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Wake up, wake up, it’s the new year! It’s time to make those visions come to life … execute those mission statements and live by your values.
Values guide you in the often tricky world of business, where the temptation to make a fast buck is always lurking. Your values save you.
Implement those plans and remember the genchi genbutsu, which is a Japanese principle that car manufacturer Toyota has used successfully. It simply means “go and see for yourself”.
Go where the business happens – do not sit behind the fort of desks manned by Rottweiler-tough secretaries.
Go out and meet your staff, greet them all, find out about their families and their holidays; talk to them about business, because your workers are closer to the ground than you are in your high office.
Ask them about their wishes for the new year and how the business can be improved. Times are tough, so ask them for ideas on saving and reducing waste, and let them be responsible for it.
Visit your customers and speak to them, but make sure you listen twice as much, and notice any changing patterns in their industry.
A business cannot improve beyond the capability of its suppliers, so make regular visits to them.
Find out what new technologies they have that can improve your business ahead of your competitors. You need to know the best in the business and what that costs.
Spend time with your stakeholders too, as the South African economy is being increasingly regulated; get to know the regulators and do your best to influence policy. After all, this is your country; if you do not participate, who will?
Attend at least one industry conference to share ideas with your contemporaries, but also attend one in a totally unrelated industry to avoid inbreeding. Renew your subscriptions to good publications and buy your newspaper – this is the best way to rust-proof your brain.
It is an election year, so it is also the time for white noise and distractions. The art of predicting the future will be at its peak.
The charlatans who bottle rainbows and peddle them to the gullible and the chasers of easy money will be in full swing, and so will those who profit from selling fear, muck and mire.
Remember that you build a business not by shouting on the streets or Twitter, but by making sure that you have a good product and customers to buy it.
Turbulence is the opportunity for the ambitious to speed ahead while the rest are held back by fear. Pierre Wack (1922-1997), the Shell executive who was the first person to develop scenario planning in the private sector, said you can “see” the future, but you have to be in the right state of focus so that you can put your finger unmistakably on the key facts or insights that unlock or open understanding.
Predicting the future works on two planes. The first is based on the cold facts of the real world.
The second, and probably more important, is based on the perceptions of the decision-makers.
South Africa is in a particularly precarious position. The gulf between the decision-makers is too wide.
The decision-makers in politics are overwhelmingly black, but in big business, they are overwhelmingly white, and there is no one who is trying to bridge that gulf.
White business people are feeling negative about the country, so they are not investing as much as they should, and this leads to fewer jobs being created.
As more people are thrown on to the streets without jobs, politicians blame business, and vice versa. No one will admit to their own shortcomings.
As a small business, make sure that you are not the grass that suffers when the giants fight.
Use every opportunity to grow to be a strong baobab that even the elephants cannot fell.
Kuzwayo is the founder of Ignitive,an advertising agency
