Last week I received a phone call from a longtime reader that is out of work and asked me if I knew of anything (we keep both formal and informal lists of readers looking for fellow hard hitters*). As a rule I'm sympathetic to involuntary unemployment since I know what it can do to a family. So I listened. A moment later I realized who it was then I tightened up. Although it was announced he had "resigned for personal reasons" everybody knows he was fired because of the poor performance of his company. I asked him what happened. He very articulately explained what I already knew because I read the FT and seemingly everything else. I also looked up the stock price while he was on the phone--it was all right there.  He described how every time they (the company) went into a new market they were trounced, or nearly trounced, by the incumbent. "Suddenly they would deploy all these resources we had no clue they had. Nobody knew." Huh?

Oh, please. This guy deserved to be fired. If he was a military general in the battlefield, rather than a civilian one hiding away in his corner office, sons and daughters would be gone. A lot of them. I couldn’t get off the phone fast enough. A weak whiner. No wonder his company’s expensive efforts were so easy to defeat. All that shareholder value wasted. Poof!

Never forget what’s up in the box and on the masthead of this newsletter: "Battles are won or lost before they are fought." Although it came from Sun Tzu a very long time ago there is absolutely nothing mysterious and illusive about this. The reader’s comment about "Nobody knew" is just plain lame--a genuinely ludicrous excuse for egregiously poor chief-level performance. Everybody in the other companies knew what was available to deploy against a new manufacturer entering their market spaces. The defeated guy on the phone was surprised when he should have been prepared for marketplace battle. His idea of being prepared for the worst, was expecting the best, and that’s what he provisioned for. And this happened to his company more than once! He should have been fired 8 years ago. I’m embarrassed the guy is a reader of this newsletter. It makes me feel like I’ve somehow failed.

And this works all the way down through your company. Everybody in your company and in your department should think like a good soldier. Always ask yourself what’s the worst that can happen within the timeframe relevant to your job scope. The shipping clerk’s horizon is different than the CEO’s but The Magic Question is the same: "What can go dreadfully wrong and what have I done to prepare myself and my team for it?"

That’s only one part of earning your paycheck and supporting your shareholders, but it’s a vitally important one.  

Think about it...

And think about us, Parcon Research, when you need executive search services.
We find you high-impact winners. Not excuse addled whiners.