CJBryan's blog

Choosing a systems implementer is often not a straightforward decision. You are entrusting your organisation to another company with at best conflicting objectives and at worst a strategy that is the polar opposite of yours. Potentially your people will be impacted, your processes changed and your ability to keep doing business challenged.

Growing companies suffer from growing pains, just like children. There is a point in the lifecycle of most companies where the goals go from being simple personally orientated, e .g. “to not be poor”, or “to be able to retire at 45” to being team orientated e.g. “biggest supplier of plumbing equipment in the Swindon area”, or “increase number of customers by 50% each year”.

There is almost as much rubbish talked about goal setting as there is about wine, and as with a bad wine the urge to spit inevitably follows many company planning sessions. Take this quote for instance.

Research in the August 2005 issue of Harvard Business Review revealed that businesses average only 63% of the results they target in their strategies.

Every sales and marketing course I have ever taken has the phrase “People buy from people” somewhere in the first 15 minutes. Which explain the runaway success of Amazon, Ebay and Waterstones online to name but three. The phrase is utterly and completely wrong. People only buy from people once they have exhausted every other avenue of avoiding face to face contact. As a sweeping generalisation businesses often prefer to deploy disinterested, slovenly, poor communicators as their public facing representative so the success of the online world isn’t surprising.

This year you were going to organise an awayday for you and your staff. You know this is important for lots of reasons. For example:

“while some must, of necessity, rule and teach, so others must, of course, learn, submit and obey”

The news continues to be dominated by failing companies, unemployment and toxic financial institutions. Added to this are all the various scams that were covered up by market growth and are now coming to light because of the financial crisis. It’s ironic that Mr Madoff made off with so much money and was only found out because of the broader problems in the markets. Walking through Alton High Street during the week, I was shocked by the number of shops that had closed down.