Although great care has been taken to ensure the accuracy and completeness of the information contained in this publication, its author Simon Buckingham is unable to accept any legal liability for any consequential loss or damage, however caused, arising as a result of any actions taken on the basis of the information contained in this publication.

Contents

 

“Employee Errors” contains the following sections:

 

1.      Introduction

2.      Entry into my first job

3.      Company History

4.      Entry

5.      Character Set

6.      Job descriptions

7.      Micro-management

8.      Internal controls

9.      Managerial experience

10.  Reasons for promotions

11.  Organizational politics

12.  Non-Disclosure Agreements

13.  Verbal warning

14.  Positive Practices

15.  Exit

 

16.  Company History

17.  Globalization

18.  Business activities

19.  Recruitment Methods

20.  People

21.  Distributed Offices

22.  Task Setting and Reporting Relationships

23.  Complete autonomy means complete accountability

24.  Overseas Travel

25.  Software strategy- partnering

26.  Non-systematic analysis of opportunities

27.  Staff Retention

28.  A few bad managers

29.  The balance of power

30.  Challenges doing business globally

31.  Doing business in Poland

32.  Doing business in France

33.  The myth of the global market

34.  Communication

35.  People Update

36.  Facilitating international cooperation- right attitude, right execution

37.  Exit

38.  Summary

 

Introduction

 

This book chronicles my experiences as an employee at the two companies I worked for after graduating and before setting up my own company. The companies are very different from each other and provide an interesting insight into working for large and small companies. 

 

This is a true story that actually happened. I have tried to portray my view of events as accurately and honestly as I was able to recall, express and interpret them. I have however omitted some events and muddled the order of others. I have also changed the names of the personnel discussed. As with all businesses and business in this day and age, some things have changed since this book was first written.

 

Entry into my First Job

 

This first section describes the management and organization practices I incurred at my first employer- HardSoft, a high technology company. The HardSoft Group had sponsored me for four years throughout my university education. During that time, I worked in six different departments and been very much a golden boy. These were the honeymoon years in our relationship since I was learning new things and never having to stay too long in any one place. I had worked on some high profile projects and won awards from the HardSoft Group charitable trust.

 

Upon graduating, I looked for a full time position with HardSoft. I did not even bother to apply anywhere else since I wanted to focus on graduating with a good degree. I knew this qualification would always be with me whoever I worked for. The sponsorship meant that I did not need to go through the extensive and intensive graduate recruitment process of multiple interviews, tests and assessment centers to get a job after university. In fact, the only interview I actually had with HardSoft was with the Marketing department that did ultimately employ me. The interview was conducted by the HardSoft manager who I later fell out with to a great degree. This department initially turned me down by saying that competition in the job market was high. I bet they wish they had stuck with that decision, rather than allowing themselves to be persuaded to take me on a three month contract and then offer me a "permanent" position. I commenced trial employment in June of 1995 (just a few days after finishing my university degree).

 

My job title was “Marketing Officer”. I never got used to this title. If I had wanted to be an officer, I’d have joined the navy. Every time I gave my business card out, I cringed. Nonetheless, I accepted the position. I will never forget asking the personnel manager how long my contract would last. Her face lit up when she replied that it was a non-renewable “permanent” contract. She was so proud of the organization’s policy. My mind on the other hand filled with negative images of being permanently welded to the organization until retirement decades ahead.

 

To welcome me to the corporate cocoon, I was sent a copy of the Employee Information Handbook. The foreword was written by HardSoft’s then Chief Executive and read as follows:

 

 

I felt privileged to be joining such a prestigious organization where I could realize my full potential. But all this turned out to be typical of the false promises that fill corporate propaganda. About 50 pages of rules and regulations setting out how an employee was supposed to behave followed this introduction. The handbook detailed all of HardSoft’s policies regarding hours of work, holiday entitlement, sickness, disciplinary procedures et cetera.  At the end of the book, each employee was required to sign and return a form to the personnel department saying that they had read and understood the handbook (and thereby binding themselves to following the rules and regulations it contained).

 

Company History

 

At the time I joined it, my first employer HardSoft, founded just ten years previously, was a very successful and much admired organization. It had achieved a leadership position through a combination of fewer mistakes and better products than its competitors. It is worth noting that in the organized world, a badly managed company could nonetheless be a successful market leader if its competitors were managed even more badly.

 

HardSoft had initially developed as a unit of a long established organization that was operating in more mature industry segments. Unfortunately, many of its parent company’s procedures and practices were still being used in HardSoft. Hence, despite its youth and the dynamic industry it was in, HardSoft resembled a hierarchical and static company.

 

Positively, HardSoft had a pragmatic corporate culture, insofar as it called its personnel department the “personnel department” as opposed to “human resource management”, and “quality assurance” rather than “total quality management”. Early on in my employment, I went into a director’s office through the open door and asked if he wanted me to do something, got my reply, said “Thanks Bill” and left. His secretary said that I should address a director more formally. I replied that one of the biggest benefits of HardSoft was that its employees were more interested in getting the job done than playing politics. That was the impression I got at the time.

 

HardSoft was very much an engineering-led organization that was renowned by its competitors and customers as a technical leader. It lacked marketing expertise and brand presence. As competition had increased, HardSoft had had difficulty differentiating itself.

 

The HardSoft directors had been with the organization since it started up, and were not necessarily those people who were best able to make the changes necessary for continued competitiveness. Seniority and experience were the order of the day, not talent and ability. Very few HardSoft employees held professional management qualifications such as Masters in Business Administration (MBAs). A lot of the employees at all levels of the organization were once employed in the army and navy. Not one single women held senior management rank- there were a lot of women managers, but no women was higher up than that.

 

As such, whilst HardSoft had been well positioned in the past, it was not prepared for its new market environment. The organization was fundamentally out of alignment with its business environment. These effects of these general problems- such as engineering-oriented staff- could be seen in certain HardSoft departments, such as the Marketing department that I joined.

 

Character Set

 

I spent my first day of my first job at a press day held at a hotel in central London. HardSoft had hired a function room there and invited journalists to visit and see the latest developments. This introduced me to a few things I would end up getting to know a lot better. The press day showcased software solutions that worked on the HardSoft network. For example, a company was demonstrating the generation and display of video images using an add-on camera. Little did I know it at the time, but pretty soon I would end up managing the development and marketing of these sorts of business partner applications.

 

I also met the HardSoft employee who was later to become my boss, Steve. Steve was a Product Manager in HardSoft Marketing responsible for defining features to be included in new value-added services. As usual, I bombarded everyone with questions, including Steve. He said let’s wait until we get back to the office to answer those questions.

 

It gradually emerged over time that Steve was one of those really nice average people- slow and steady, not extrovert, but friendly when approached. Steve used to work for a public telecoms monopoly and was brilliant at administration and very procedure-conscious and hierarchy-aware. He played office politics in a way that is much more befitting of the post second world war world than tomorrow’s companies. Steve considered a lot of information to be confidential and not for sharing, with reports marked “Strictly Company Confidential”. Information had to be actively requested, it was not forthcoming. Steve was unmarried but in a long-term relationship, had no children and was pretty focused on his career- which he took very seriously indeed. Perhaps that’s why he was so adamant when he later managed me that his word was the final one.

 

In short, Steve was everything that I am not. This could, of course, have been advantageous, had Steve not tried to force his rules onto me. Some people are naturally more attuned to certain roles than others. The secret is not to distort this natural process of task allocation by artificially intervening. Managers should simply let the allocation of organizational responsibilities emerge, much as I ended up running the Business Partner Program because I was good at the job and it suited my ability and inclination to evangelize the development of applications using HardSoft’s network.

 

At the end of my first day, I got a lift back to HardSoft's base in the South of England with Paul, who like myself was a HardSoft Marketing Officer having been a graduate recruit the year before. Paul drove us home in his small blue car, with the bodywork shaking at 80 miles per hour down the highway. Paul was tall and boisterous and the sort of guy who added life to the party (and the office) with lots of laughing and jokes. He also knew how to connect mobile phones to computers, making him a useful contact when customers rang into the office with difficulties.

 

My initial boss in HardSoft Marketing was Graham, Marketing Executive. Graham was a typical middle manager with his designer suits and membership of the company golf club. He sometimes wore yellow shirts. He was a very good guy- someone who was instantly likable because of his enthusiasm and recognition of hard work. 

 

Graham’s boss, the head of the HardSoft Marketing department, was Richard, Marketing Director. Like Graham, Richard was an engineer by training and had worked for HardSoft for about ten years. Richard had left for briefly for another mobile phone company but re-joined within a couple of years. He was a family man with three children and a very large house with a very large mort-gage to pay off.

 

I spent my first couple of months in HardSoft working mainly on producing documents such as price sheets and the first edition of a Directory listing and detailing the HardSoft business partners. Business partners are independent companies who had developed complementary products, in this case, solutions that ran on HardSoft’s network. When the hardware and software were combined, HardSoft had the opportunity to deliver tailored solutions to HardSoft customers rather than just standard undifferentiated product offerings. I rang up a few of the business partners to get information to put in the Directory, and as happens, we got talking about other things such as the potential customers they were talking to and new product developments. I ended up taking over responsibility for business partners, which was called the Business Partner Program, although I think this decision [rightly] emerged and was never consciously made.

 

Job descriptions

 

One day, soon after I joined HardSoft, a quality assurance board was auditing us, and as you do, we tidied up certain parts of the department to which the assessor could safely be steered. (Measurements always distort). Part of the preparation for the audit involved everyone in the department having their job description readily available to show the quality assessor should it be requested. A job description is a document that explains the position in the hierarchy a job takes (who the jobholder reports to) along with a listing of the key tasks and responsibilities the job entails. Stated on my HardSoft job description was a field saying that the jobholder’s signature was optional. I exercised this option and chose not to sign. I didn’t sign because the job description didn’t fully reflect my responsibilities and efforts on a day-to-day basis, and contained the dreaded words “Marketing Officer”.

 

The head of department Richard called me in and stated that most people were glad to have a job description to refer to and more than happy to sign it. I don’t agree that people are insecure enough to gain reassurance from a piece of paper which is so vague that it was not representative of a typical job in a fast-changing organization. Indeed, the job description was so ambiguous that it may as well not have existed. This, of course, is not a bad thing- better an ineffectual procedure than an effective one. However, when a procedure serves no purpose, it should be abolished. By not signing, I was not trying to be deliberately obstructive, I just considered the job description to be irrelevant. Richard told me that this was the real world now, and that I wasn’t there to form an opinion and act upon it. Instead, I should accept my manager’s wisdom as being for the greater corporate good.

 

On another memorable encounter with HardSoft’s Quality Assurance department, a Quality Manager audited the Business Partner Program. I had caused considerable amusement amongst my colleagues by being totally honest with the Quality Manager about the poor state of my filing. I honestly wanted constructive suggestions for improvement. After all, this was a colleague of mine from a different department in the same organization. I was probably the first person who did not try to hide the chaotic state of their affairs. I did not feel guilty about this situation because I was very productive then and genuinely too busy to have time to sort things out. The report was written up and when I did not see it, I asked the Quality Manager where it was. It had been issued to the managing director, executives and my manager, but not to me!!!! I asked him why this was and he said that it was a report for managers whilst I was merely an officer!! As if that makes it all right. They were auditing the position in order to look at the procedures and protect the organization if the jobholder subsequently left- helping the person to learn and realize their full potential was irrelevant.

 

Micro-management

 

A few months after starting work, I began reporting to a marketing manager, Steve. I became the first and only person to formally report to him. I actually believed at the time that this change in reporting was trivial because reporting relationships simply do not matter in the normal course of events. You go to the person who can help you with the question you have or make the decision you require if you can’t make it yourself. I feel that employees with obvious areas of responsibility like myself (running the Business Partner Program) do not need to be constantly checked: they know what needs to be done and how to do it.

 

Steve immediately began giving me a string of administrative tasks to do. This was the beginning of the end of my enjoyment of my time at HardSoft. These trivial tasks did not improve the way the Business Partner Program was run. Instead they were actions on him simply passed across to me without an explanation of what needed to be done. More fundamentally, I had no idea how this administration would have improved HardSoft’s processes: there was no justification and no opportunity for me to buy into the tasks. I simply ignored these tasks, with plenty of other more important things to do with my time. There is a very big difference between empowering an employee by delegating real responsibilities and passing across trivial tasks.

 

I really did not like the way that some HardSoft managers such as Steve micro-managed every aspect of the tasks their direct report employees performed. Steve was setting me weekly priorities for tasks that had to be completed in that time. These tasks were to take priority over calling business partners, corresponding with customers et cetera. He then forwarded the list upwards to show that he had me under control!! It was almost as if managers insist upon checking things just to appear worthwhile and feel that they are making a difference. The trouble with such close supervision and task prioritization is that it focuses efforts and rewards on the set list of tasks. Other work is either neglected or carried out but not recognized or rewarded. You never get thanked or praised for the work you have done, just hassled over the tasks on the list that you haven’t yet completed.

 

The following emails were typical of the exchanges between Steve and I:

 

 

At least my former boss Graham had respected the value of my business education. He was simply too occupied with his own work and not the sort of person to thoroughly check every piece of work that I sent out. As long as I waved my output in front of his face, which he passed straight back, I was covered in case anything incorrect did go out. I wasn’t trying to bypass the chains of authority, I already knew to ask when unsure about something or when something was being communicated for the first time or an offer was being made that deviated from our published prices and policy. Checking everything that went out of the door, when most of it was routine communication, would be excessive.

 

On one occasion, Steve spent a lot of time pointing out the imperfections in a document that he had asked me to write. He cared about the document and what it contained and wanted it to persuade its audience that our (in that case, shared) arguments were polished truth: clear and lucrative for all to see.  I cannot help but get amused by such micro-management, so that I can cope with it. Micro-management is such seriousness about such trivia. I reminded myself that I was being paid, and forced myself to take it seriously. I subsequently revisited the document and sought evidence of the points he made, and found so very few, for he was making such small points in such a large way. I was left confused, not knowing how to significantly revise the document in ways that were satisfactory to him. No-one who could see the wider perspective, the trivia associated with the points being made, would ever have bothered with them. I wonder what makes someone care about such nonsense- what lack in the macro is it that makes such micro matter? From the mind of a micro-man or woman comes micro-management.

 

I found myself being drawn into apologizing for my lack of clarity and blaming it on his unclear instructions. This is not without truth: I was not certain who the audience for that document was, so how could I clearly address that audience? It is often quicker to carry out such jobs yourself, and the end result is often of a higher quality too. No matter how much time and effort the manager takes to clarify their requirements and intentions, they will always be interpreted differently, because of ambiguity in language and differences in the mental models that people use to interpret those words. And so I frequently found myself in situations where I was criticized for not making my arguments clear, for not ensuring relevance, for not taking things to their final point, when this has become my core business when writing the unorganization books.

 

I would not have done half of what I actually did without constant badgering- I was personally committed to my employment but not obsessed with it like Steve was. You only need supervision if you are not motivated, but there is nothing more demotivating in this world than being micro-managed and effectively bullied by your managers. In such an environment, task completion is carried out mainly because of fear. The context is falsely elevated above the content in importance. This means that plans are written just to keep managers off our backs and not because we care about the content. We write what we are told and have to get it done so quickly that we neglect to analyze what we are saying.

 

Micro-management is necessary when people are doing just enough, not whatever it takes. The need for micro-management arises out of the need to improve things written or done by people who do not care about them and are doing them because they have to and not because they want to. Micro-management is necessary when subordinates are forced to undertake tasks they do not empathize with. Micro-management is NOT necessary when people are seeking to meet the needs of their audience and their customers, because the person knows who the audience is and what the requirements are. They own the process and control the output. They cannot control the response to that output, but know that they are maximizing the chances that it succeeds, because they are instilling their own passionate belief and interest into it. To eliminate the need for micro-management, we need to evolve a model of management and organization in which everyone is able to do what they want to do, what they care about and are interested in.

 

Internal controls

 

When Steve complained about the non-completion of these trivial tasks, I emailed Graham, Steve’s boss and my ex-boss, requesting that administrative barriers were not put in my way that slowed me down. Graham replied that I should view internal administrative tasks as an opportunity to work with colleagues in my organization. A good point perhaps, concentrating on the process and not the outcome, but ultimately results matter.  After all, that which is not worth doing is not worth doing well. There is nothing more wasteful than doing well that which should not be done. There is a huge difference between “business” and “busyness”. The aim of “unorganization” is to increase the amount of business and reduce the amount of busyness that arises in organizational contexts.

 

Graham also asserted that management controls exist to guide and assist employees, rather than to stifle them. I don’t believe that management assists. Much of the intervention in my work infringed at such a basic level on my freedom to act that it could only have been designed to impede my progress. Almost never could it be said that my managers improved the quality or direction of my decision making.

 

According to HardSoft’s own guidelines for managers, internal organizational controls “covers all day-to-day controls which aim to ensure the smooth operation of your business. It includes checks and balances, procedures, policies and guidelines, rules and structures put in place by management.” Examples of internal controls include organization structure, segregation of duties, written procedures, management information and management monitoring.

 

After getting my own way and doing my own thing for so long, it was probably only a matter of time before HardSoft’s management made further attempts to try and regulate me and encroach on my decision making autonomy. After all by that time I was running some major customer accounts, all of the Business Partner Program and some new product development.

 

Sure enough, the restrictions soon came. After a week’s absence from the office on the road visiting customers, my manager Steve told me that my responsibility for products such as sending a short message to a fax machine was being withdrawn. When I had first started reporting to Steve, he had given me these sorts of new products to manage. I had been so pre-occupied with customers and business partners that I hadn’t paid much attention to the new products I was responsible for developing. My boss concluded from this that I was a poor product manager- not that I was too busy to manage those products at that time. I had neglected those products temporarily but the customer activity had then slowed. I would have then had more time to look at the products. Managers were making decisions and drawing conclusions with a significant long-term effect on the basis of a temporary perceived event. I saw this sort of behavior so much from my managers that I call it “conclusion grabbing” and “decision fumbling”, just like politicians who respond to serial events with permanent legislation. They use one-off extreme cases as an excuse to intervene and regulate every situation.

 

Removal of my product responsibilities alone would have been mildly understandable. At that stage, I was seriously overloaded with work- with too much to do even for someone as productive as myself. However, the product management setback was coupled with severe limits on my autonomy to develop the Business Partner Program for HardSoft’s business partners. From then on, all meetings I had were to be authorized by my immediate manager and the department head. This internal control was introduced despite the fact that of the 37 such companies I had formally met with in the previous six months, 32 had chosen to write applications for the HardSoft network. This was without budget or any formal business partners program literature.

 

I consider this level of intervention in the activities of individual employees to be excessive and I complained strongly about this internal control, first to my manager Steve and subsequently to the department head Richard. I assumed at the time that if management introduced a wrong procedure I could argue against it and get it withdrawn. I hadn’t considered that management could introduce the procedure with the deliberate intention of constraining subordinates. I honestly believe that my managers introduced these restrictions out of jealousy and lack of self-confidence. They simply did not like me being so popular with external organizations. Both Richard and Steve admitted that they wished they got out of the office more.

 

The requirement for meeting authorization was devastatingly effective in reducing the number of meetings I had from at least one a day to about one a week. After a week in which I had no meetings at all, for the first time ever, I started to go outside of the authorization procedure. I liberally interpreted it as meaning that I could not meet new business partners without permission, but the 50 or so existing, signed up partners could be met at will. I also co-opted assistance from other members of staff and implied that I was just supporting them. Going into meetings accompanied by a manager, even if that person was not my manager, was more comforting to my own managers.

 

I suspect that the primary reason for having a full set of “checks and balances, procedures, policies and guidelines, rules and structures” is to keep managers above their “subordinates” in the “hierarchy”. Everyone at all “levels” left in the downsized organization is simply too busy to keep written procedures up-to-date. Clearly segregated duties are infinitely hazardous when the workload of customer opportunities must be spread between staff members. Management has neither the time nor the cognitive capacity to continually monitor the organizational controls and the people. Internal controls put the focus on managerial control and internal procedures, rather than the all-important external customers. These formal internal controls set by management simply inhibit employees from getting their job done.

 

Managerial experience

 

Head of the department Richard and I met to discuss this issue of internal controls. This was in many ways a remarkable meeting. Richard started by saying that Steve was a good product manager, something I agreed with. It was his people management skills that left a lot to be desired. Richard then embarked on a monologue about the right of the department head to understand and determine the direction of the department. Given the collapse of communism under the burden of its own ego, I really do not see why top managers should behave like dictators. When I tried to counter, I was told not to interrupt. Richard was someone who other people regularly labeled an intelligent person. Because of this, I had difficulty working out why he could not use real reasoning with me, rather than invoking rank.

 

The main thrust of Richard’s argument for the intervention was the collective experience of my managers gathered over many years of presence in the industry, compared to my lack of experience. This was the first time I had really thought about the actual importance of wisdom gained over the years i.e. experience. I knew it to be a false argument and could not suppress a smile at a director seriously using it as justification for his intervention.

 

An example of the problems that having experience can cause arose when HardSoft needed some software development to be undertaken. My managers assigned the project to a contractor who had successfully carried out some work for the department two to three years previously. The contractor’s company had since gone out of business and the contractor was no longer in a position to do the job. Managers made the mistake of selecting a vendor on the basis of their past experience that was no longer relevant, without systematically considering alternative vendors. Experienced people tend to make today’s decisions based on yesterday’s facts even though the world has changed. Instead we should assume nothing and always re-evaluate our assumptions and keep an open mind.

 

Unfortunately, because HardSoft at that time contained too few professional managers, I felt like I was much more qualified in running a business than my managers were. The increasing numbers of graduates with degrees means that ever more incoming employees will be better qualified than their older managers who entered the workforce at a time when qualifications were not a pre-requisite for entry into larger organizations. The two most senior HardSoft Marketing department managers both held engineering degrees. My direct boss held a degree in computing along with a diploma in management. This doesn’t say much for the rigors of part-time education! No systematic analysis of events or issues took place: no attempt to position decisions or opportunities within a wider context.

 

During my employment at HardSoft, my unprofessional managers made decision after decision incorrectly. Active decision making by HardSoft managers, in which they actively intervened to take a specific decision, and their non-systematic behavior in general, had caused a lot of other operating difficulties. Some of the resulting errors were more costly than others. The worst example of wasted expenditure (you could not call it investment) was the approximately $US 1 million spent developing a new value-added network service. The company that had developed it had already introduced one version in another part of the world- but HardSoft’s managers insisted upon completely redeveloping the front and back end of the software. This is where the cost came in. When the software was finally released, there were already several earlier, cheaper and better alternatives for consumers. HardSoft had made the classic mistake and focused on technology rather than customers. They ended up with an over-engineered and under-imaginative product. Designed to be the next “killer application” that every HardSoft customer must have, it ended up getting only a few hundred customers before being withdrawn from sale. Once again, the focus was put on internal procedures rather than external customers.

 

Reasons for promotions

 

On one occasion, a HardSoft manager came into my corporate cubicle and I said “What now?”. He said “Remember that you’re talking to a manager” to which I promptly replied “If I was your age, even I’d except to be a manager!”. Similarly, all the title “department head” means in a hierarchy is that its holder has managed to flatter their seniors especially well, being particularly adept at playing corporate games and getting their own way. Promotion in hierarchies is too often a reward for managing to subsume your personal beliefs to those of the organization. In other words, you get promoted if you let yourself be socialized by the organization. There are often other arbitrary rules governing promotions at all levels.

 

For example, in HardSoft, neither could you move up to the next level of the hierarchy until you had spent a fixed amount of time in your current position, nor could you reach senior management rank until you were thirty. These rules were left over from the days of having Racal as the parent company. Such arbitrary rules constrain the development of both the individual and the organization and have no place in the unorganized world where the only prejudice is talent- not age or sex or color or anything else.

 

After two years in the organization as a Marketing Officer, Paul was promoted to Marketing Manager. He had started out being disruptive like me, having to apologize to the organization’s former Finance Director after complaining that his tight-fisted nature was making it difficult to win new business because we could not loan phones to potential customers for trial purposes. Gradually, Paul became more deferential to the head of department Richard, paying him a lot of attention (subconsciously I think) and laughing at all his jokes. Have you noticed how people mill around senior managers, giving them their uninterrupted attention and laughing at everything they say, even when the comments were not meant as jokes? I really cannot stand this practice. As far as I am concerned, respect has to be earned and is not automatically conferred by mere rank alone.

 

Soon after his promotion, Paul moved into a large rented house shared with one other person in his early thirties. It is what I call an adult house, far removed from the student accommodation that he had vacated only a couple of years previously. He became a manager, got a steady girlfriend and a nice green mid-class company car to replace his own small blue car. Every month he consciously bought himself something nice. “Fat slavery” in which people compensate themselves for disappointing and uninteresting working lives in what free time they have is one choice. However, “fat liberty” in which people control their time and destiny- without financial disadvantage- is a better one.

 

Organizational politics

 

I discussed this situation with Paul and he agreed that he had been promoted because he had towed the organization line, but also because the organization has to promote you after a certain period of time. I asked him how he managed to stay happy in HardSoft and he replied that his philosophy was to view work in a hierarchy as a game, because if you think of it like that, it is much more tolerable. He didn’t think that he was doing his job any better or worse than me, he was just keeping Richard happy. Doing your job well is not enough, you have to play the game of politics as well. It is all a game and you have to cover your back. It is all a game if you can be bothered to play.

 

Paul said that he always did what Richard asked straight away. He dropped everything when Richard asked for something because as the marketing director, he was the most important person in the department. He asked Richard to explain things, even if he understood them, because it made Richard feel secure in his position of power. For example, Paul was always asking Richard for an update about how sales volumes were going. Because of this, Steve started updating Paul on sales without him asking. My manager Steve was volunteering information because he knew that Paul would ask Richard and did not want his position undermined. Paul then went and asked Richard anyway, throwing in intelligent comments from the information he had gleaned from Steve!

 

Soon after, one of the account managers was really getting too arrogant. She was also adept at playing politics, reporting everything back to her managers. I took a couple of calls from her accounts because they were unable to get through to her. When I called her afterwards to pass the details on, she cut me off and said that I should have passed the calls straight through to her. I was shocked at this rudeness: even I had at least tried to get on with my fellow colleagues, if not my own managers!  When she then reported to Steve that I had not passed these leads to her, I told her directly that she had an attitude problem. As other colleagues later said, it was a shame it had to be me who had criticized her- it was needed but didn’t look good coming from me, by then, seen as the department’s bad boy. Steve said that we would deal with the issue the next day.

 

Predictably, at the start of the next day, Steve was straight in to see Richard for a closed-door session. In the end, Graham asked me to apologize to the account manager which I eventually and reluctantly agreed to do in return for a promise that he had a word with her about her attitude. At my next weekly supervision meeting with Steve I told him that I had found it disconcerting to see him visiting his boss so promptly to report on my behavior. Steve replied that he did speak to Richard about other things apart from me. I knew enough though. Two things are worth remarking on. I agreed to, and did, apologize over a matter for which I was not in the wrong- just for a quiet life. Not only that, but I had played the political game and wound Steve up over his actions. It’s worrying what these hierarchies can do to you.

 

Non-Disclosure Agreements

 

I had been managing a project with large potential for developing mobile solutions using the HardSoft network. The potential business partner company had developed a very novel and powerful technology of great interest. They insisted on a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) with HardSoft to ensure that information about their technology went no further. I agreed with HardSoft’s policy of avoiding signing Non-Disclosure Agreements wherever possible. However, this company’s livelihood depended on it being first and best to the market. They were paranoid about disclosing anything and as such not having an NDA would have prevented any meetings or cooperation taking place.

 

I had gone so far as to discuss the project in detail with both my direct boss and the department head and received at that stage no explicit indication that the opportunity should not be pursued. I had got HardSoft’s legal department to draw up a suitable Non-Disclosure Agreement and as it was a non-typical activity, passed it across to my manager for checking. He passed it back with a note saying “See if you can get Engineering to sign this”. I’d briefed and invited a representative of this department. The problem was that managers were vague when they needed to be precise and precise when they should have been vague.

 

A couple of weeks later, the potential business partner company came in and we had the meeting, with three representatives from their firm and three from my own organization. I signed the Non-Disclosure Agreement as did they and the meeting was held and was very interesting. The technology was very flexible and its deployment did not depend upon the cooperation of HardSoft Engineering: it could all be managed as part of my Business Partner Program. The meeting was interrupted by the department head, who called one of my colleagues out for a brief discussion about (I assume) who had signed the Non-Disclosure Agreement.

 

After the meeting, I was interrogated by my manager Steve. I was told that someone at my low hierarchical level was not authorized to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements. I apologized for this, although it hadn’t even crossed my mind when signing it that I was not allowed to. I may have unknowingly made a mistake in signing the Non-Disclosure Agreement in the first place, but someone authorized to sign it could have simply countersigned. This would have helped make the potential business partner feel important without jeopardizing the opportunity. The fact that the independent company wanted to work with us, and that any such cooperation would have been mutually beneficial, was ignored. The Non-Disclosure Agreement was terminated, along with all contact between my organization and the potential partner company. The procedure got in the way of the opportunity. My managers were not interested in the outcome of the meeting itself, just the procedures. I saw this focus on processes rather than results time and time again.

 

Verbal warning

 

At this stage, I chatted to a few of my colleagues about my predicament including one of my other colleagues was also under pressure from management. He said that he had not left the organization simply because you had to remain employed for a certain length of time before HardSoft employees got to keep their job relocation allowance.

 

The department head and I met to discuss all of these issues regarding my conduct. The meeting was called on Monday for the following Friday, and whilst waiting I felt like I was living on borrowed time. Graham and I exchanged the following emails about the meeting:

 

 

I wanted to get someone from the personnel department involved because I was sick and tired of going around in circles between myself and my bosses. I got fed up seeing the same faces over and over every day. I wanted someone from the personnel department to be present who hadn’t been involved in the day-to-day issues and therefore had a fresh perspective. Management ignored my twice-repeated request for the personnel department to be represented.

 

At around the same time, we had a very interesting off-site meeting. It was the first and only one I attended and showed my managers in their true colors. My colleagues and I had thought that the idea of the off-site meeting was to work out what new products we were going to develop over the coming year. It turned out that we just gathered together all of the same people who spent all day every day with each other anyway. Managers just acted defensively when anyone made a constructive suggestion and these ideas were shot down in flames such that after everyone had made one proposal they dared not make any more. Thereafter, Richard went off on one of his monologues. If only the Managing Director who had introduced the meeting had stayed and seen this. The problem is that there was never an independent presence from outside the department to observe how managers treated their “subordinates” and top directors did not see this side of their department heads either. This is as good a reason for senior managers to adopt “Managing By Wandering Around” as any you’ll find.

 

Colleagues gave me their advice on how to handle this imminent meeting about my conduct. Graham advised me to be humble during the meeting and apologize for my conduct. He said that I couldn’t hope to win out over a company director. I told Graham that I had no issues with him, and that the general consensus around the office was that he was a good guy who understood that we were all under pressure, working hard and getting a lot done. Fellow recent graduate Paul came around to my house after work and we had a long chat about the situation at the office. His advice was not to lose my temper and resign. Paul said that the opportunity at HardSoft was good and that I needed to get at least a couple of years working behind me so that it looked good on my resume. He said that he thought Richard respected me as he could probably see a lot of himself in me because of his intelligence and his interest in technologies. Richard was the sort of person who was very polite and friendly as long as you were agreeing with him and did not question his views or answer back.

 

All of these events culminated in me receiving a verbal warning from the head of department about my conduct, which conveniently for us, he chose to confirm in writing. This letter is reprinted without alteration (other than names) below. It was written 14 months after I had begun work in the marketing department.

 

 

It took a few days after the meeting to get the letter content typed up and agreed, but that’s the nature of hierarchies for you- quick they are not.

 

As is reflected in this letter, one difficulty that I certainly had was reconciling conflicts between work and my private life. Obviously, most people expect to have interests outside of work (indeed they often need them to keep their body and mind occupied). Problems arise if these interests conflict with the views of the firm such as these opinions here. Some of the views I hold personally may appear to be fairly controversial. There were several times during my employment at HardSoft when my opinions were published as letters in newspapers and magazines. Ultimately, I decided that these activities were too important to me to sacrifice them for the hierarchy’s interests. After all, HardSoft did not pay me that much considering I worked 47 hours a week 47 weeks a year for them. These days, the same person often wears different hats.

 

The comment in the letter about me sending “communications to various people” referred to the fact that I had issued quite a few memos and emails around the organization with ideas on them about how the market was developing and new products. These memos were unsolicited, but contained valid and good ideas, many of them very innovative. They were sent to the relevant managers responsible for the issues raised. I knew these people from my previous sponsorship placements. The first few memos went out without negative comment from my management, returned with comments such as “What actions are you proposing?”. Obviously, senior management does not have a monopoly on good ideas, and new starters can often bring a fresh perspective to a product or opportunity. I was glad to be able to communicate my ideas to other people, for the overall good of the organization. I felt the need to contribute my ideas beyond the narrow confines of my job description, and when I was prevented from adding value internally within HardSoft, I turned my attention to unorg and other external tasks.

 

Richard scribbled the following on the copy of this memo I sent him:

 

 

This reply went to Steve first and was passed on down the hierarchy to me. Steve added “Simon Pls take note of Richard’s words. Pls do not circulate such memos. Steve”. Remarkably, someone else raised the same idea about three months later and Richard revealed that he had looked into it and found the idea to be unfeasible TWO-THREE years ago. This is a long time in the technology business as I pointed out to him. He then blamed me for not investigating the feasibility when making the suggestion.

 

As Richard's letter states "some of the content of these communications have been matters which are being dealt with within the department. Only one memo had been considered, but this was enough for management to tell me to stop sending all such memos. Managers were using one-off extreme cases as an excuse to intervene and regulate every situation.

 

The letter also said that I had signed the confidentiality agreement "against my and Steve Cumming's specific instructions". This was not the case, as the vague Post-It note saying "See if you can get engineering to sign this" shows.

 

Positive Practices

 

It would be very easy to forget the few good practices that HardSoft adopted in this tide of complaint. But, of course, there were some positive aspects, including:

 

'        Sponsorships. I joined HardSoft because it had a student sponsorship program in place. Throughout my university degree I was a sponsored student. Basically, I agreed to work for the company during my summer vacation for a minimum of four weeks, with longer periods of work and employment during other vacations very negotiable. In return, HardSoft paid me '30 (US$ 50) per week during university terms and a very fair high salary during the university holidays. This kept my student debts down when I graduated. There was no contractual obligation on either side to offer or accept full time employment with HardSoft at the end of my degree and sponsorship, but that was nonetheless the intention.

 

I completed sponsorship placements in six company departments over the course of the four year sponsorship, including marketing, operations, quality assurance, and at the German subsidiary in the personnel department. I had gained a lot of practical knowledge about how organizations are structured and run, to couple with the theory I was learning in my business degree. I completed a university quality assurance assignment using my own unique case study of my sponsoring firm, getting me better marks.

 

Sponsorship programs help companies gain a better insight (but not perfect insight- full-time work is very different from a short-term placement) into how particular people actually fit into their company. This insight reduces the reliance on extensive pre-recruitment testing and interviewing and also reducing (although not eliminating) the risk of recruiting someone who is not suited to the organization. The emphasis in graduate recruitment interviews is usually (falsely) on experience gained in organizational contexts, which sponsorship programs provide. As an imminent graduate I was able to concentrate on my final exams, rather than devoting a lot of time and effort to applying and interviewing for graduate positions. In all honesty, the graduate recruitment application forms I saw were often more difficult than passing final exams with long sections to explain how a particular university event you took part in signaled your management potential.

 

The sponsorship had been mutually beneficial- HardSoft had benefited from having a hardworking and not too expensive work resource and I had gained much practical business insight. All in all, student sponsorship programs are an excellent idea that should be much more widely offered by business firms.

 

'        Weekly departmental meetings. Every week, Richard chaired a meeting at which each department member got to report back on what they had been working on during that week, who they had seen and what progress had been made. Everyone exchanged information systematically and gave feedback on different opportunities. This meeting served the dual purposes of keeping everyone informed whilst keeping everyone accountable- because people listed their actions and achievements. 

 

'        External communication. The marketing department did make a concerted effort to systematically communicate with external “stakeholders”. It held customer conferences, attended industry conferences, held press days, had regular business partners meetings, went on a round-the-country roadshow and so on. The Business Partners Programme typified this external openness.

 

It is interesting that one of my former colleagues reflected that the time I was in the HardSoft had been really great and a lot of fun. When I reflect on it, things did start off really well and I had enjoyed working there. My memory had been clouded by the restrictions that had been put in place at the end of my employment. I can never really feel anything but discomfort about HardSoft- there are always good times even under the most restrictive regimes- but that does not make it right.

 

Exit

 

I labored on in HardSoft for a few months after these events and actually ended up in a position where I had, relative to my colleagues, a lot of freedom to get on with what I wanted during work hours. I had battled hard enough to get my own way in a lot of things and was pretty much left to my own devices. I very rarely even spoke to Steve or Richard. However, internally, I felt as though I was “hunted” and could not relax in the office at all- I was continuously tense and looking over my shoulder. Lots of little procedures appeared such as an office rule saying “Access to the Internet is only for business purposes”. Fortunately it did not say which business! It is lots of little things like that which get to you after a while.

 

At the same time, a couple of months after my verbal warning, I got myself a good job offer from another company. Once it had been confirmed in writing, I handed in my resignation. I felt elated that just like when I was a sponsored HardSoft student, when someone gave me a pointless job to do, I knew I would soon leave. All of my colleagues wished me well with my new job and many could see why I wanted to leave and were not surprised at my decision.

 

On my last day at work in my first job, I sat down with the department head Richard Pemberton for one last time and had my “exit interview”.

 

I retained a photocopy of the questionnaire from the exit interview, which I reproduce below:

 

 

Holding exit interviews when an employee leaves is certainly more valuable than having no formal and systematic exchange of information. However, I found that there is a tendency to be less than completely honest in exit interviews as the person leaving does not particularly care anymore and is ready to leave, and the exit interviewer is fairly anxious to deflect blame for the departure from him/ herself. For example, the questionnaire states that I had a “positive view of my time at HardSoft”. This is not true at all, as you can tell from my publication of this book! Neither would my former HardSoft employer re-employ me in a hurry! Indeed, you have to read between the lines to find great truth in this, as read alone, you would not gauge the level of discomfort I felt in that position. It particularly annoys me to be described as only satisfactory when it comes to honesty/ integrity, as I invest considerable effort in being completely and utterly honest. Still, as we have seen, being a brander, a person who has multiple interests and specialist knowledge, in a hierarchy, is not always a straightforward matter these days.

 

More truth can be ascertained from the informal discussion and conversation after the formal aspects had taken place. The marketing director Richard stated that he had taken a risk in taking me on but felt that it had been worth it initially. He had lobbied to get me opportunities to speak at important conferences when others more senior in the organization had expressed reservations. Richard spoke about how he had expected me to mellow out after a few months. I said that in fact I had become more uncomfortable over time as more and more restrictions were put in my way. I felt that I was too young to settle down just then. Richard explained how he had gone through a lot of the same things as I had and felt that he did not say “Yes” enough to his seniors and that was why he was not chief executive of HardSoft. It is a tragedy that those who get ahead in organizations are those who tow the line and agree with what their seniors say.

 

At lunchtime on my leaving day, I was given a presentation when most of the organization gathered to give me a card and some gifts. I cannot remember what the gifts were- there were some novelty items- such as “cola bottle” sweets on account of my enjoyment of Coca-Cola. The department head Richard Pemberton gave the farewell speech and for the first time, he explicitly thanked me for establishing the Business Partner Program and for conferring a positive impression of HardSoft on the business partner community. Recognition and thanks at last, but much too little, much too late. He also told everyone I was leaving to travel more widely- and this was the reason I gave too.

 

Despite the fact that one of my colleagues said that if you cut me in half, I would read “HardSoft”, this rapidly changed when my managers started intervening in my work. That is the tragedy of the hierarchy: you either let it weigh you down and subsume your personal principles to the interests of the organization or you leave. I was not willing to sacrifice my own performance just to appease some insecure managers and I left. I had learned a lot over those months. None of it good. But all of it useful.

 

Having left HardSoft, it was a tremendous relief to have thrown off the shackles of hierarchy and left behind the procedures and managers. I felt as though I had escaped with my life before I got locked in. Even if I had been leaving my office to go to a part-time or less well paid job, I would still have felt as though such a downshift from “fat slavery” would be a good move and would not have regretted leaving.

 

Ironically, I was seen as a success by many of my peers. I remember explaining what I did at HardSoft to some friends of a friend. It sounded impressive and I wasn’t exaggerating. But the procedures and the office environment and management practices made work in reality difficult to bear. This particular “success story” was unhappy, trying to conform to the expectations of near and far family and even some of my friends. I asked one of my friends if he would be disappointed if I left HardSoft and was not a corporate high flyer. Gratifyingly he said he liked my individuality and told me not to lose it. A job is only as good as its holder feels about it- and no-one knows how they feel but them.

 

So after consciously making a well-informed decision to join a organization I knew well, in a job I excelled at, appreciated by everyone outside the organization, I had left my “permanent” position after just eighteen months, with a lot of my “career” still ahead of me. You can find the perfect job in the perfect industry, and the hierarchy stills makes it intolerable. Even if you can find an interesting and growing industry, product or service, then chances are that the related organizations will not share those characteristics. The management guru Tom Peters is absolutely right to say "Most organizations bore me stiff. I can’t imagine working in one of them. I’d be sad if my children chose to. Most organizations, large and even small, are as bland as bean curd". (PETERS, 1994). I like Tom Peters. He dislikes static organizations almost as much as I do. Almost.

 

 

Company History

 

A few days after leaving HardSoft, I joined SoftTech as “Development Manager- Enabling Technologies”. This was a pretty vague and all-encompassing title in another high technology company.

 

SoftTech Inc. was headquartered in the US. When I joined it, the company was only a few years old even younger than HardSoft- and had changed its name a couple of years previously from one of the instantly forgettable acronyms that litter technical industries. Soon after the name change came a flotation on NASDAQ, a US stock exchange.

 

SoftTech’s “business mission is to distribute mobile phone products and provide related value-added services to the mobile industry on a worldwide basis. SoftTech must be the most efficient and effective channel of distribution for its vendors, and the lowest cost and highest service provider to its customers. SoftTech must be the best total cost provider in terms of price and performance”. SoftTech had set out to achieve excellence and lead the world in mobile phone distribution and services and had achieved this aim.

 

SoftTech had grown rapidly, doubling its sales every year throughout its history.  Its customer base had grown to over 15,000 accounts including over 150 phone manufacturers and thousands of agents, resellers, dealers and retailers. This growth rate was set to continue through aggressive global expansion, primarily through acquisition. Raising money on a US stock exchange financed such expansion. Stock market capitalization exceeded US $1 billion. As the company president reflected “It was only four years ago that we had a dozen employees and turnover of 27 million US dollars. Every afternoon, I used to ring the bank to ask what sums had been credited to our account before deciding which bills to pay”. The company’s rapid growth was enough to earn awards for its directors from US business publications- the company’s chairman and chief operating officer was only aged in his early 30s.

 

Globalization

 

The growth in sales had been matched by a growth in globalization. SoftTech was expanding into a new country market somewhere in the world every couple of weeks. In my 18 months of employment there, the number of countries where SoftTech operated grew from a dozen to over one hundred on all six continents. Speed was of the essence, moving into more and more markets, raising more and more funding from the stockmarket and aggressively pursuing global opportunities. The need for speed was driven by the desire to capture a significant share of the rapid inherent growth in mobile phone sales in local markets.

 

SoftTech had few credible global competitors- if you looked at the value chain in the mobile industry- the collective processes and functions undertaken in manufacturing, distribution, marketing and sales- it was characterized by high competition in all areas apart from distribution. Companies such as HardSoft were dealing in highly competitive markets, whilst SoftTech had a unique global opportunity to build an unparalleled global capability. Its competitors were companies elsewhere in the value chain, such as vertical integrated phone manufacturers and network operators, plus many local and some regional companies.

 

By 1998, North America accounted for a just a quarter of all sales, down from a half just a year before. SoftTech organized its global operations on the basis of “hubs” and “spokes”. It had local physical distribution warehouses on each of the world’s six continents, and sales were honored from those facilities. For example, all African countries were served from South Africa, and China was managed from Hong Kong. Each regional distribution hub served several local “spoke” countries. As sales increased in each market, a local distribution presence was established. For example, Miami in the US was the base for sales to Latin America, until the level of sales justified acquisitions and local infrastructure in countries such as Brazil.

 

By the middle of 1998, SoftTech had six divisions: North Asia, North America, Latin America, South Pacific/ Southeast Asia, EMA (Europe, Africa and Middle East) and SoftTech Global Access, the division responsible for managing the global supply contracts that SoftTech’s unique global capability allowed it to capture. For example, global operators were signing exclusive distribution agreements such that all units of their new phone models were shipped direct from manufacturers to SoftTech for distribution globally. This was mutually beneficial: taking SoftTech into new markets and increasing the channels that the manufacturers could reach.

 

Business activities

 

SoftTech’s net sales were comprised of a combination of sales in three main areas: mobile phones, related accessories, and fees generated from “fulfillment” and software services. Fulfillment meant that instead of a standard product being delivered to the retail outlet in a standard box, SoftTech delivered the product in customized packaging for the particular seller and purchaser.

 

In addition to globalizing its sales over time, SoftTech had also gradually moved the nature and form of its business into higher value-added areas- whilst staying focused on the mobile industry. This was part of its move beyond the basic distribution of standard undifferentiated phones. The idea was to build on the existing relationships it had with phone manufacturers and retailers and add more value over and above the low margin business of phone distribution. Given its huge investment in distribution infrastructure, SoftTech wanted to ensure that it maximized the amount of volume it was distributing through that infrastructure- whilst at the same time staying with complementary products for mobile phone users.

 

Mobile phones accounted for a falling proportion of SoftTech's total sales, although they still accounted for more than three-quarters. Accessories were falling as a proportion of sales whilst fulfillment grew from nothing to over 10% of the total business.

 

SoftTech’s phone distribution business took mobile phones from manufacturers and supplied them to the various places you could buy phones from such as direct sales, retailers and resellers. SoftTech Distribution took the phones from the people who made them, packaged them up and then distributed them to the people who sell them. SoftTech’s distribution services included purchasing, marketing, selling, warehousing, picking, packing, shipping and "just-in-time" delivery.

 

The established distribution business employed several hundred people in sourcing phones, selling them and distributing them. This organized area of SoftTech’s business was hard work- it involved physical equipment- but it was also highly efficient. Over 30 million US dollars had been invested in Information Technology (IT) systems to provide accurate and timely information on the status of products and deliveries within and outside the company. For example, automatic location and tracking of inventory inside the warehouse and en route to its purchaser was carried out using barcoding systems. The exact stock balances in any retail outlet could be remotely ascertained, with automatic stock replenishment, such that phones that had been sold were automatically reordered and replaced. “Extranets” in which SoftTech and the phone manufacturers, network operators and retailers could exchange information were implemented. By sharing information throughout the entire value chain, from manufacturer to distributor to retailer, efficient and cost-effective restocking was possible.

 

Although fulfillment services represented a relatively small percentage of net sales, their impact on SoftTech's gross profit was much greater because of their higher margins. Additionally, their growth as a percentage of total net sales was clearly growing rapidly. SoftTech was trying to continue to increase the percentage of fulfilled phones it distributed as a proportion of the total number of all phones it handled. SoftTech’s fulfillment services included, among others, inventory management, procurement, programming, light assembly, telemarketing, private labeling, kiting and customized packaging, financing, product warranty, repair and refurbishment and end-user support services. As another way to add more value to its phone hardware business, SoftTech began to expand into the provision of value-added services through an entity that I will label for this book SoftTech Software.

 

To continue its fast growth, SoftTech was committed to:

 

'        Build and maintain its position as the most efficient and effective channel of distribution

 

'        Create and maintain its global footprint

 

'        Improve its industry position by focusing on value-added services

 

'        Participate in the proliferation of new technologies

 

It identified the following critical success factors:

 

'        Analyze and pursue the right opportunities

 

'        Hire, train and retain the best employees

 

'        Invest in and develop a world class infrastructure

 

'        Maintain its strong financial position

 

The company’s president put the emphasis on “execution” (implementation) of opportunities, saying that SoftTech employees must “Never Confuse Effort with Results”. This is as close to a paraphrasing of “business not busyness!” that you will find.

 

As such, SoftTech could be visualized as an unorganized dynamic electronically connected network of value-added service people working on the back of, but often separately from, the organized physical distribution activities. I refer in this book to the combined personal phones and accessories business as SoftTech Distribution. The value-added services activities such as fulfillment and software services is referred to interchangeably as either the “unorganized services network” or “SoftTech Software”. The company could therefore be viewed as a “fried egg”- with the solid yolk in the center surrounded by a wavy outer line of unorganized people away from, but related to, that center. Most of the rest of this text will focus on the nature and form of the unorganized business development activities which- as we shall also see- deviated significantly from the more organized and established distribution activities in the company.

 

Recruitment Methods

 

SoftTech identified and hired talented people in a novel way. It had a recruitment policy of hiring from its partners, customers and suppliers. SoftTech's personnel worked on projects and then recommended that a certain person who they have enjoyed working with (or found to be a tough negotiator!) be recruited. They then typically handled the recruitment themselves- with little central input or support from a personnel department. There were no financial or other incentives to locate and cultivate potential recruits.

The potential recruit was approached and "sounded out" about a job with SoftTech. If interested, the potential recruit was then introduced to the boss of the person recommending the recruit- who then assessed that person nominally on the basis of their own knowledge of people and the company's corporate culture. No formal interview or systematic exchange of information took place! Such “interviews” often took place at sports matches. Indeed, it could be argued that the best way to access someone is in their natural work environment and in social contexts.

And this policy was surprisingly effective- I would say that it lead to the recruitment of better suited and able people than the traditional organized formal interview process based on age, qualifications and all that. Hiring someone that you have worked with reduces the learning curve associated with recruitment- whose formal membership and expensive benefits necessitate detailed interviewing. The artificial interview process in which participants play games to position themselves for the job is now outmoded.

 

I will use my own case as an example of SoftTech’s unorganized recruitment policy. As is so often the case, my second job came about through contacts and activities made during my first job. My main business partner contact at SoftTech, Joan Tomlin, introduced me to the company’s managing director at an industry exhibition. Later that day, she approached me saying that I must get a lot of offers, but would I be interested in joining them. My initial response was not to take the job, but after a few days of reflection and some more arbitrary hassle from my managers at HardSoft, I rang up and left Joan a voice mail message saying that I was interested after all. We discussed the role further over the phone a few times and twice more face-to-face, and agreed that I would join. A couple of months after SoftTech’s initial approach, my business partner became my employer.

 

People

 

Every company attracts and seeks a certain type of person to fit in with its operating practices and beliefs. SoftTech was no different in this. The official company “Employee of the Year” award rewarded employees who exemplified the SoftTech corporate values of “Accomplishment, Integrity, Customer Satisfaction, Vendor Satisfaction, Respect, Learning, and Espirit de Corps".

 

SoftTech was committed to recruiting respected people from its partners and customers within the mobile industry- at all levels of seniority. To achieve this, they paid their staff above average salaries for the industry, plus sizable stock options and bonuses. The high caliber of its staff was a key differentiator in giving SoftTech a more professional profile than its competitors. As SoftTech’s president commented: “The fact that such highly respected people in highly respected companies are willing to come on board and implement the SoftTech mission says something about how far we have come.” And something about the stock options attached to the job offers! As the company’s president continued: “I am excited by this group of intelligent and innovative people that we have bought together- I don’t see how such a group of people can fail to achieve exceptional results.” The implicit strategy was to hire smart people, and let them get on with doing smart things.

 

A group of about a dozen SoftTech employees was responsible for designing and delivering progress in the unorganized services network. These people were designated and paid as a corporate level resource who worked with and supported local company operations, but were separate from them. The unorganized services network was comprised of a group of globally dispersed people of all ages and levels of seniority within the company, and of a diverse range of nationalities. English as a first language was the common link- the people spoke English with accents from New Zealand, the UK, the US, Ireland and South Africa. Almost all of the senior people in the company were men- this was one of the few similarities between HardSoft and SoftTech.

 

It was not the case that the global group was principally board directors. Rather the top people in the company gave their approval to develop the business in these new areas. A few people already in the company were then tasked with developing those areas. They then hired new people who had the necessary knowledge and networks of contacts in those areas. As people got too busy to handle all of their ongoing tasks, they split their role and hired someone to take over and focus on a particular task.

 

Sometimes a suitable person was located, and then a job role formed around that person. This was the case with me- I was responsible for one of the software products. I was the only employee in that division and I sometimes thought that SoftTech retained my employment because they appreciated and respected me personally- rather than for the software business I was responsible for. They let me pursue my personal interest, and occasionally asked me whether I would be willing to expand my area of responsibility to other services- whilst being careful to reassure me that I could continue with what I was currently doing as well. This was not just a question of getting a greater return on their investment in me- it was because there were a lot of opportunities in different areas that needed resourcing, some of which were more profitable than the software services I was working on.

 

When I met the senior SoftTech management team from around the world, I was relieved to find that I liked what I saw. The senior executives seemed to split broadly into two different types of person. On the one hand, there were a lot of decent, solid, down-to-earth, intelligent professional country managers and executives who knew their markets, products and jobs well. There was also a smaller number of other executives who were cigar smoking, designer-suit wearing, permanently sun-tanned, Rolex watch and jewelry types. One incoming member of the executive team, recruited from a phone manufacturer, said he had never seen such well-dressed people as some of the board directors. He went out and bought himself some expensive suits to fit into the senior corps better! One of the other employees commented on the appearance of some of the executives by saying that customers must surely think that they are paying SoftTech too much if they can afford that sort of gear!

 

Staff at SoftTech had an interesting approach to loyalty towards the company. Those senior people with large stock holdings were incentivized to dedicate all of their waking hours to SoftTech and its business. On the other hand, many employees, especially those who had joined from senior positions in other companies, viewed the SoftTech opportunity as a lot of hard work for a couple of years of high financial reward that then financed and facilitated reasonably early retirement. It was an enjoyable if stressful job in a fast-moving industry but was a means to an end rather than an end in itself.

 

The overwhelming thing about SoftTech was the strength of its management team. These were intelligent, dynamic, interesting and lively people. They were the kind of colleagues that you could not help but like and admire. Given the general lack of intelligence amongst most of the HardSoft people I had worked with, I really appreciated this characteristic of the company.

 

Distributed Offices

 

I was based from the UK, but only visited SoftTech’s UK offices three times in my first year of employment. The offices were located over three hours away from where I was living and working. There was one six month period when I did not visit the offices at all- I only made the trip when my laptop stopped working completely and I needed a replacement from the Information Technology (IT) people. Even this replacement could have been carried out using an express courier.

 

In fact, unorganized services network employees such as myself were explicitly dissuaded from visiting the company’s distribution offices because of lack of office space due to fast growth. The company outgrew its purpose-built UK offices on greenfield land within two years of their completion. Everything from parking spaces, warehouse space and office floor space was scarce. Some of the SoftTech offices around the world did start off with a so-called “transit office” equipped with desk, phone and phone for traveling executives to base themselves in temporarily. But this space was soon taken over by office-based members of the SoftTech Distribution staff, as were meeting rooms, boardrooms and so on.

 

Within a year of me joining the company, one of the SoftTech directors and a department head had both decided to permanently relocate to a holiday destination. The director purchased a penthouse and the manager a studio in the same block of apartments in Spain. They pointed out that the flight connections from that location were just as good as those from any other airport. I could have very easily done the same and moved somewhere else and based myself and my work from there. Very few companies would allow their employees to relocate in this way!

 

SoftTech soon signed an agreement with an office facilities company, whereby traveling employees in the unorganized services network could use ready-to-use offices around the world that were fully furnished and equipped with communications technologies. Customers typically pay four or five times what you would for their own premises on a per square foot basis- for an impersonal office. You share your building with many other companies, and can easily get lost in the facility since it looks the same throughout. Passkeys and codewords allow you to operate office machines such as telephones and photocopiers.

 

SoftTech used a furnished offices services company’s office suites at key airports that employees were departing from, and arriving to, and also in regions where business was being developed. This was an interim solution before an acquisition was completed that had local office space in that local market. We used these offices for internal and external meetings when people were flying in from different places. We also used them to meet colleagues and do some work when traveling overseas.

 

Task Setting and Reporting Relationships

 

My boss Joan Tomlin was based on the other side of the world. We spoke to each other every other day and saw each other face-to-face about once every six to eight weeks- either for a customer meeting or at an airport as Joan flew through on her way from one side of the world to the other. Most of these meetings took place in hotels or airport lounges. In one twelve month period, Joan made eleven round-the-world trips.

 

Joan and I had a relationship that was much more peer-to-peer and friend-to-friend than superior-subordinate. We both knew that ultimately she was my boss and had the final say. However, she was happy to defer to me and respected my judgment, especially when it came to how I carried out my own job. After all, I was responsible for a segment of the software market that Joan knew, but not as well as me. Joan basically said that she was happy if I was happy. The time to reassess what we were doing was to come when I was no longer satisfied that we were moving in the right direction and making progress towards getting sales.

 

Initially when I joined SoftTech, Joan did try to get me to behave in a certain way in internal and external meetings. For example, I was very friendly and energetic when making occasional visits to the SoftTech UK offices. Joan argued that when visiting the office, we should treat internal visits as we would external visits- acting professionally, sitting down and making calls and so on to confer a positive impression of SoftTech Software on the SoftTech Distribution staff. I used the visit as a chance to catch up with people who I had not seen for a while. I had my reasons for behaving in that way and it was right for me. Joan soon gave up and admitted that it was not a good idea to try and change me- but rather to harness my advantages of enthusiasm, intelligence and so on.

 

I was not given any formal targets to meet- I had not had any in my first job either. During my first couple of months of employment, little or no activity was being carried out in my area. I felt guilty and anxious about this until I finally came to accept it as the way things were and managed to ignore my worries. Joan told me not to worry too much if I was not doing a lot of work every day- just as long as I completed the tasks that were set for me. Very few tasks were explicitly given to me- and even those were often subsequently forgotten about and not followed up on. Before joining, I asked Joan what I would do on my first day of employment at SoftTech. She thought briefly about it and replied that I would sleep in a little longer in the morning!

 

Overseas Travel

 

The SoftTech services staff were involved in what seemed to be a constant, ongoing circumnavigation of the globe. They were exploring and pursuing different opportunities in different markets. In fact, the unorganized services staff were expected to be ready to be deployed anywhere at a moment’s notice. Personal flexibility and mobility were of paramount importance- supporting opportunities and attending meetings, often with only a few hours notice- with tickets collected at the airport. I had to get used to travel and meeting plans changing at very short notice- teaching me both the difference between unorganization and disorganization and the need for flexibility and mobility. The fact that timescales have shortened considerably in today’s unorganized world was bought home to me. My friends and family had difficulty believing that I would not know what I was doing and where I was going until just before I set off. Eventually, we both adjusted to the new reality and got used to the unpredictability.

 

Initially when I wanted to organize an overseas meeting, my boss told me to get a written expression of interest from the customer. There needed to be a concrete reason for making the visit. Once I had written communication from the customer and verbal agreement from my boss, the authorization had been given, and the employee was fully supported and trusted in getting the work done. Authorization meant commitment. A corporate travel agency was then used to book flights and accommodation.

 

Formal travel authorization measures are understandable given the cost involved in making the visit- it is better not to waste time if there is little or no opportunity for business. Overseas business trips for SoftTech were fairly luxurious anyway- SoftTech’s policy was for its employees to travel in business class. Business class conferred greater flexibility in changing flights to suit dynamic schedules and using airport business lounges. SoftTech employees also stayed in top centrally located hotels, consumed meals and drinks on expense accounts, took taxis everywhere and so on. “Hotels, restaurants, air travel, theatre tickets, taxis, office space and especially lawyers all have price schedules geared to people who are not spending their own money. The modern corporate employee is a new kind of aristocrat, enjoying the economic privileges which go with being Director of Bottlewashing at Acme plc” (DUNCAN AND HOBSON, 1995).

 

Indeed, on my first field trip for SoftTech, to South Africa, I learned all about what I came to call “glamorous working”. This arises when executives mix their business with pleasure by working on the weekends around the pool and ordering expensive food and drink to nibble whilst they are working. It is in effect carrying out what is often dull work in a glamorous environment of luxury international hotels and first class cabins in airplanes. The glamour numbs the routine of the business details. I don’t admire the commitment of executives who work long hours at the weekends, but when you have flown in for just a couple of days and part of that stay is over a weekend, then you do have to work through and complete the objectives for your visit.

 

On the other hand, other SoftTech employees bought me into meetings in different countries with much less clear objectives as to what my contribution was. Unorganized services network people like myself were invited to meetings by distribution people just in case some technical people were there from the customer’s company or specific questions about the software services were asked. The distribution people could give a general introduction of the software services, which was all they really needed to be able to do. The presence of the software people provided comfort to the distribution people.

 

I saw some very interesting contrasting meeting styles from different SoftTech staff. A deferential approach was taken by some sales people and a confrontational, aggressive style by others. The friendly approach was aimed at making the customer feel good about themselves by treating them with respect and trying to cater to their every need. The more aggressive approach on the other hand was aimed at trying to convince the customer to accept the SoftTech model and services- with little willingness to alter this view. I tried to find a middle way- emphasizing that SoftTech could supply best-of-breed services- whilst being friendly but making it clear that practice from around the world indicated that certain approaches did work better.

 

Software strategy- partnering

 

The SoftTech Software strategy was to partner with software suppliers and get outsourcing contracts from phone manufacturers. SoftTech was very much a part of the trend towards outsourcing. Not only did it specialize in and take over part of its customer’s business operations, but it also outsourced many of its own non-strategic activities such as travel and property management. It even outsourced the distribution of the packages it had fulfilled- to FedEx, a courier company.

 

SoftTech Software identified the best-of-breed suppliers of this software from around the world and then concluded business partnership agreements with them. In practice, this meant that I selected the best HardSoft business partners and carried on working with them. SoftTech Software then approached phone manufacturers with a view to deploying the services to assist them to earn a greater return from their sales and better serve the needs of their customers.

 

SoftTech was not an engineering-led company and it was (rightly) not its intention to reinvent the wheel. The software had already been developed by software houses around the world, but had not been fully deployed. The existing software companies tended to be small, limited in their geographical reach and technology-focused. SoftTech did not see itself as owning the technology itself, rather it partnered with these companies and looked leverage its existing global presence, relationships, financial resources and local distribution centers to deliver these services. The business partnership was thereby based on combining complementary capabilities for mutual gain. These extensive resources were SoftTech's strength, and provided a level of comfort to a phone manufacturer looking to contract for software services.

 

When SoftTech started to develop the new value-added business, some of the potential business partners were initially perplexed and frustrated by its way of doing business. A couple of quotes from suppliers read as follows:

 

“We have made [SoftTech] other offers and invited other arrangements which have so far fallen on fallow ground. I also cannot understand why (as originally envisaged) SoftTech have not yet discussed packaging our services with the hardware you are selling... I suggest the best thing is that we meet again with your management and talk it through... I am sure we can provide SoftTech with a strong business partnership for this emerging market at a rock bottom entry bill but you cannot expect us to continue to foot the cost of your market research while your management get comfortable with the idea”.

 

“Basically SoftTech are all over the show talking to a lot of people, spending a lot of time talking and getting people thinking about value-added software. Their dealings all over the world with manufacturers and retailers gives leverage in areas where we could not hope to get. However, they are ALL OVER the place, ALL of the time and mundane items such as NDAs [Non Disclosure Agreements], Agency Contracts and general paper work is not their strong point. This appears to be from the CEO [Chief Executive Officer] level down, they have a somewhat cavalier business attitude, but make a lot of money”.

 

It was certainly true to say that SoftTech gave phone manufacturers got more reliable attention and conventional contracts than its business partners. However, the business partners were making these comments based on the old organized model where they felt the need to define and control things. The unorganized reality is that it is difficult to define the progression of a business partnership in advance, because new opportunities and potential partners are emerging all the time. The SoftTech Software strategy certainly did emerge- and change- over the first few months of my employment there. The model never ceased evolving, largely through actions and feedback from customers and SoftTech employees.

 

It is difficult to structure a business partnership agreement- if you try to encompass all opportunities in a contract then you end up with a complicated deal. If you sign a standard agreement, you preclude or make difficult collaboration on emerging novel opportunities. It is difficult to make commitments to say selling a minimum volume of product in advance. It is difficult to agree revenue shares before there are any revenues!

 

As such, business partnerships these days can consist simply of a Letter of Intent- this is effectively a commitment to go forward and a commitment to commit resources in order to move forward. There may also be the need for a Non Disclosure Agreement if both business partners are not accountable for their reputation in the marketplace. If either party can widely communicate that the other is not a trustworthy or reliable business partner, then the threat of loss of reputation, coupled with personal honesty and integrity, should ensure that sensitive information is not disclosed. The rule is: do not disclose anything to anyone who you do not trust to keep the information private. If in doubt, do not disclose.

 

The idea behind successful business partnerships is to ensure that all parties to the partnership are not left MATERIALLY ANY WORSE OFF BECAUSE OF HAVING BEEN IN THE PARTNERSHIP when the business partnership breaks up at a later date. The potential for mutual gain is intent enough- who knows in advance whether the business partnership will be a success or not?

 

These cultural differences had existed for as long as there had been contact between SoftTech and its potential business partners. But as soon as SoftTech had located potential customers with a serious interest in using the services provided by the business partners, the focus became working together to facilitate winning that business. As such, after some time had been spent understanding each company’s products, people and philosophy, the business partnerships evolved into something that was mutually beneficial. There were in fact not even any formal ongoing agreements between SoftTech and its business partners- not even a Letter Of Intent- instead, business was carried out on a case by case, customer by customer basis. It was more stressful dealing on a case-by-case basis than knowing in advance what the exact terms of the business would be for future customers. However, once a technical and commercial model had emerged and proven successful for other mutual customers, it became clearer to all business partners how future deals would be structured, even if the exact costs were not known. Mutual customers meant that a working relationship had been established, along with some familiarity and a little trust.

 

It can clearly be seen from this feedback from SoftTech’s business partners that the unorganized services network was not without challenges and difficulties in implementing its strategy. The primary business challenges were:

 

Non-systematic analysis of opportunities

 

New customer opportunities seemed to arise by chance, for example, when an existing SoftTech customer met someone from another company at a conference and recommended SoftTech. Of course, there is nothing wrong with word of mouth recommendations. They are the best form of referral that any company can get. But other opportunities were passing SoftTech by because they did not get to hear about them and didn’t have a mechanism to find out about them or because the right people in the right potential customers were not aware of SoftTech’s capability. This analysis was not being undertaken because the unorganized services people were too busy flying around pursuing existing opportunities- they did not have the time to read up on industry trends and so on.

 

To solve this, SoftTech needed to SYSTEMATICALLY analyze and target new market opportunities globally. Some resources had to be hired or freed to focus on a mandate to analyze. One person would probably suffice if tasked specifically with monitoring the relevant industry publications and market intelligence such as the press releases published on many Internet sites. SoftTech needed to proactively establish a dialog and relationship with potential customers about its people and capabilities. This approach required SoftTech to become systematic and focused and proactive.

 

Staff Retention

 

In my first 18 months at SoftTech, there was a high degree of redeploying people into different regions. Staff turnover was also high. Only four people who attended my second face-to-face meeting had also attended the first one. Indeed, one of the few advantages of job titles and descriptions was that I could locate who did what despite the changing names of the jobholders. In fact, the staff in SoftTech Distribution- especially in the sales and accounts departments- rapidly changed- whereas the staff in the unorganized services network tended to move between regions and functions- rather than between external companies. For example, one competent senior staff member changed roles every few months as new opportunities and challenges arose.

 

One of the few employees in the unorganized services network to actually leave SoftTech was (sadly) my boss, Joan Tomlin. Not surprisingly, she joined one of SoftTech’s business partners who she had worked closely with.

 

Joan was an immensely intelligent, smart, complicated and sensitive person. Joan liked the fine things in life such as hotels, food and limousines. She liked things to be done in her way, but got her way in shops and hotels by asking politely rather than shouting, although, she was not afraid of arguing with colleagues who she disagreed with or disagreed with her. She had always seen the SoftTech job as a means to an end, and always known and openly admitted that she could easily get another job in the industry if she wanted to.

 

Soon after she left the company, we met up and discussed the situation at SoftTech. She had left without any formal exit interview- I was the only person she had discussed these reasons with- and had not even written a formal resignation letter.

 

The main reason Joan gave for leaving SoftTech was internal politics. She had seen SoftTech as the ideal entrepreneurial company for herself 18 months ago, but felt that internal politics had since significantly increased. For example, Joan felt that too many people were getting on in the company by saying the right thing to the right people at the right time. Her specific complaints included:

 

'        SoftTech had wasted 18 months by not implementing the ideas that Joan and I had discussed when I first joined the company. For example, we had made little progress in implementing our software strategy- we had a few small pilot projects that were running at break-even level. There remained a huge undeveloped opportunity within SoftTech’s operations that was not being taken advantage of because of a lack of understanding and cooperation from the staff in SoftTech Distribution.

 

'        Joan had wanted to take charge of the software services business and develop it, but had been hindered in this by the person who had run one of the international divisions- it was that person who Joan blamed for delaying the pace of progress. That person had since left the company.

 

'        Joan was then assigned responsibility for developing software services in one of the Asia divisions- but the head of that division had in Joan’s opinion not wanted her located there from the first day of that arrangement. The division head did not return Joan’s calls and had offered Joan the position for a reduced salary that was only believed to be about a third of the (rumored) level of the division head’s basic pay.

 

'        Joan readily admitted to having an ego and needing to receive praise and recognition. Joan had won the first value-added contract and thereby taken the company into a new profitable business activity. She had taken SoftTech into the software services area and had (slowly) built the business up from nothing. She had managed the software services people globally, but when the division had 16 employees around the world (including myself)- but few actual contracts- it was decided to allocate those resources regionally, such that they reported into regional management, rather than to Joan.

 

Joan had hired me for SoftTech and I had a great relationship with her. I thought that she was a great mentor and also extremely good at her job. When a company starts to lose people of that caliber, other similar people in that company had to take a close look at their own situation.

 

A few bad managers

 

Perhaps it is not surprising that such a rapidly changing company in such a rapidly changing industry would incur a lot of internal politics as people battled to retain and enhance their responsibility. However, rapidly changing environments must not mean internal politics, because political actions are driven by the behavior of the people in the organization. The kinds of static procedures that HardSoft employees endured are just one manifestation of attempts by some senior people in organizations to protect their own interests and hide their own lack of self-confidence. Static procedures are a tool used by insecure management aimed at hindering the progress and enjoyment of “troublesome” “subordinates”. Such petty procedures are particularly likely if like both Joan and myself, the “subordinates” have minds and self-confidence of their own and are not afraid to voice their opinions. Whenever you see an inflexible procedure that does not make sense, take a closer look, and chances are you will find a dynamic individual and a scared manager.

 

In HardSoft, I happened to work in a department where petty managers made my life a misery through a series of arbitrary and petty policies and procedures. However, there were a large number of managers in HardSoft who were decent, honest, confident individuals. I feel apologetic about writing this book when they remain good friends of mine. However, they are well aware of the way I was treated and did not agree with it at the time and would not threat their own staff in that way.

 

In both HardSoft and SoftTech, the majority of managers were great people. In SoftTech, Joan and I listed nearly every manager in the company as being the sort of people we like and respect. In SoftTech, it was Joan who suffered from petty managers, whilst mine (including Joan) were excellent- people who you respected and could talk openly with. However, the personal dislike of Joan by a couple of senior people in SoftTech resulted in arbitrary actions such as reduced responsibility and not returning phone calls. This behavior looked like a deliberate attempt to squeeze Joan out of the company and was sufficient to lead her to leave SoftTech, despite her own fondness for it and the colleagues she was leaving behind.

 

In a formal hierarchy like HardSoft or even a networked company such as SoftTech in which people do not choose who their colleagues are and get told to varying degrees what work they should be doing, the potential damage from small-minded behavior exists. Only in a “collapsible corporation” in which the people work together voluntarily and impermanently is the likelihood of such pettiness truly minimized, because of the mutual gain from self-employed people working together and the ease of exit conferred by project-by-project based employment.

 

In a world whose implicit basis is force, just one petty person with power can make many other people’s lives a misery. It only takes one bad manager (or politician) to have widespread negative consequences. To deal with this, companies should be constantly vigilant for situations in which there is tension between different people and objectively assess the situation. Companies should not hesitate to remove bad managers- sooner rather than later.

 

The balance of power

 

Throughout this book, we have seen how doing business is largely driven by an often implicit but omnipresent question of the balance of power. All business transactions involve a different balance of power between the parties taking part. We have seen how some managers exploit their formal power over “subordinates” by deliberately hindering their development. We have seen how internal politics arise as different people, often at the same formal level in the company, attempt to gain more power by engaging in internal politics. We will see how different players in the same industry try to exert as much control as they can over other players in the industry- and not just their competitors.

 

All of these balance of power issues are driven by the existence of force between people- by the fact that those transactions are not voluntary transactions for mutual gain. Each company wants to maximize their share of gains and control opportunities for future gain. Transactions between myself and the other decent, honest people working in SoftTech such as my boss, and even between myself and people like Graham and Paul in HardSoft, were not based on force but on a keenness to work together based on mutual like and respect. For me, SoftTech was the closest possible way to be employed on a salary with a formal boss and responsibilities, whilst minimizing force. Force had not been eliminated- but SoftTech certainly counted as a great employer and was very close to being a group of people who voluntarily and impermanently collaborate (often electronically) to meet customer requirements. People in SoftTech liked each other and worked well together because they did.

 

To deal with balance of power issues, companies and individuals should retain their independence and protect against reliance on any one party. At the same time, they should identify companies that are interested in constructive partnership for mutual gain and willing to equitably allocate those gains according to the value each party adds.

 

Challenges doing business globally

 

SoftTech faced a challenge identifying acquisition targets and then integrating the acquired companies. It spoke to its existing customers and contacts in each market it was looking to expand into, asking for recommendations of companies who fitted the acquisition criteria of good management looking to grow their business and existing distribution facilities in a good location in the local market. SoftTech then tried (usually successfully) to acquire the company.

 

Once the acquisition had been completed, SoftTech added its global Information Technology (IT), financial, human resource and procurement skills to help build sales in the local market. In theory, the acquisition of a local company by a global player such as SoftTech provides a “dream team” combining global perspective, global economies of scale, global information technology and financial resources with local people talking the local language with local contacts and local facilities and local market presence.

 

The way that business is conducted around the world does vary significantly, even between different markets in the same region. A traveling executive is unlikely to be able to discern all of these factors whilst on a short tour of a country’s operations. At SoftTech, it was never a question of a US company bringing in a lot of people from outside the local market- the importance of language differences and other cultural and learning challenges was fully recognized. Instead it was a question of combining the local with the global skills, to the benefit of all. The local SoftTech people provided advice on how to present what is often the same capability in different ways for different markets and different customers in the same market.

 

In fact, it is extremely difficult for a US company such as SoftTech- whose business is based on the distribution of physical products such as phones- to enter into overseas markets with solely or mainly US personnel without local representation and support. Even the success of running an Internet site that makes information available electronically on a global basis is dependent upon the content creator have a sensitized attitude towards the various disparate groups who are likely to visit the Internet site. The content that is distributed globally must have local context and applicability and accuracy for it to have widespread and enduring appeal.

 

In the majority of countries, people like to do business with local people. For example, most French people in most French companies like to do business with other French people in other French companies. There is a residual respect for American companies and American people in some markets in places such as Eastern Europe, but on the whole, benign nationalistic attitudes prevail. The only exception to this rule seems to be the USA- where people will buy any great product from any company and where some entrepreneurial immigrants can still quickly become millionaires. If anything, foreigners can positively discriminated against in the US- people like myself with English accents may even be favored compared with other Americans saying and doing the same things.

 

I was regularly visiting and trying to do business in many of SoftTech’s “hub” countries and regional bases. In markets where I was having meetings and SoftTech had local operations and staff, I took the local support staff into the meetings with me. They provided local perspective, language skills, conferred credibility about SoftTech's seriousness and ability to do business in that market, and provided feedback on the “hidden messages” in the meetings- interpreting the potential customer’s body language and behavior. I will now look at doing business in two specific case studies of Poland and France.

 

Doing business in Poland

 

I visited Poland half a dozen times, and it took a while for me to even partially understand how business was conducted there. Many meetings did not work out in the anticipated way. Meeting agendas were often dynamic, with attendees and the agenda changing, as some customers in Poland seemed to seek to take us by surprise and gain a superficial advantage in taking control of the agenda.

 

In Poland, the local mobile phone network operators had a very suspicious and adversarial approach to doing business. They felt threatened by the uncertainties surrounding the entry of a large American company into their market. Basically, sales of cellphones in Poland were concentrated through three main network operators, whereas a dozen or so retailers were present in the market. As such, the bargaining relationship and balance of power was strongly in favor of the retailers. The problem was the adversarial nature of supplier relations- rather than seeing a business partnership as a mutually interdependent relationship in which both business partners gain, the emphasis was on how to play suppliers off against each other to maximize bargaining power.

 

SoftTech’s ability to do business in Poland was severely hindered by the fact that each of the main suppliers insisted on exclusivity. One of the network operators, a company I will call “Ego”, insisted on exclusivity to it, but would never have contemplated giving any of its external distributors exclusivity in return. If you wanted to supply them, you could not supply any of their competitors. I could understand their policy of using multiple suppliers to retain their independence, but this went much further and included a systematic attempt to ensure that no one distributor became too powerful.

 

On one occasion, soon after SoftTech’s initial entry into the Polish market, and before we understood the requirement for exclusivity, we were working with Ego and simultaneously concluded an agreement to supply different software services to another network operator “Icon”. We had also presented these value-added services to Ego, but they were not interested in offering them. When Ego saw that SoftTech had been supplying their competitor Icon, they threatened to cut off SoftTech’s ability to distribute any products to Ego outlets. SoftTech sorted out this dispute and then worked hard to conclude an agreement with Ego to extend our existing working relationship and try to turn it into a more strategic business partnership. Instead of supplying standard, undifferentiated products to Ego, we would customize them.

 

SoftTech was however told by Ego that if we worked with one of their competitors again, we would immediately lose our ability to supply to them. There would be no second chance. I was therefore left with the difficult position of having to go back to Icon and tell them that I was unable to develop the business partnership much more than it already was. The interest in the services we had supplied had been very high and the initial services a great success. However Ego’s lack of self-confidence and paranoid attitude meant that we could not take our cooperation much further without endangering our business with Ego. I was told by SoftTech managers to cancel meetings in Poland with Icon until the situation with Ego had settled down. I contemplated making up excuses about why I had to cancel meetings, but in the end I decided to be honest and tell Icon the real reason why I could not do carry on the business partnership. After all, Icon was well aware of the nature and form of the Polish market.

 

I was able to win the business with Icon simply because the person who made the decision was an “anglophile” who has studied in England and wanted, I think, to speak more English! The notion that people do business with the people with the best service delivered in the right way at the right price was disproven- the central supplier selection and purchasing factor was the internal and external politics of selecting one vendor over another, and the relationship between the people.

 

To try to coordinate and control the business activity in Poland, the local country manager was assigned to direct all business. For example, when I was asked to draft a press release about the successful pilot project with Icon in Poland, the following emails were exchanged:

 

 

So on the one hand, we had shown our independence and had run a successful value-added software service for Icon, and also extended our business with Ego. On the other, the static organized structure of the Polish market and SoftTech's decision to cede to Ego's demands and remain exclusive to it prevented much more business there.

 

Doing business in France

 

I also spent a lot of time and tried to conduct some business in France. SoftTech acquired a local established phone distributor in France. The acquisition of a French company by an American company took an immensely long time- about a year from initial approach to completion. This compared with half that time in many other markets for similar acquisitions. “Due diligence”, the process through which the stated assets of the company being acquired are independently assessed, took a very long time. Meanwhile, SoftTech carried on with other tasks in parallel, such as incorporation of its own French subsidiary, acquisition of local offices (in the same building as the company it was intending to acquire), and rolling out its global Information Technology (IT) systems.

 

Unlike with Poland, there were no requirements for exclusivity in the French market. This meant that in theory SoftTech could work with any of the large network operators in that country. However, in practice, the mobile carriers tended to be vertically integrated and would rather carry out activities in-house than outsource them. This hindered the opportunity for SoftTech to win outsourcing contracts from the vendors and network operators. When an opportunity to win some business did arise, SoftTech spent a lot of time and effort with the potential customer demonstrating our capability and supplying them with quotations for the supply of our services. During this pre-sales stage, the companies were enthusiastic and attentive- asking questions and requesting more information. But as soon as the full information had been provided, silence ensued.

 

I was worried that the companies had used SoftTech to gain insight into its expertise and then used the information and pricing to benchmark their internal operations. I was suspicious that they were just trying to extract as much information as possible for as little money as possible. It is difficult for any company to decide to what extent it makes information available and how it protects itself against a potential customer taking those ideas and implementing them themselves. If you provide no information, you will not get any business, because the potential customer would not know what you are capable of. I was acting in good faith and hoping that the potential customers were too. To deal with this situation, I rang up my contacts and expressed my concern at not having heard from them and my worry that they had been misleading me. This was a low-key attempt to stimulate their conscience and get them to act honestly. However, a couple of months later, it did emerge that the company was launching similar products.

 

The myth of the global market

 

Working for SoftTech gave me the opportunity to see at first hand the extent to which today’s world really is global. The leading theories about globalization (as explained “Unorganization: The Global Handbook” on unorgan.com) hold that visible barriers to cross-border trade are falling as free trade agreements are ratified, and invisible barriers such as attitudes are becoming more sensitized to the international aspects of many business activities.

 

However, I learned at SoftTech that in practice the barriers may be falling, but they are still significant. Seen from afar, the same product or a very similar one may be sold in similar ways by the same company in many different markets. However, in fact, in different markets, products are often sold in different ways by different people at different prices. The promise of a single global market is unrealized. There is not really such a thing as a global market for most products.

 

For example, the phone manufacturers were highly skilled at preventing products intended for one market ending up being sold in another market. They sought to control each local market and use that control to maximize their overall profits. Methods of control to make sure that product allocated to one market did not turn up on sale in another ranged from specific branding of the phone to tracking the product identification numbers.

 

In one meeting with a leading mobile phone manufacturer, one of its very senior staff stated outright that the company would support SoftTech in its efforts to develop ADDITIONAL “legitimate” channels but SoftTech could not cannibalize EXISTING partners. By “legitimate”, the company meant ones that it approved of. SoftTech was told that if it built an “orderly” business, there would be no problem. By “orderly”, they meant no trans-shipments of products intended for sale in one country into another. In sum, the manufacturer was advocating organized policies and defending the status quo. The possible efficiency improvements by introducing innovative US practices into the staid and closed European market was ruled out. SoftTech was clearly told that it must change its practices to suit the European market, because the market would not change for its practices. On one hand, a company such as SoftTech cannot expect to simply come in and dictate the market practices overnight, however, neither should it be precluded from competing with existing distributors.

 

As it had with the network operators in places like Poland, once again, the new European management at SoftTech simply did exactly as they were told. I do not see how asking Nokia "how far" when it says "bend over" can help SoftTech to gain credibility in the European marketplace. As their largest customer in the world, I would have expected the bargaining relationship to be a little more evenly balanced. In reality, a mere kit manufacturer used all kinds of tactics to get its distributors, SoftTech included, to do what it told them to. For example, it explicitly linked the allocation of its scarce mobile phones to those companies that helped it to meet its goals. Distributors exerting any independence were punished by withholding phone stocks. This is the business equivalent of naughty children not getting any sweeties.

 

The existence of such structural barriers ensures that in practice, there is no such thing as a global market for the majority of product categories.

 

Communication

 

A fundamental issue at SoftTech was communication- both inside the unorganized services network and between employees in SoftTech Distribution and those in the new parts of the business.

 

SoftTech was one of the world’s largest distributors of mobile phones, but to the software staff, it may just as well have been a small but well financed start-up company. SoftTech’s strength in its organized distribution areas conferred little advantage on the software services people. This lack of leverage arose for several reasons. For example, the people in those areas of the customer’s company had never heard of us, were uninterested in the distribution activities of the company and unimpressed by our track record on the software side. We were not advertising the software services side of the business, we had no presence at industry software conferences and had few live applications that we could use to showcase our capability in the software arena.

 

Much of this lack of awareness was driven by the fact that in theory, the phone distribution sales people should have been informing and educating their existing distribution customers about the new software services and then introducing us to them. But in practice, the SoftTech Distribution sales people did not know much about or understand the software capability. As such, the software staff were as good as solely responsible for generating their own sales leads- even from within existing customers that SoftTech already did business with. This lack of communication between the different areas of the SoftTech business worked both ways- the Software people were meeting with existing and potential manufacturers and not feeding the information back to the SoftTech Distribution employees.

 

Much of the communication issue was caused by a deep clash between the corporate culture of the organized distribution business and that of the unorganized services network. Few people outside the mobile industry realize that the trading department of distribution companies such as SoftTech closely resembles that of the trading rooms of stock exchanges- with global buying and selling of phones with volatile prices.

 

SoftTech Distribution included a so-called “Global Stock Balancing” department within the international sales function. This department shifted mobile phones from places where supply exceeded demand to countries where there was a product shortage. Global Stock Balancing basically meant that a mobile carrier operating in a specific national market such as Poland who had purchased too much stock for a promotional offer could sell that product to SoftTech who would then sell it somewhere else in the world. Basically, “Global Stock Balancing” was just a glorified title for “Trading”, but it did exploit SoftTech’s advantage of being a global player and therefore its ability to operate more flexibly than a distributor focusing solely on a local market.

 

However, as we saw in “The myth of the global market” section, the manufacturers of products such as mobile phones were very keen to prevent “gray market” transactions in which product earmarked for one country was actually sold in another. Nonetheless, the Global Stock Balancing department traded product between markets to the annoyance of the very manufacturers and vendors that the software people were trying to woo for extra business. In fact, the Global Stock Balancing team caused quite a lot of hassles and embarrassment for the unorganized services network. Basically, the unorganized people were trying to develop higher value-added business with recurrent revenues, whereas the organized traders were carrying out one-off transactions for short-term profit. Problems arose from the fact that the customers being targeted for both the unorganized and organized activities tended to be different people in the same companies. Global Stock Balancing dealt with the purchasing managers whilst the unorganized services people spoke with the product and services development managers.

 

The lack of communication between the unorganized and unorganized parts of SoftTech can be seen by the following extraordinary example. Two unorganized services people arrived at a potential customer’s offices only to be told that one of their colleagues had arrived twenty minutes ago and had already started presenting. Surprised and baffled, the two unorganized services people went to the room where the meeting was taking place and found one of the Global Stock Balancing people about to start giving a presentation on unorganized services! SoftTech was there to sell logistics and distribution but could not coordinate its own staff! Neither the unorganized nor the organized parts of the business had told each other that they were working with the same customer. Let me just repeat that again- different people from different areas of the same company turning up at the same time to do the same presentation to the same customer- without each other knowing about it!

 

To solve the problem of the lack of communication between the unorganized and organized parts of the company, a vice president in the unorganized services network did something very clever. He arranged for someone he knew and trusted to be hired to head the Global Stock Balancing activities. He hired someone who understood both sides of the business who he knew that we could work with. He knew that he would then be informed when a potential sensitivity and mismatch between the objectives of the different parts of the company arose. He could communicate openly with someone he respected and trusted.

 

In addition to the personnel changes, a trading policy was put in place (for the new employee to implement) stating that “gray market” transactions would only be undertaken if the transaction met several criteria. Transactions had to be carried out in a discrete manner- such that price levels and existing relationships were largely unaffected. Any gray market transactions had to have compelling logic- for example, be highly profitable or assist an existing or potential customer. Stock was allocated to existing or high potential customers- this turned a tactical and operational transaction into something more strategic. Faced with the choice between selling stock to another SoftTech company in another market or to external companies, the SoftTech company was to get priority.

 

Soon after, partially as a result of our meeting with the senior Nokia people, SoftTech eliminated this trading activity altogether and closed the Global Stock Balancing department. They wrote off a few million pounds profit as a result. This was seen as a short-term sacrifice for a longer-term gain from more cooperative relations with phone manufacturers such as Nokia. As it continued with what it thought was "professionalization", SoftTech moved further from its trading roots.

 

Communication within the unorganized services network also presented a challenge. Keeping the autonomous, widely-dispersed and very busy group of people in the unorganized services network informed about what different people were doing and which opportunities they were pursuing presented a major operating challenge for SoftTech. The communication processes between colleagues took place in several forms:

 

'        Prolific use of Internet email and mobile telephones. Mobile phone bills could easily exceed many thousands of dollars per person per month. In fact, mobile phones were typically left on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week: with people boasting the next morning about the call they got in the early hours from someone in another time zone. There seemed to be a competition as to who could stay up the latest working- because of the global nature of the business, someone was always working somewhere in the world.

 

'        Weekly “Executive News” email messages. These were sent out updating managers around the world on how the business was doing and the latest industry and company developments. Because people were so busy on a daily basis, telephone-based communications were fragmented and on a “need to know” basis for involved people. Thus, the formal emails provided a more systematic exchange of information. The emails helped to keep different people in different places and time zones up to date with these developments. This valuable information was distributed at low cost via Internet email around the world.

 

'        Monthly global conference calls. Every month, the key people in the company held a global conference call by telephone in which various groups of people gathered at various SoftTech offices and communicated anything that seemed important- activity, opportunities, problems and so on.

 

'        Global face-to-face meetings. Every six months, all the key people from all parts of the company attended, such as executive management and the country managers who headed up day-to-day operations in each country.

 

Soon after joining SoftTech, I attended one of these face-to-face meetings. I met many of the senior people in SoftTech for the first- and in many cases- the last time. Attending a face-to-face meeting of the global staff was very useful and insightful for a new starter to learn about the company and its activities around the world and meet most of the senior people running those activities. When someone later made a comment about someone, I at least knew who they were and what they did. It was however unusual for someone who is not senior to be invited- I was just fortunate that the meeting was held in the UK soon after I joined the company.

 

That particular meeting was held at a country retreat in Northern England (the next one was held in Hong Kong). Everyone welcomed me to the company and was friendly and relaxed, but obviously focused on earning more sales and getting those sales done. The proceedings were informal, with the attendees wearing casual clothing. Mobile phones were left switched on- with people coming and going from the conference room to make and take calls.

 

These meetings facilitated a more systematic and comprehensive information exchange and progress and development review. Best practice and industry developments were discussed and relationships were forged with colleagues from around the world whose help and advice could be needed at sometime in the future. The meeting agenda gave every country representative the opportunity to explain the structure of the local phone market. So much valuable knowledge was available from one place and because it was an internal meeting, this information was readily shared and ideas openly exchanged.

 

The key outcomes from these global gatherings were information exchange and relationship building and the expressed commitment to adopt and implement certain strategies.

 

By systematically developing different levels of communication that cumulatively kept employees up-to-date with the latest developments and gave them a sense of belonging to a widely distributed but knowledgeable group, these communication procedures played a fundamental role in allowing SoftTech to capture the benefits of its global reach.

 

Indeed, the single most important lesson from the SoftTech’s unorganized services activity was that:

Communication is structure

 

Effective communication, facilitated by technology tools such as Internet email and mobile phones, is the glue of the networked company. Communication is the dynamic structure between the individual members that shapes and guides the progress and actions of the people. It is the communication that coordinates and not formal written procedures.

 

In fact, the success of networked companies such as SoftTech is inversely related to the quantity and quality of communication between members around the world.  Problems arise when communication slows or stops and progress is taken for granted- requiring hyper-communication to achieve subsequent residual recovery of right direction. Problems are just uncommunicated differences- in actions and expectations. 

 

This intense deliberate communication is itself a transaction cost. It requires substantial effort and may not always be business- it is necessary to deliberately provide opportunities for other people in the networked company to explain and notify you about problems- but naturally such problems do not actually arise every time members communicate. Because of the absence of the kinds of adhoc accidental casual conversations that arise in elevators and around water coolers in offices, the communication at SoftTech had to be deliberate, systematic and worked at. But the benefits from avoidance of misunderstanding achieved from effective and honest ongoing inter-personal communication- facilitated by technologies- makes such dynamic networked companies possible. Such communication also prevents greater, later costs incurred from error correction. Not to engage in routine ongoing dialog can easily turn out to be “false economy”.

 

Of course, the communication needs to be timely and truthful for it to be valuable- it needs to be proactively stated, discussed, openly, honestly and fully disclosed.

 

I believe that communication is the very structure of the company- and therefore is essential to success. Communication can be formal or informal, systematic or fragmented. The people doing the communicating need to be open and honest- with themselves and the people they are communicating with- as all communication is generated by people.

The quality of the communication depends upon the content of the communication and the context in which the communication is taking place. Communication needs to be formalized- there needs to be a systematic, regular and comprehensive exchange of tailored and relevant data. This formal communication is supplemented by the informal "conversations" between people in elevators, at water-fountains and so on. So the content has to be right. And the context too- the problem with organizations is that their static systems, procedures and policies hinder effective communication- which become driven by politics- rank, position, department, allegiances etc. This prevents the open and honest exchanges of information that are so essential to the success of companies in the 21st century.

 

Respect and trust and so on were important in relations between SoftTech colleagues, with some people easier to talk and relate to than others, but primarily, as long as activities and approaches were agreed to by other colleagues, you were okay. It was consensus and inclusive decision making and proactive communication before the event that formed an important part of the consistent message and activity from SoftTech employees around the world, despite their geographical operating autonomy. People were accountable primarily for achieving the results they were set by the company consensus. 

 

In sum, I advocate systematic information exchange- via email, face-to-face meetings and so on, supplemented with some informal communication- friendships and so on. Removing the static structures and policies is also essential. In a world where communication is structure, not taking these measures endangers the very existence- and certainly the effectiveness- of the company.

 

People Update

 

Over time, as SoftTech acquired more companies in places such as Europe and Latin America, the base of employees changed from having predominantly English as a first language to English as a second language. Within Europe, for instance, as more acquisitions were made, the focus of activity within the region expanded from the UK to local operations in markets such as France, Germany, Poland and Sweden. The new president of the European region was a Swedish national recruited from a senior position in the US. This was the first time that someone who did not speak English as a first language had held such an important job which involved close contact with the US head office.

 

Having completed the acquisitions, the next task was to integrate the disparate parts and realize the benefits of global reach. As we saw in the section on “Challenges doing business globally", the primary criteria for selecting acquisition targets was the company’s existing contacts and contracts and the location of their distribution facilities. The mentality of the people was clearly a consideration- but more related to whether they were willing for their companies to be acquired on a reasonable terms than their global sensibility.

 

In general, SoftTech’s European staff were quieter and much more reflective than most of the US people. I wondered what some of the people from Europe must have thought about the stories of some of the eventful nights out on the town by the longstanding SoftTech staff. They must have wondered just what sort of company they had joined when they heard, for example, about sizable gambles at casinos, wild nights and expensive cars.

 

In fact, at the first face-to-face gathering of all the European country managers, there was little evidence of the group of people meshing well. Everyone seemed to spend most of their time speaking to people they already knew- who tended to be people based in the same country. Indeed, the main uniformity was in the uniforms the people were wearing- they all had their best clothes on- not necessarily flashy designer clothes- but understated, well tailored clothes. Indeed, the trend throughout SoftTech was away from flashily dressed people towards professional managers. This stood in contrast to the first casual, informal global gathering I had attended.

 

Having expressed skepticism at the level of integration, I must say that I presented our software services capability at that first European face-to-face gathering and this generated some cooperation. Many of the people were unaware of, but excited by, the opportunities that having the software services in their portfolio provided. That presentation generated at least two meetings (in Sweden and Germany) and opportunities to use the existing relationships in the local markets to carry out more business. For the first time, I found myself not having to organize meetings and develop the opportunity- instead, I was acting as regional resource and as a support person for local SoftTech companies. The opportunities were coming to me! Signs of such regional cooperation were encouraging.

 

Facilitating international cooperation- right attitude, right execution

 

There are formal and informal methods for encouraging cooperation between people working for the same company in different countries.

 

The new company president for the European region announced some formal procedures aimed at getting the disparate group aiming in the same direction. These formal measures included standardized reporting formats and bonus programs, the new trading policy and regular regional face-to-face meetings.

 

However, the extent to which the newly acquired companies would actually work successfully together was likely to be associated to a far greater extent with informal collaboration on the basis of trust, familiarity and goodwill between the people involved. People with good personal relations who are a part of the same company have the greatest natural incentive to work together. They achieve greater results because they want to work together, rather than only doing so because they are told to. Hence, the brilliance in the idea of hiring a trusted person to run the previously troublesome Global Stock Balancing department.

 

International opportunities spanning more than one market could come about with or without the involvement of regional management or network services staff. Two people in different SoftTech companies in different countries could talk to each other directly without regional involvement, or regional resource could identify potential synergies from the standardized reports they were receiving. The regional staff would then make the introductions and effectively facilitate the opportunity. However, the success in capturing the potential would still depend primarily on the willingness and ability of the personnel in the local markets to cooperate.

 

For global companies to develop themselves into something that is significantly more than the sum of their parts, the real challenge is to get the:

 

Right attitude, right execution

 

It is relatively easy to put in place a global organization structure and framework- these standardized formal measures can be initiated by the corporate headquarters at a regional or global level. However, the true test is having people within the global company that have a globally sensitized attitude. Everyone in the company has to think from a global perspective and be interested in taking ideas from other countries and implementing them in their local market. From such an attitude springs the communication that is the structure. The very act of a local distributor looking to join or joining a global company such as SoftTech encourages this outward perspective. So does interacting with people from a wide range of countries, by having, for example, a presence on the Internet. People have got to be willing to work with people from other countries- and preferably, they need to be fascinated with other cultures and therefore genuinely inquisitive to find out and incentivized to solve the challenges and difficulties that arise when doing business around the world.

 

Once this globally sensitized attitude was widespread within SoftTech, the right execution needed to be implemented. This entailed following the critical success factors listed earlier- namely analyzing and pursuing the right opportunities and never confusing efforts with results.

 

“Right attitude, right execution” is the motto both for internal and external purposes. As we saw earlier, it is all very well having the Information Technology (IT) systems such as extranets in place that allow information to be shared between companies, just as “intranets” can help communication and information sharing within the same company. However, if the attitude about the business partnership between external companies is a suspicious one such as that of Ego in Poland, then these systems are not used. The technology facilitates the communication, and the attitude determines the communication.

 

In sum, the key challenge for SoftTech’s regional and corporate management was to encourage and facilitate the establishment of regular and voluntary communication through informal channels. Cooperation and implementation of initiatives between the company’s personnel based in different markets could then be carried out with the assistance of the formal regional systems such as information technology and reporting infrastructures. The formal infrastructure and systems provided implementation support, but were only a means to an end, that end being generated by communication between different people throughout the company.

 

Exit

 

SoftTech set up an office in the South of England for its regional Europe, Middle East and Africa corporate employees- including myself. The region’s new president decreed that all employees in the region were to attend that office every weekday when they were not traveling. This was the beginning of the end of my employment at SoftTech- after a great 18 months. My employment at SoftTech had got me out of the habit of being in a certain place regularly at a certain time. The commute was about 45 minutes each way, which was wasted time. I was not willing to go back into an office environment- and several of my colleagues were also reluctant. I don’t think that companies should arbitrarily force employees to do something against their will- these days, companies hire heads and not feet! I don’t think I could have handled the inertia, incestuousness, formality, security, commute and so on that offices represent. I tried to find a compromise and offered to visit the office a couple of days a week- I would have enjoyed the change of scene and the chance to work with other colleagues who I liked and respected. However, the region’s new SoftTech managers were unwilling to let me be an exception, even though I told them that unless employers are willing to make exceptions, they will end up with unexceptional people. The management view was that the requirement was to visit an office was a temporary arrangement whilst the regional team was being built. The view was that in the past, the company had been disintegrated and needed to be more coordinated.

 

I was open about my concerns and my managers and colleagues were all amicable and sympathetic. They asked me to continue to work with them as a consultant and said there would be a need for my services forever. They did not back these kind words up with a compromise on the office or a better package though.

 

Upon formally resigning, I circulated the following email to the people I had regularly worked with:

 

 

I received many calls and messages from my colleagues expressing surprise and disappointment. My friends were also surprised as I had always been very positive about SoftTech. There were other factors as well as the office for me leaving- in particular the need for fresh stimulus in a new role- I felt that great as though SoftTech was, I knew it and was looking for my next challenge.

 

After I left the company, SoftTech went through a continued period of turbulent change. The head of European operations and several other key people left the company after an unsuccessful attempt to “tame” the company. SoftTech was forced to close its UK and Polish operations because of the market structural follies I mentioned- refusal of network operators and handset vendors to supply and be allowed to supply.

 

I would dearly love to be able to say that the SoftTech style has lead to unprecedented success but alas that is not the case. The industry in which they were operating, and the role within the value chain in the industry they occupied, meant that quiet focus was needed.

 

Summary

 

HardSoft and SoftTech were both market leading companies in the same fast-growing industry which adopted the opposite extremes when it came to organizing their business and managing their employees. They pursued the same ends via completely different means. HardSoft was a highly over-organized restrictive hierarchy with micro-management of employees and procedure-driven actions. At SoftTech, self-management and teleworking were routine. When moving from HardSoft to SoftTech, I didn’t just change my job, I changed my lifestyle as well.

 

At SoftTech, I had all the benefits of being self-employed coupled with the advantage of a substantial salary every month. Once you have experienced the extremes, you can easily understand all the intermediate states. I have tried to capture some of the magic in this unique company in this book. The SoftTech discovery encouraged me to advocate similar practices such as teleworking as part of unorganization. As such, this book brings the theory of unorganization to life.

 

I will always be eternally grateful to SoftTech for saving me from HardSoft- allowing me to escape with my life intact. I will always look back with fond memories at my time spent there- the tings I learned, the people I worked with, the places I visited. SoftTech was like a period of therapy and recovery for me after HardSoft. It was at SoftTech that I was able to reflect on what I had seen and what I wanted to do with my career and within my own start-up company.

 

Feedback

 

There are several other related books published on unorgan.com. These include "Unorganization: The Company Handbook", which compares management and organization practices in organized and unorganized companies. "Unorganization: The Individual Handbook" shows how people can help themselves make the transition from rankers in hierarchies to self-employed, independent branders. The author of this book, Simon Buckingham, welcomes any and all feedback on this book. Send an email to simon@unorgan.com.