Wednesday, April 17, 2013

From A to B - That's the Point!


I've been enjoying reading a book that I picked up a couple of weeks ago by Vineet Nayar, "Employees First, Customers Second: Turning Conventional Management Upside Down." It's been great to read his thoughts on what has now come to be called the EFCS Principle; has worked in HCL and how other companies are following that and how having satisfied employees leads to customers also being satisfied. This turns around the old adage that said, "The Customer is always first or right!"

But what caught my attention in this book is this little analogy that he gives right at the beginning. One of the things he noticed with his children was that when they first got a pencil in their hands and realized the potential it had to make all kinds of lines and drawings, they would get all excited and keep on scribbling. What they scribbled did not make any sense, but the child was so happy to see all that he could do with a pencil. Yet, order came when they were able to introduce a Point A and a Point B and have the child connect those 2 points. When that happened, immediately the potential for more directed understood writings began to surface. Suddenly with points, alphabets and numbers could be formed. The potential to communicate began to come out of that initial chaos.

Basically what he was saying was that, "In a lot of companies, Point A and Point B are the paths that companies choose to go from where they are to where they want to be. In most cases, Point B is well articulated – vision statements, missions, goals, that outline where the company is headed. But very rarely is Point A talked about. Often the only thing that marks Point A is a financial statement or something like that. It is so important to understand where one is before you know where one has to go. If this place is muddied, then you are going to find it very difficult to get to Point B."

When he was invited to leave his Tata Company of Comnet to join HCL, he says this. "When I took over the job as President, I went to the employees and I realized that Point A had become blurred. I began to talk to all HCL employees worldwide and pointed out to them that information technology was no longer peripheral to business strategy. It was central with developments in telecommunication, web services and social media, just exploding. And it couldn't be something at the periphery any longer. It had to be brought in to the center."

The second thing he said, "HCL had lost its competitive edge. It had gotten complacent and tolerant, believing that gradual change and gradual movement were all right. Actually all around, the industry was changing rapidly. It was like a huge behemoth trying to move slowly towards its goal when all around there were changes that were happening that were moving ahead of HCL. The whole point had to do with Point A; that had become blurred. People hadn't understood that the landscape was changing and it was no longer the same as when HCL had started on that journey."

I thought to myself that it was so true. For all of us, when you look at where we are in our companies, we often have Point B very clear. That seems to be the one point that is well articulated, well talked about, put down in charts, and so on. Yet, we rarely pay too much attention to Point A and that Point A could be changing. So I decided to talk about it on this call today and ask you the question: Are you aware of your Point A's? As you look at your own office spaces, are you aware that the landscape could have changed, that the people whom you started working with have moved and today you have a new staff? Or have your own roles and responsibilities changed over the years that you have worked here? Maybe you are working with a younger age group that has a different mindset but you haven't recognized it? Maybe the educational qualifications of those around you have changed and yours hasn't, all to say that the landscape around you is no longer the Point A that you started at. Do you need to make some changes?

Or look at your own self? You're probably older now than when you started at the job. Maybe you're better qualified than when you started. Maybe your own situation has changed – maybe you're married now, your family has increased, you have children. Or maybe you used to read a lot before and now you don't. Or it could be also that you used to rely a lot on God and His wisdom and trust Him, but now you don't. Point A's change subtly, and before we know it we are in a place that is so unclear and unfocused.

Recently J.C. Penny made the news because they sacked their CEO Ron Johnson after only 17 months. He was appointed CEO when Myron Ullman who was the former CEO retired in June 2011. He brought J.C. Penny down, from share prices of $34 when Ullman retired, to $14 in April 2013. He had lost sales of about $4 million. Yet Ron Johnson was very successful at his previous job. He was head of retail for Apple and Target and was the one to bring genius bars into Apple stores. Yet it seems that his Point A, which he thought was the same as Apple and Target, was not the same at J.C. Penny. And he paid for it.

It's so important, isn't it, for us to look at our own lives and say, "Has my Point A changed? Am I aware of it? Are there changes that I need to make so that I can better clarify where I am, what I am doing right now and then be able to know what I need to do to get to Point B.

Strategy is dependent on our understanding of Point A, whether it is in our office spaces or whether it is personally. It is so important for us to be able to put those 2 dots – a dot which is Point A and a dot which is Point B. maybe today, you and I need to take a good hard look at Point A and check to see whether it is clearly defined or whether it has gone fuzzy and we need to do something about it.

Let me pray with you. Almighty God, bring clarity into our various spaces, into our lives today. Show us whether we need to look with different lenses at where we are today. Give us the wisdom to know how to operate within these changing scenarios. Master we rely on you for wisdom. Give it to each one of us, each one of these precious ones on this call. Let your wisdom come. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.



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