No one to trust, nowhere to learn

How many more financial disasters are waiting to happen? How many more sociopathic and amoral business leaders are paving the way for their companies, and ultimately their national economies, to travel down the path to Armageddon? If you think I am being alarmist - good! The social cost of getting it wrong is at an all-time high, and it gets higher by the day.

I am writing this on an aeroplane travelling at just under the speed of sound. In today’s business world, that is not nearly fast enough. The Bourses, Stock Exchanges and markets still worship sociopaths and amoral business leaders. They reward them with high market caps. As the speed of markets and their attendant demands increase, managers of corporations are pressed to cut corners in order to satisfy the analysts. Quarterly reporting may be a quick way to identify organisations that are on the way up (and on the way down), but it seems to me that compliance and regulatory demands increase the chances of deliberate misreporting rather than decrease them as intended.

This situation is exacerbated by the youth and inexperience of the people running some businesses. In one case I know of a new European head of a US-owned firm that had to apply for a passport because she had never left the shores of America. How was she supposed to run a pan-European business with its diversity of cultures and its 130 languages? A polyglot on speed could not manage in a lifetime what this otherwise gifted person had to contend with. How could she be expected to understand the intricacies of European law in the 12 member states and do her job and deliver next quarter’s results, without guidance and preparation?

An attack on the cultural divide? No, this runs much deeper. How can organisations develop their managers in 2003 without throwing them in at the deep end without a lifejacket? How can they nurture a willingness to learn new skills and develop a culturally strong, ethical and caring company - a company that is successful in its market and a pleasure to work for, regardless of whether you are the CFO or the floor-cleaner? Where is the wise counsel without a vested interest?

I am not building a case here for reverse-ageism or so-called ’executive coaching’ that’s currently the thing to do for the ’at-a-loss’ clients of under-employed headhunters and psychologists. What I am talking about are the simple things that should and must be done inside a company by people that understand its business and desire to protect its values.

So where have all the mentors gone? In a previous life, I had the good fortune to be an officer in a Guards Regiment in the UK. This involved managing people in extreme circumstances at a very early age. The system was run so that junior officers could be mentored, not only by more senior officers but also by the much more experienced Non-Commissioned Officers, and most importantly by the Guardsmen (Privates) that had never been promoted but liked it that way. These Grand Old Men within the Regiment, were not senior, but held sway over large parts of the intimate workings of the system. They ran all of the back-office processes that ensured that the operation ran smoothly, with the minimum of fuss and the maximum efficiency.

In the early 1990’s the UK Government decided that these people were surplus to requirements and offered them voluntary redundancy. For anyone who was working for less than the much-vaunted minimum wage, and was offered several thousand pounds, tax free, this was too much to resist. The Grand Old Men left in droves. The result was that things broke down, things that were taken for granted for years no longer worked properly and the very people it was supposed to benefit the most, were helped the least.

As corporations go from bloated and inefficient to lean and mean, we will have to be very careful that we do not just end up with mean and nasty. Outsourcing, shared services and corporate right-sizing must not be allowed to pander to the gods of efficiency and low cost at the expense of sacrificing the people that have a role to play in forming talent and reducing the excessive risk taking that can do irreparable damage to a company’s standing.

If corporations get rid of their Grand Old Men, at whatever level, in the race for efficiency, the cohesiveness, accountability and the checks and balances necessary to avoid potentially catastrophic mistakes will be lost. Only by ensuring that managers can turn to trusted mentors for advice, people who share their knowledge and understanding of how to get things done and also allow their personal interests to come second to those that need counsel, can the risks be reduced.

In the headlong rush to efficiency a caring and ethical company is not something that the Stock Exchanges should discourage, as these are precisely the organisations that will last longer, become stronger and drive the economy to the benefit of all.

PS Grand Old Men do not necessarily have to be grand, old, or even men, they just have to be unselfish, caring and wise. Mentor: advisor, counsellor, teacher, guide, guru.

Mr Guy Kirkwood
Antiphon
guy@kirkwood.biz