The Change Dude’s Blog

Business: Art or Science

Ever since my first days of  joining the community of business leaders it has occured to me that the act of generating profit from a product or service wasn’t really something you get a degree in.  Good business is done by creative people that hit a nerve with a market.  Who would have thought that rocks could be considered pets?  Where in the Harvard Business School curriculum is the course that helps neophytes to business learn the art of schmoozing?  The whole notion that charts, graphs and numbers make a business run is ludicrous.  In my experience it’s exactly the opposite.  Finance is sludge that slows down the engine.  Scientific business destroys the hearts and minds of everyone involved in the endeavor.

To validate my claim that good business is a product of great creativity and lots of luck is a recent study highlighted in the April 2009 HBR by a couple of Deloitte Consulting guys and a prof from the University of Texas.  You can read the article but in short they evaluated companies from 1966 through 2006 finding that of the 287 alleged high-performers only one in four, that’s right 25% of the group had “remarkable” characteristics.  Hence, the conclusion is that you can do everything right, according to the rules of scientific business and fall flat or just do OK and hit the market right and be a STAR. 

Aha!  My Five Rules for Being a Successful Business:

1. Have an idea that you love

2. Put the idea on the street and see what happens

3. Keep changing the idea until someone buys a lot of it

4. Take really good care of the people that make your idea work and the people that buy it

5. Ensure no finance executive achieves greater status in the org chart than a staff accountant, if you need real finance help buy it by the hour, you get better ideas.

It may seem a simple way to think about business.  The reality is that perserverance, integrity, creatitivity and old fashioned courage make a business thrive, the rest is window dressing.  Much of the consulting I’ve done over the years has been focused on assisting executive teams get back to basics.  Which in large part requires them to put down the daily spreadsheets and pick up the customer satisfaction data.  To move their eyes off the numbers and onto their staff. 

People are the core of business and trade.  Numbers are the by-product.  Of the many highly successful businesses I’ve been fortunate enough to have as clients make money in-spite of management not because of it.  The day-to-day work of creating, manufacturing, delivering and servicing are accomplished by heroic individuals that, more often than not, have to ignore management to keep customers happy and deliver on the brand promise.

Imagine for a moment that every C-Level executive had to service at least one customer or account every day, what a very different place most businesses would be.

April 2, 2009 - Posted by thechangedude | Thinking About Customers