Dear President, Director-General (PDG), Do you know just how high you have soared? Could it be that you have reached an altitude with a dangerously rarefied atmosphere? Could it be that your tower has become so high and so secluded that you no longer see or hear what is happening on TERRA FIRMA?
When last did you ask yourself the kind of questions that would help you redefine your destination and adjust your inner compass? When last did you listen to anybody, let alone those who say things you don’t like to hear? Possibly there aren’t many of those around. It is definitely more convenient for subordinates and ‘friends’ to say the ‘right’ thing rather that the ‘honest’ thing. People need their jobs, after all, and even more so when the economy is in deep recession. Of course, you have major problems to cope with. After 20 years of war and stagnation, and another 10 years in intensive care, businesses have been trying to wake up from their comas, new ones have been coming to life and growing so rapidly that there is little time to adjust to practical realities, much less to the psychological changes necessary. Still, others have ‘died’ or are now on their ‘deathbeds.’
I know it is not a very flattering picture. Can it get better? It is possible, if you are prepared to take off your rose-tinted glasses, remove your earplugs, and take a walk through the ‘uncomfortable streets of reality.’ Then, after taking everything in, you make the painful decisions, which may be necessary for your corporate survival.
Let us make a rapid review of where we are and actually have been for quite some time:
1. Thinner and thinner profit margins have triggered an exodus of business from Lebanon to other countries in the region where conditions are more conducive to industrial prosperity. Unemployment and poverty is not the best recipe for the growth of any business.
2. Obsolete rules, regulations and systems are no longer applicable but are still being used to address contemporary challenges. The ‘solution’ is to ‘get around it’ rather than change it. Without change and adaptation, we are not even stagnating but going rapidly backwards.
3. Three generations of staff with very different outlooks and job expectations work in your organization. They have problems communicating with or accepting each other.
4. You have a lot of ‘deadwood’ inherited from the days when it was hard to say ‘no’; and now, although these persons cannot really make added-value contributions to you organization, you are ‘stuck.’ However, they also have nothing to fall back on, so you face a dilemma when considering your options.
5. You face a severe scarcity of the kind of skills needed to compete in today’s markets.
6. There is an absence of systems to regulate organizational growth because the old ones are obsolete and the new ones have yet to be created.
7. Do not forget the misplaced staff that got into jobs they could barely fill when the job market was extremely limited.
8. There are no places for promoting staff because either the ‘deadwood’ or the ‘senior staff’ forms a ‘low and hard’ ceiling. Many of those seniors still have 10 to 15 years before retirement and family-business owners tend not to retire until they die.
9. You also need to restructure the entire organization while keeping it profitable and growing.
10. There are a lot of things for which you don’t have the expert manpower and for which you don’t have the time yourself, and yet these are pressing needs.
11. Long-term survival and growth indicates moving towards a more corporate approach to business and away from ‘family’ business while maintaining an acceptable ‘balance of power’ and control.
12. Don’t forget that you are human too and that you need supportive and flexible management structures, along with a multidisciplinary team of advisors to support you in the increasingly complex technological and market-driven business environment.
13. You may not be able to get high calibre staff due to the steady exodus of qualified young men and women looking for opportunities to fulfil their professional ambitions, because such opportunities seem to be ‘an impossible dream’ for them in purely Lebanese organizations.
The list could be much longer and more detailed, but let’s be practical and stick to essentials.
Tell me, when was the last time you visited the offices next door, or sat down and had a discussion for longer than five minutes with some of your key officers? Have you recently visited any of your widely distributed offices and outlets? Could you be in danger of working to realize a futuristic organization for which you neither have the infrastructure nor the manpower? Strategists, tend to hate details, but they do need to do one of two things to secure the proper growth of their organizations:
1. Take the time to personally look at and listen to what is happening ‘on the ground,’ or
2. Work with a team of experts that complement their capabilities by providing a ‘wide-angle’ and multi-disciplinary view of the situation, so that plans get built on a solid foundation of realities.
When the pressure gets to be too much, we all tend to insulate ourselves by not listening to anybody and by persuading ourselves that we have an intuitive capability or ‘flair’ to tell right from wrong without facts or figures to support our claims. This is a very fragile position from which the PDG plays the role of ‘god’. Remember Oedipus the King? His unrelenting investigations to find his father’s murderer led to the most horrible discovery: he, himself, was the unwitting perpetrator of that crime and of other sins so ugly, he wilfully put out his own eyes, so that he would never again be able to see the light or day or have to look at the embodiment of his own sins. One of the key themes of this classic drama is: “those who climb highest, fall hardest.”
Dear PDG, first of all, get rid of that title. Either keep the ‘P’ and get another competent person to take the ‘DG’ or vice versa, depending on which role you do best. This title is good for small, 50-person organizations, but not for 500-person organizations. The bottleneck you are creating when executives have to wait six months to two years to see you is costing you hundreds of thousands of dollars in wasted production time and opportunity losses in the same denomination. Your decision-making procedure is so cumbersome that it might as well not exist. Can you really afford to keep on ignoring all this? Do you have to have a fire at your door to realize that “all is not well” in your ‘kingdom.’ It would be so much more profitable if you opened your door and took a reality-check before the fire breaks out in earnest.
What are you afraid of? If you prefer a three-lettered title, why don’t you try CEO, chief executive officer, at least that title suggests that you have a support team and that you are still the chief, but you are all doing different things to manage the organization and keep it profitable. Dear PDG, the organization will always be yours. If you distribute your power more wisely, so that the people who are worth keeping stay around to help you make it bigger and better, you will enlarge the ‘cake’ so there will be plenty to go round for everybody. I close with kind regards and best wishes for a speedy awakening. Hopefully, you will wake up before your competitors do in 2004.
Fay Niewiadomski, founder and managing director of ICTN, has over 30 years of experience in management, consulting, researching, and training. She is currently a consultant to some of the largest Lebanese and regional blue-chip companies.
