This is Mycenae in Greece (obviously!).  I learned to read on books of stories about the Trojan and Greek hereoes from the Iliad and the Odyssey….

… we have a Greek friend who has a beach cabin (don’t picture an American beach-house here – it really was a small cabin, but is was smack oçn Marathon Beach.

We toured around taking in ancient history with every breath….

So what has this got to do with anything?

One word:

EXPERIENCE!

Consideration of this issue is just one of FOUR tasks you will engage in as part of our ‘ColmarCo’ exercise.  I have created a company – ColmarCo – (well, I was working at IUT Colmar at the time I wrote the company outline and this ‘Realistic Work Environment’ exercise), and I will immerse you in it.  See details hereunder….

The context.

I am the CEO of ColmmarCo.

You are my Brand and Division Directors.

I have pulled you out of your offices to get you together for a series of events where you will solve key problems which the company is facing.  This is critical to ColmarCo’s future survival and profitability.  The four issues we are going to address areas follows.

The Issues and Tasks

1. Expectation v Experience.

Our clients seem to find a gulf between these two as judged by the level of complaints we are receiving.  I used to think those who complain about our services were just time-wasting busybodies, and to my shame, the instruction I gave to our Complaints Unit was that I would treat them as a cost-centre: they were to get rid of these people as quickly as possible for the minimum possible cost.  Our appointment of a dynamic new Head of Complaints (must change the title!) has helped me to see this very differently: those who take the time and effort to complain and the analytical information they freely provide should be considered as part of our Quality Control System.  They are telling us what we have got wrong and its impact upon their enjoyment of our services.  If only we would listen to them, we could pinpoint where our quality is going wrong and change our systems and processes accordingly.

So, I am wanting us to start with a candid analysis of our own service experiences: good AND bad ones.  We can learn from them.

BAD.  We need to describe the experience and its impact on our enjoyment and then get highly analytical: just where did the problems lie – a glitsch in processes, recruitment, training, responsiveness , planning etc etc?  Then if we can do this we can identify what should have happened to avoid they situation in the first place.  We can then hold our ColmarCo services up to this ‘light’ and see what we need to do/change/improve/re-invent etc.

GOOD. Clearly if we can work out the ‘hallmarks‘ of ‘excellence’ then we can use this set of criteria by applying it as a standard against which to measure the ‘experence quality’ of ALL our services.

If we can put both of these analyses together – we should have a road map of principles to build a robust quality assurance system around.  I am taking this so seriously that I am going to appoint an ‘Experience Architect & Assessor’ to work on this across all Colmarco brands.  I expect your full cooperation with this person.

2.  Performance Appraisal (Brands + Divisions + Corporation.)

I know you all want to defend to the last man/woman your brands and divisions – but we can’t operate with our heads permanently in those boxes – I need to get you to stand back dispassionately and review brand performance:

• over time
• brand against brand
• what functions are working well / less well and why?

This will require you to do some basic calculations concerning turnover evolution, profit evolution and return on investment.  I am sure you are up to this task!  It should be, shall we say, ‘refreshing‘ for you to see where your brand and division figures in the ColmarCo portfolio…

If you are honest, it is all too clear that some elements are no longer profitable, do not justify continued ColmarCo investment and are simply not attractive to banks and shareholders.  We need to identify these with a view to ‘cutting out the dead wood’ in order to ‘stop throwing good money after bad‘.  Once we have identified what these are, we will have to ask ourselves what is the best way to divest ourselves of these non-performers….

On the upside, we have some fast growing ‘star’ elements in our portfolio and they need heavy investment and now, so that they can really establish themselves in the marketplace nationally, internationally and globally if possible.

I am not ‘teaching your grandmother to suck eggs‘, as they say, but if you ‘hark back‘ to your business Degree, Master’s, or MBA,  Iam sure you will remember the Boston Consulting Group’s so called ‘BCG Matrix‘….. well I will be wanting you to:

• Identify and dispose of the ‘DOGS’ in short order
• Reconsider the COWS to see whether we can rejuvenate them and extend their product life cycle
• Focus upon how we rapidly develop the potential of our STARS (and where we get the money from to do it)
• Examine the QUESTION MARKS to see whether we can get them to really work for us, and how.

In order to do this, you need the BASIC PROFILE of ColmarCo, its divisions and brands.  I have pulled this together for you with the help of TJ Business Analysts.

3. People Make Profits (not corporations)

I met one of my own Senior lecturers from University the other day, and recalled his mantra: « Companies don’t make profits, Tony.  People make profits. Now think on! ».    Well, I have been thinking…. I have been looking at our labour turnover figures and they are incredible!  Every year we are spending a sizeable % of our hard-won profits replacing people we have only just recruited!

• Of 750 managers, 250 leave in their FIRST YEAR with us!  (30% of those – 80+ individuals – in the first 6 months)!
• Of our 2,500 operational staff, nearly 40% (appx 1,000 people!) leave in the first year. 50% of those depart within the first six months!
• in total, this means that with 250 working days in the year: we are recriting 5  people per day just to replace those we have lost!

To say I was horrified would be an understatement.

There are obviously two causes:

• we are recruiting the WRONG people    and/or
• we are recruiting the right people, but we can’t get them to want to stay!

So we need to know:

• how much is all this costing us – I want you to track this and identify all the costs: financial and non-financial from the point at which an employee decides he/she is not going to stay with us, through recruitment and selection and on to the point at which such a replacement decoides to leave himself.  Then we can multiply this by 1250 to see what are real costs are.
• how to re-invent the system so that we do NOT attract the WRONG people, we DO attract the RIGHT people AND manage to motivate them to stay with us.   I am convinced that even if we spend money doing this, we will make a massive overall saving as compared to constantly losing staff at an unsustainable rate.

Over to you!

4. Vision and Strategy.

My old Sunday School classes came to mind when I wrote the word vision: I recall that somewhere in the Book of Isaiah there is a line: ‘My People perish for lack of vision’.  I’m making no religious point here at all, but it does seem to me that perhaps ColmarCo itself does not have a clear enough vision of where it should be heading. Perhaps we don’t do enough ‘visioneering’….   Clearly strategies serve little or no purpose if we have no target to aim at.

So, I have worked with business futurologists and they have produced a long-range forecast of economic, socio-cultural, technological, environmental and political conditions into which I am going to ask you to project ColmarCo.  This scenario presents ColmarCo with no end of threats but also potential opportunities.  I want you to do a ‘Reference Projection’.  This answers the question for the brands, the divisions and the company as a whole: ‘If we do nothing / change nothing, how will the company fare in this scenario?  This analysis should give us reason to change…. to overcome the threats and seize the opportunities.

• what should be done with each existing division? (and when, why and how)?
• What new opportunities should the company invest in?
• At the end of the Scenario period, what will ColmarCo look like?
  • what will the divisional structure look like?
  • what will the brand portfolio look like?
  • where geographically and in what sectors will the bulk of our turnover and profits be coming from?

This should give us a ‘feel’ for the vision we need to take on board and we can then develop the strategy (ends + means) to work towards it.

Afterword.

You have my assurance that no idea is too crazy in these exercises – sometimes we need to think the unthinkable!

All thought and ideas are welcome – ColmarCo needs them.

TJ CEO