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When a business loses its biggest contract and the CEO can’t provide a credible turnaround plan, fire him. If you are a subordinate, leave before that ship sinks and your self-confidence is permanently damaged.
When a major client cancels a contract, the smaller ones become jittery and follow.
Organisations that are on the back foot, whether in boardrooms or council chambers, soon switch to survival mode and lose their rational-thinking processes.
Managers turn on each other as they think about the possibility of losing their livelihoods.
Take, for example, a major financial institution here in South Africa that kept churning out lukewarm results for years.
In a strange way, its shareholders had become accustomed to the abuse of tepid returns, while management topped up their bank accounts with options and other perks. Eventually, the shareholders decided to sell this institution.
To make it palatable to the regulators and the unions, the sale was called a merger, and the name of the holding company was changed.
Consolidation followed, and the IT department was moved to a new floor. The head of IT at the acquired company got to work early and chose an office.
But the stalwart of the acquiring company announced that it was his office and that he was taking it.
The shouting started. They pushed and shoved at the door. Eventually, one manager walked off and sat at the desk. His adversary followed him, and sat on his lap and shouted:
“This is my desk!” Subordinates didn’t know what to say. Eventually, one manager was put through a disciplinary hearing and expelled.
Always have a contingency plan, whether as a manager, a councillor or an ordinary employee. Losing your source of income has become easy.
It’s called pruning. A business is not a charity organisation. It does not depend on donor funding, and the sooner the losses are cut, and dispassionately so, the greater its chances of survival.
A useless manager creates no jobs.
This is something to remember as Africans, because we are taught to put politeness and loyalty above all else. This invariably breeds entitlement.
Collective leadership may be a political model, but there is no such thing in business. It is a symptom of weakness.
It is not the fittest who survive, but the most adaptable, those who can read, understand and react to the changing circumstances correctly.
There are many great organisations that have faltered because they have failed to understand that Darwinian nuance.
As human beings, we are instinctively hopeful and, because we are always comfortable with the familiar, we are naturally complacent.
This is how champion businesses lose out to upstarts, and is the reason so many factories stand empty and why manufacturing has moved offshore.
Managers find it easier to follow the tyranny of statistics rather than adapt to the new circumstances.
If you want to employ people who can bring your organisation back from the brink, you need to appoint someone who is honest with himself or herself.
After all, those who lie to themselves can’t be honest with anyone.
Also, you’ll spend an inordinate amount of time second-guessing them or deciding whether what they say is true or not.
Employ someone who knows his limitations and accepts them. Lack of knowledge is not a handicap. Find people who are diligent, and choose those who have character over those who are concerned with outward appearances.
Success is not in major events, but in daily habits, and the gap between what people say and what they do.
Kuzwayo is founder of Ignitive,
an advertising agency
