business | Page 3 of 3 | Chronicles from a Caribbean Cubicle

December 11, 2006

More on a Likkle Man

Growing from being a Likkle Man performing a service or selling a product in the Caribbean means more than just expanding the top or revenue line of the business.

The pathway for growth must include some basics – there has to be a market, and there has to be some basic means of supplying it.

Beyond these basics, there must exist a company that is able to provide what the market needs. This is where the Likkle Man typically runs into problems, and has no clue how to get himself out of it.

A business can grow by just being in the right place at the right time – in other words, from luck. A friend of mine just happened to be selling roller-blades in Austin Texas, when no-one knew what they were. Then, all of a sudden one Christmas, everyone had to have one under the tree and she sold enough roller-blades to make a tidy profit.

However, most companies are not lucky. Their growth comes from careful cultivation of a market, and the organic growth of their capabilities to meet that market.

In one sense, my friend from Austin was “lucky.” However, she also told me that she spent several months giving away free classes in roller-blading at a time when no-one was interested in the sport. In other words, she systematically created the demand for the product by giving people an experience of it, at a time when no-one would pay for the classes.

She gradually built up an organization that could take advantage of the sudden demand that kicked off what became national fad.

And that is what the Likkle Man must do – build up an organization that will enable his company to create demand and take advantage of it. This is where the Jamaican entrepreneur is weak.

Based on my experience working in the region and beyond I would say that we Jamaicans have no problems dreaming big, and envisioning what a business idea can become. The challenge comes when the dreams must be translated into an organization that must deliver the product or service reliably.

The typical entrepreneur’s approach is to do it all themselves, and then hopefully find someone else who is willing to learn to do it themselves to pass it on to (often an heir). However, the problem with this approach, unknown to many entrepreneurs is that this approach keeps the company at about the same small size.

While there is nothing wrong with being a Likkle Man forever, a lack of growth does less than it could for owners, employees, customers and countries. Most company owners are not interested in remaining small.

However, it is fair to say that they do not know what it takes to grow and develop their organizations to be anything other than small.

The good news is that this is one of the skills of entrepreneurship that can be taught. The work done by Michael Gerber, author of The eMyth books, is a method that I continue to use years after reading his original book, and has the simplest and best prescription on how to develop an organization over time.

Even a Likkle Man who has no desire to grow can use these skills.

When we Caribbean people ask someone if they know a Likkle Man, what we are asking for is only a lower price, not a lower standard of product or service. A Likkle Man such as a shoemaker who operates out of a converted container (like the one I used 3 weeks ago) can use Geber’s techniques to consistently maintain extremely high standards that cause customers to keep coming back, and referring others.

In our region, there is nothing like a high standard to attract attention from customers. This is unfortunate, because so very few businesses are able to produce anything at a high standard.

On the other hand, it makes for lots of low-picking fruit. When the market is used to low standards, a higher standard comes as a welcome surprise, and even a shock. In many of my blogs, I have written about the presence of higher and lower standards indirectly.

The ongoing quest for higher standards of product and service delivery are critical to the entrepreneur’s goals of revenue expansion, market growth and greater profits. This quest is also important to countries, such as Jamaica, that have high unemployment and years of stagnant GDP.

This is where all Caribbean need to be very, very careful to empower the Likkle Man, but demand that he deliver at an ever-increasingly high standard. Perhaps we have failed ourselves by not demanding more.

December 11, 2006

A Likkle Man

Here in the region, we delight in finding a “likkle man” who can do something at a fraction of the cost of a much bigger player, at the same perceived level of quality.

Shoes need to be repaired? Take it to the likkle man on the corner. Oil in the car needs to be changed? Take it to the likkle man down the lane.

Empowering the likkle man is an everyday form of rebellion, perhaps going back to plantation days when holding back business from Massa was an imperative. Giving it to the likkle man kept the business in the community.

However, giving business to the small man is only the beginning, and unfortunately, we in the Caribbean are very weak in helping the likkle men around us to turn into big men. We don’t challenge them to achieve high standards.

That is not to say that they are not able to produce samples of high quality. In Jamaica in particular, we have hundreds of artisans in the arts, for example, who are incredibly ingenious.

The problem is that we mistake the importance of technical ability, and vastly underestimate the importance of entrepreneurial ability. Our schools are organized to produce technicians in all fields, and from age 16 a student must narrow down their course of formal study (for life in most cases) to four subject areas and General Paper.

The truth is that educating another lawyer, doctor or accountant is unlikely to contribute much to our GDP. Narrow technical abilities are admirable, but nowhere near as vital to countries in which the large mass of people cannot afford to use them.

What most developing countries need are not more professionals with masters degrees in contract law, but more entrepreneurs who are willing to hire ever increasing numbers of ordinary people.

In the Caribbean, we have developed First World values that have no basis. In other words, we cannot afford to produce more and more sophisticated cardiologists, when the people who need them are selling icy-mints and steering-wheel covers on the corner.

What would it be like if we as a society were to value entrepreneurs, and determined to make their way easy?

What if that ingredient were to be taught in schools as a subject? Included in every profession as a subject to be studied? There could be subjects in medical school, engineering school and law school on starting and running successful small and mid-sized companies.

What would it be like to know that in the bigger picture, the company that creates opportunities for others enables all professions to thrive, all families to eat, and all children to be educated?

As an engineer who started his own company with little or no formal training in entrepreneurship, I made far too many mistakes that could have been avoided. When I graduated, I had no idea I would end up owning my own company, and it was not until my father started his that I could imagine that it was something I ever wanted to do. That was 14 years ago.

It is about time that we not only loved our likkle men, but gave them the environment that they deserve to grow from being likkle. It is about time we gave them the laws they need to be successful, and about time we gave them the support they require to hire the unemployed youths who sit around our corners deciding each day whether or not to join the local gang or not.

December 11, 2006

An Employee’s Worst Nightmare

Life in Caribbean companies can be chaotic. Employees take advantage of the chaos by trusting that managers will forget about half the things they ask for in a matter of minutes. Changing circumstances will render unnecessary a good number of the other requests, leaving employees required to keep track of perhaps only 10% of all the things a managers asks for.

The tricky part is to figure out which 10% is important.

I remember a US executive I once consulted with, who expressed some frustration with his direct reports. They apparently could get little done, leaving him feeling frustrated at their collective lack of progress.

I interviewed his direct reports, who admitted that they freely ignored his first few requests for any action, knowing that he would either forget the request, or resort to making the request of several people at once.

When I asked him about repeating his requests to different people, he freely admitted that he used this practice because “that was the only way to get stuff done around here.”

Did I mention that he was a Senior Vice President, and that his direct reports were all Vice Presidents?

Into this morass of confusion comes a product that a colleague of mine, Scott Hilton-Clarke, has been refining for the better part of the last 6 years.

Executive Slice has been through several iterations, and its latest test release is the most innovative and provocative, which tells me that Scottie is on the right track.

The new promise of the software (which is shared between executives, managers or professionals on the same team) is that it “Prevents Promises from Falling Through the Cracks” (or something quite similar.) It does an amazing job.

What Scottie has done is to imagine the conversational “space” between the members of a team, and the promises that keep things together, or allow them to drift apart.

His thesis (in my words) is that managers have no business trying to remember all the promises that they have made, and others have made of them. They world is moving too quickly, and situations are changing too frequently to even try.

It is no mistake that Scott is a Caribbean consultant, who led the Y2k implementation at Jamaica’s largest bank. He knows a thing or two about managing against a background of chaotic events.

Whereas a manager in North America and Europe might try to reduce the chaos, Scottie seems to understand intuitively that that approach is doomed. Instead of wasting energy in that direction, it seems that he has instead focused on managing the promises that fly around organizations un-managed, and unrecorded.

The chaos will never go away, but we can become highly effective in managing or thriving in spite of it. (From my point of view, this could become a company’s competitive advantage.)

His software offers a powerful way to shape the promisphere, that space of promises and commitments that exists between managers and their reports.

In Executive Slice, promises that are made are immediately captured in the programme, and then “remembered” by the system’s players all the way through completion. As useful as this feature set is, the real power of the system comes after the promise has been made.

The manager to whom the promise has been made has a variety of interesting ways to follow-up on progress, and ask for updates, information and clarification. The system automatically reminds him when promises are overdue, or in limbo.

At some point in the future, it will offer coaching on how to have difficult reporting conversation, and even coaching conversations so that a manager who has two minutes to prepare can do so effectively.

Over time, the effectiveness of both a manager and their reports can be tracked by simply measuring how well they are managing the promises they are making, and the ones they are receiving.

To go back to the example of the Senior Vice President and his hapless Vice Presidents, a reasonable performance review system would show who are the effective and ineffective players in the promisphere.

But let us not be fooled – this is an employee’s worst nightmare, regardless of level. The time is coming, through tools such as Executive Slice, where chaos and change will no longer be good excuses to not get work done.

The 10% game will be over, as will its cousin – the game of working ridiculous hours to fulfill unrealistic deadlines. In its place will come a level of rationality and communication that will help teams to deal with chaos more effectively, and this will be no small blessing for the Caribbean manager.

November 7, 2006

Article on the Collapse of the 1990’s

Here is an interesting article on the collapse of the Jamaican financial industry in the 1990’s.

http://www.camagazine.com/3/4/4/9/1/index1.shtml

August 23, 2006

A Trinidad–Jamaica Chamber of Commerce

It is an idea whose time has come.

Beyond the differences in food, accent, holidays, ethnicities and culture there is much for the business communities of Trinidad and Jamaica to work together to accomplish. A Trinidadian Jamaican Chamber of Commerce seems like the perfect kind of forum in which it should take place.

Now, to find others who agree!

In the current study we are conducting on Trinidadian executives working in Jamaica, there is much that we are discovering that so many have in common.

The same thought struck me when our firm conducted the Caribbean Acquisition Project, and we discovered that there were all these similar stories of “coming to Jamaica” among the manager-emigrees. I wished at that time that I could gather everyone together in one room, put on the drinks and just lime away until each issue was addressed.

That was not too realistic, but it occurred to us as if conducting a study would be the next best step.

Now, 5 years later, it seems as if we are ready for more. How about a Trini-Jam Chamber of Commerce?

Apart from the obvious social benefits that such a lime would produce (my wife is Trini) I think it could be good for business. I imagine 2 sister organizations, one in Kingston and the other in Port of Spain.

Here is a possible list of topics to be tabled from the very beginning:

travelling to work between Trinidad and Jamaica (work permits, CARICOM Skills Certificates etc.)
welcoming and preparing new executives
promoting and changing laws related to trade, immigration, taxes, joint ventures
giving export and import advice
starting new businesses in each country
provide needed business intelligence
sourcing timely market information, news and trends
learning how to manage across the cultures

Now… as I said before… to find others who agree.

Francis

May 15, 2006

I Don’t Care

I recently read a fascinating New York Times article about following what you love in life.

The article, by the authors of Freakonomics, started out by asking why it was that the best soccer players all seemed to be born in January, February and March.

It turns out that the reason has nothing to do with the Zodiac, seasons or school holidays. When young boys and girls are moving up in the soccer systems in their respective countries, they are all subject to age group requirements, and it turns out that the requirements coincide with calendar years. For example, to play Colts football (under 14), the players must have been born in 1992 or earlier.

Naturally, players born in early 1992 are larger (on average) than those born in late 1992, and therefore would have received that little extra encouragement from early on that the others would not have received. They would have been encouraged to develop whatever talent they had more frequently. In other words, if they had a dream to be a footballer, it would seem to those around them that they would be more likely to follow the dream than the rest.

It brought to mind a conversation I had back in 1992 with a new boss of mine. Her name was Norma, if I recall rightly.

I had just changed managers, and we were having an intro meeting, to really get to know each other. During that meeting, I told her that I really did not care about performance review, as others opinions of me just didn’t matter to my career.

This was plenty big talk for a 25 year-old.

But it was true. I had been doing a lot of growing and reading up until that point, and had very recently read a study that said that the difference between the largest and smallest raise in the typical department was some $2000. I was stunned.

I considered myself a high performer, and to learn that the difference was that small made me think that those who busted their butts to get to the top were separated from those who were lazy and did no work by a mere… $5.58 per day after taxes. That worked out to some 70 cents per hour.

This was clearly ridiculous.

I was in a rat race for a 70 cents per hour difference? That worked out to a Coke back then, or a candy bar.

A friendly supervisor could not believe it either, and he checked the numbers for our own department, and the numbers were almost exactly what I had read.

I felt like a fool.

And I stopped competing, as my dream was not to be promoted, but to leave and start my own company.

Even as I was telling Norma that the review does not matter to me, I could tell that she did not believe me.

Until, that is about six months later when it came time for her to deliver the review. I kept putting it off and putting it off, until it finally was overdue and we sat down to speak in a cafeteria in Bedminster.

She started in, and I could see that she had forgotten.

She continued, and I interrupted her by saying “But Norma, don’t you remember? Performance review does not matter to me.”

She stopped and stared at me. Her world and my world paused… I explained that it was not personal, no reflection on her, it was just that I was not interested as I found that it made no difference. The people who were evaluating me, I explained, have no idea what I am doing here, and I knew that nothing they said was related to what I was doing.

Poor Norma. She was flabbergasted. I was a bit surprised that she had forgotten, and also nervous because I was basically upsetting the status quo by not pretending that this mattered.

From my recollection, we went on to talk about other interesting things, unrelated to the review, relieved that the pretense was finally over. I can’t say that we became close after that, but I would say that had an understanding from that moment.

It was a turning point for me and my career, and when I did eventually resign to go my own way several months later I was stronger for having dealt with my fears in a straightforward way — by telling the truth.

At the same time, I do understand what it was like to be caught up in a rat race. AT&T Bell Labs was, at the time, not only my employer but one of the best places in the world for a scientist or engineer to work. Getting fired was almost impossible back then. And, I remember vividly an old-timer telling me that I should not think of leaving, but instead should stay until I was vested in the pension plan… at the 30 year mark.

Many AT&T veterans were skillful at one thing — staying an employee of AT&T.

In the years since I left, AT&T split into several pieces and my department was disbanded. The company was recently acquired for very little, and the number of employees before the acquisition was at a very small fraction of the 100k+ men and women that I remember being on payroll.

I’m unsure as to why the soccer article reminded me of Norma, and the conversation. I guess that I am grateful that even though she was shocked, she did not try to talk me out of my thinking. In fact, she applauded it, which gave me some assurance that I was not mad. Just different.

Just like those January-March soccer players got some encouragement to later become world stars, I also benefited from the same. What a workplace it would be if people could only be encouraged to follow their hearts.

March 11, 2006

Why EVERY Serious Business Should Blog

Now this is just an excellent article written by Robert Scoble on Tom Peter’s website that I think every business owner should read.

The only objection I can think of that a Caribbean executive might have to blogging is that relatively few people in our region are computer-literate. My response is, “if you build it, one day they will come.” In other words, it is only a matter of time until people become computer-literate, and start reading blogs, and by the time a company decides to jump in, the space will be too crowded to be heard.

Also, it is a good idea to create an online dialogue about your company, before someone who could very well be disgruntled, creates one about you… As the article explains, what blogging is doing is taking underground conversations and making them visible. It is a good idea to assume that whatever people are whispering about you behind closed doors, will one day turn up as part of an online conversation (better give up that mistress now!).

Plus, there is a tremendous learning curve to blogging. Only a year ago, I was still puzzled at what the term really meant. Beating the learning curve is just a good idea!

Let me know if you find the article useful, and if you are thinking of blogging also.

February 16, 2006

The EMyth and the myths it dispels

I was so, so very lucky to happen to run into the newest book from Michael Gerber last December, while browsing in a bookstore, entitled EMyth Mastery.

For anyone who is contemplating starting their own business, any of the EMyth books should be required reading as the author does an excellent job of describing what it takes to start a successful company for the long-term. The irony is that very few people truly understand what it means to be an entrepreneur, or what it is that entrepreneurs actually do on a daily basis.

Essentially, most people think that if you do something well, and enjoy doing it, that starting a business doing that thing is a natural next step that should be encouraged.

Knowing what I know now, after 13 years of running my own firm, I would discourage those who think that that is all that is required. Their ignorance will only hurt them.

What most people do NOT appreciate is that there is a distinction between working IN your company and working ON your company that I am only still grappling to appreciate.

Working IN your company means, in the simple example of a roti shop: making and selling rotis.

Working ON your company means setting up the operations processes, policies and turn-key applications that are basically required to make any company successful, and must be customized to make your own company viable over a period of years. For example, the roti vendor would have to develop a standard process, manual and teaching method to standardize the method of making rotis so that

they are made the same way each time
they can be taught and re-taught the same way
they could one day form the basis for expansion

Case in point: it was Ray Kroc’s genius for building a viable, expandable business that turned the store he bought from the McDonalds’ brothers into a multi-billion dollar empire.

The big myth about starting a business is that, for example, it’s the quality of the rotis that will make the business succeed. While that’s important, it’s just not true. Instead, it’s the quality of the business itself (and how it is run) that is much, much more important.

I’ve spent the last month re-tooling my own company and writing manuals for doing just about everything that I think is important. The areas that I have created for Framework Consulting are:

Enterprise Leadership
Management
Financial Leadership
Client Fulfillment
Lead Generation
Lead Conversion
Thought Leadership*
Marketing

* this is one that I added to the standard set that Gerber recommends.

I had to do quite a bit of reworking of his original ideas to fit my kind of business, but his basic thinking is still the best advice around for small business owners

July 7, 2005

Illusions in the Workplace 1

Lately, I’ve been reading the book Communion with God by Neal Donald Walsch.

The author talks about the usefulness of illusions — 10 in all — that are part and parcel of the human experience. The illusions are actually meant for us to re-experience who we really are and who God really is, and life is about working through them and arriving back at where we started, i.e. the Truth. However, once we’ve come back home to the truth, we return with a new experience, which actually adds to what God knows of himself.

This is a powerful, grand concept.

Perhaps that same concept can be expanded to include the workplace, and that there are illusions that we maintain in the working world that are useful, but only to a point.

The First Illusion I’d like to explore is that of competition.

It is an illusion to think that out and out war exists between companies. In fact, there is far more cooperation than there is competition.

We are taught that business is about the survival of the fittest, and that companies are fighting with each other to survive, and that their focus should be on the destruction of their competitors.

Let’s look at some examples of what also seems like competition, but it actually a carefully crafted case of cooperation.

Athletic Competition

In sports such as boxing and track and field, at one levels it’s all about the competition between the competitors. Obviously, one person is out to “beat” the others.).)

Yet, in order to have a competition, until the boxers step into the ring, or the athletes step onto the track they must cooperate in order to allow the competition to proceed. They must show up at the same time and the same place. They must allow each other to train, and to do so with the best resources possible. They must follow the rules, even the seemingly meaningless ones. They better they are at getting people interested in the competition, the more tickets will be sold to the event.

In other words, they must cooperate to assist the other athletes in showing up as prepared as they can be to engage in the competition. Why?

To put it simply, a boxer needs an opponent. He or she cannot show up for the fight and claim victory when their opponent either fails to show or does so in poor condition.

Also, in the case of the athlete, he or she needs top class competition in order to do well, and to break records. Even if the athlete is good enough to break records on his/her own, no-one would show up to see them compete with themselves, and that would be the death of that sport.

Clearly, the destruction of one’s opponents is not in the best interest of an athlete, which is why competition only makes sense against a background of broad cooperation.

The same is true for corporations that compete in business.

Monopolies, or companies that have the least competition, are probably the most inefficient companies. They are despised the most by their customers (witness TSTT in Trinidad and other Cable and Wireless companies across the Caribbean, before the advent of competition in the cellular market). Their employees (anecdotally) appear to be the least motivated (after all, if you don’t like it here, then “tough luck” to you).

The demise of one’s competitors, or absence of the same is simply bad for business and leads to a propensity to fool oneself (no-one at Cable and Wireless believed that a competitor with no history in the Caribbean would gain 60% market-share in 3 years in the way the Digicel has).

It is much wiser to have competitors, and to foster their entry into markets, and to hope that they prosper. When there is broad cooperation, everyone can win, and do so at a much increased level.

In the airline business, it is an article of faith that one should never advertise one’s safety record or compare it against one’s competitors. Why so? The reason is that reminding the flying public that fling carries with it some risks, is a sure recipe to reduce overall flying, which would reduce the profitability of each airline.

Airlines, therefore, must cooperate in what they use in their advertising (even while not appearing to do so).

This is not to say that competition is not a useful illusion. It’s very useful when trying to serve customers better than the shop down the street. It’s useful in coming up with new ideas and product innovations. It’s also quite useful when it comes to treating stockholders and employees well — in some countries, awards are given to companies that are able to create extraordinary work cultures.

But executives need to understand that competition is actually an illusion, which exists to teach us an important lesson — there is much more to be gained from broad cooperation, and competitive impulses are only useful when everyone can remember this bigger truth.

An acquaintance of mine is an “ultra-competitor”. When she plays any board game, she plays to win, and if she loses she is prone to throwing nothing short of 4-year old tantrums (including cursing, stamping feet, throwing game pieces, etc.) The net result of this behavior is that no-one wants to play with her… She doesn’t get that competition is just an illusion, and that the real enjoyment comes from elsewhere.