas and new
applications better than anyone in the industry. He had a great
understanding of the technical aspects of his business.
Because Jim knew technology so well, he decided to start a company
producing products for the market he understood. At first, the company
experienced explosive growth. Jim had a great technical solution to a real
market problem.
As the company grew, Jim hired more people. He grew the company to about
75 employees and $20 million in sales. As the number of people in the
company grew, so did the people problems. Jim didn’t really worry about
these issues. He decided that he would focus on technology so that
customers stayed happy and that he would let the company’s people issues
“work themselves out.”
Eventually, the conflict and miscommunication between people in the
company started to show in declining sales. The Customer service and
Technical service representatives showed poor customer concern, and the
R&D staff seemed to lose interest in developing new products.
Jim knew that he had a problem, so he called in a consultant to help him
sort out the issues. The consultant’s did employee interviews and spent
several weeks observing Jim’s business. Their conclusion: Jim did not know
how to work effectively with people and that he needed to change his
behaviors in order to save the business. Jim fired the consultants. He
then replaced his senior management staff because “the other guy’s just
couldn’t get the job done.”
Two years later, Jim had $16 million in sales. So, he hired a different
group of consultant’s to help him “fix his people.” The consultant’s
concluded that the company’s problems came from “the CEO’s (Jim’s)
inability to work effectively with his staff.” Jim fired the consultants
and again replaced his senior management staff.
Three years later, Jim had $11 million in sales. This time, he eliminated
most of his senior management staff and took over day-to-day operations
himself because “you just can’t find good people to run the company like
you want it run.”
Jim eventually sold the business to a group of investors at about 60% of
the value the company had six years earlier. Overall, Jim profited from
his business, but he lost nearly 40% of what he originally built. In
addition, several teams of talented managers, technicians, and sales
people were hurt personally and financially by Jim’s inability to work
with people.
Jim refused to confront his problem. When the truth of the problem came to
the surface, he buried it, ignored it, and denied it. Jim failed to learn
this principle: problems rarely go away by themselves, but they often get
worse if left unattended.
Problems and their causes can take many forms. Maybe personal behaviors
are causing the problem. Maybe one of the people close to you is causing
the problem. Maybe you need to divert money from income to investment to
address the problem. Maybe customers don’t like your product and you need
to reformulate it. Whatever it is, you have got to confront the reality of
the problem regardless of what it says about you or your company. As a
participant in one of my seminars once said, “You need to find the truth
before the truth finds you.”
Human nature tends to drive us away from problems. Confronting problems,
especially those that point towards us, can be uncomfortable. Confronting
problems might force us to look closely at our personal behaviors, the
systems we created, the products we developed, or the businesses we built.
The challenge is this, by ignoring problems, we:
