'Complaints can be good' and other business lessons
If you don’t have money, time, or the desire to go to a business school, Michael W. Preis and Matthew Frederick’s 101 Things I Learned in Business School provides some help. Preis is a business administration professor at the University of Illinois while Frederick is an architect, urban designer and teacher. The tome is a handy, easy-to-read-and-digest book that offers basic business concepts, principles and guidelines. It can be used as a personal consultant as it imparts tutorial tidbits on accounting, finance, marketing, management, leadership, strategy, and human relations.
Each micro-mini lesson is an entry to dive deeper into topics that greenhorn business students and experienced corporate men and women and entrepreneurs alike need in order to perform better in today’s fast-changing business environment. From a long list of what can be called review notes, I deliberately chose and liberally picked up from the authors’ long list some interesting bites on management, HR, and marketing to share with you.
• Learn an organization’s culture before working with or for it. This is all about being able to understand a company’s set of behaviors, norms, attitudes, priorities and beliefs. Cultures vary widely. In some, executives are aloof while in others they are more accessible. In some, processes and behaviors are ad hoc and quirky, while in others regimentation and predictability are norms. A poor match can create discomfort for individual workers and compromise endeavors on a corporate scale.
• The most difficult and time-consuming problems in business are not business problems. Operating a business is often complicated by human factors, misunderstandings, absenteeism, selfish agendas, and ego clashes, among others. The wise manager identifies and minimizes root factors in the workplace that contribute to people problems, works to resolve the problems that do occur, and conducts himself as a role model for others.
• Greed begets greed. If your thinking is sloppy, your business will be sloppy. If you are disorganized, your business will be disorganized. If you are greedy, your employees will be greedy, giving you less and less of themselves and always asking for more.
• Most employees want to do good work. Employees may be motivated extrinsically or intrinsically. Extrinsic motivations include praise, recognition, money or punishment. Positive motivators can lead workers to expect additional rewards for merely doing their jobs, while negative motivators may help get a task done but usually have a detrimental effect over the long run. Intrinsic motivation comes from a worker’s internal sense of purpose, personal enjoyment of the work, and satisfaction of a job well done.
• Command, consensus, or consultation? These are varying management models, which can be used alternatively depending on the situation. “Command” is the traditional top-down, hierarchical style. It is efficient but can be over-reliant on old ways when a new approach is needed. Voices that might otherwise be unheard are allowed into a “consensus” decision-making process, but it can be inefficient, cacophonous, and confusing. “Consultation,” seen to be the preferred approach, is an authority-based model in which managers solicit input from the affected before making decisions.
• Substitutes are competitors. When evaluating competitors, consider indirect competition as carefully as direct competition, which can occur at many levels, including product, ingredients, service, and convenience. You can protect your equities against substitutes with a strong brand identity, patents and deliberately incompatible standards.
• Complaints can be good things. When a customer tells a business where it failed, he or she is doing the business a favor. As Bill Gates said, “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. For every unsatisfied customer who complains, many others quietly leave and never come back. A complaining customer usually wants to continue doing business with the company — he or she just wants something to change so the relationship can continue. In fact, customers whose complaints are resolved quickly and satisfactorily often become very loyal.
• An expert isn’t always the person who knows the most. Experts are expected to know a lot, but often it is better to know how to organize and structure knowledge than to simply have knowledge. Innovative thinkers don’t merely retain and recite information; they identify and create new patterns that reorganize known information.
• Two views on good management. Good managers delegate. He or she is responsible for the big picture, and lets those under him or her handle the details and overflow. Good managers serve those under them. A manager exists to expedite the work of staff, and does whatever is required to help those under him or her do the “real” work.
• Some stress is good. A lot of stress is bad. Tight deadlines, financial constraints, demanding customers, aggressive competition, and the expectations of work colleagues — the Yerkes-Dodson Law says that performance increases with stress, but only up to a point. When arousal due to stress is too high, performance decreases. One can endure stress for only so long before performance declines and exhaustion is reached.
• When overwhelmed, try doing fewer things but doing them better. When having difficulty maintaining quality standards, achieving desired outcomes, meeting schedule and cost targets, or getting others to prioritize and perform well, see if you can reduce the number of things being attempted, and focus on doing them better.
It’s good to be reminded. Preis and Frederick’s book does precisely that. Readers are taken back to the fundamentals of business knowing that all businesses have similar concerns and responsibilities. It will surely help companies, its managers and employees if they understand the basics and sticky-note concepts of accounting, finance, marketing, human resource management, communication and leadership.
* * *
E-mail bongosorio@yahoo.com or bong_osorio@abs-cbn.com for comments, questions or suggestions. Thank you for communicating.
