Why company business exist ?

Why company business exist ?


These questions should continue to be pondered, year in and year out by any business or organization :

What is the purpose?

A lot of businesses had a purpose when they started, but over time their product, service might be affected by market situation and change. Do we need to relook into the present purpose, intent and review if there is a need to adjust it’s original purpose if we are off line.

Did we target the right customer?

Did we reach the right group of client or we missed them totally but targeted a different set of consumers. Did we had a hard time convincing our client to support our “product”. “Product” could be any marketable item or service which we provide. Needless to say, it's a lot easier to come up with great ideas and convince people to get into if it is clear who is purchasing your product, and why.

Why people need our product or service?

We often land into the trap that people want something because they preferred or like it. This is the road to perdition. We never asked why or what they really wanted and why they chosen ours instead. A company rarely would fail if they literally speak to customers what exactly they wanted and produce what they asked for and within their commercial means.

If there is a “want”, is it going to be profitable venture ?

This is important to assess the possibility of a successful venture and there are alot of homework to be done, before setting your business plan and goals. Assessing the real market is not simple and with competition in the global business, some niche needs to be cast out from the standard norm in doing or beginning with a business.

Watch out for competitors?


If we had properly assessed our competition, would we want to do differently as we progress further into our business? How could we continuously do differently to remain as forefront player?? Whether you are selling a product or providing a service, you have to be constantly innovate and re-design or modify or carve out a new niche.

Can you cost cut - without affecting product image?

Of course cost cutting might affect or lower the quality of the product. But when you really work into the details and talk to vendors, they had lots of ideas on how to reduce cost without sacrificing quality. There are many ways to “skin a cat”.

Do we have the right leadership?

As companies mature, they require managers with different skill sets and strong leadership skill.

Do we have the right employees?

There are employees who know how to bring new ideas, while others know how to nurture an existing product line. Make sure you do not have a big mismatch of business view amongst your staff.

How will we continue to drive revenue? The management and board never held a down-and-dirty strategic planning session. We never went to a bar and tossed around ideas with employees. Companies can't live in vacuums. Chances are, what works today won't work tomorrow--just ask anyone in any kind of business.

How are your employees holding up?

You have to check the “temperature” and mood of your employees, let them vent and encourage their honest feedback. These main stakeholders are the key to pleasing your customers--and your shareholders and they lead your company to either better growth or doom. We all need to watch out that our staff hold up to their quality of work with the demanding work environment we are facing with.

Company doing "good deed" is good business sense?

High moral standard or virtue is supposed to be its own reward, but according to recent article in USA, it's profitable too. The Pfizer (PFE, Fortune 500) case is the kind of object lesson that permeates the gospel of Dov Seidman, a Los Angeles-based management guru who has become the hottest adviser on corporate virtue to Fortune 500 companies.

A trained moral philosopher, Seidman has built a highly successful business on the theory that in today's wired and transparent global economy, companies that "outbehave" their competitors ethically will also tend to outperform them financially.

Many companies, including Pfizer, Wal-Mart and Procter & Gamble have hired Seidman's firm to analyze their corporate cultures, rewrite their codes of conduct, and give ethical-compliance training to their employees. 
Don't nice guys finish last? Since when has success in business been about goodness rather than earnings growth? To paraphrase the 13th-century management theorist Genghis Khan, isn't it more about crushing your competitors, seeing them fall at your feet, and taking their horses?

It's true that in recent years lax regulation and asset bubbles have allowed many corporations to hide their ethical shortcomings long enough to become obscenely rich. Unhappy employees and customers can trash you globally in the time it takes to dash off a nasty blog posting or upload a cellphone video, it's becoming much harder to manage reputation the old-fashioned way, by hiding behind lawyers and crisis-management consultants.

Ultimately, the only way to enjoy a good reputation is to earn it with the highest integrity. The practice of corporate social responsibility has been on the rise for some time, evidenced most recently by the outpouring of U.S. corporate donations to support earthquake relief in Haiti.
It is difficult for companies globally to differentiate themselves based on their services alone. Whatever might be, chances are the other side of the world can copy and do for less and better. More important, companies need to compete at the level of behavior: crucially, how they treat customers and employees. It's about who has the most trust in their relationships, and where most people want to work. This will be the soft currency of the 21st century.
How to measure the impact of good behavior? One promising area of research is around trust.
The least trusted buyers in the study incurred procurement costs that were five times higher than the costs of the most trusted buyers.

Seidman laid out this vision in his bestselling 2007 book How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything ... in Business (and in Life). Today people can see into your life further, faster, and cheaper than ever before.

The least trusted companies in the study seemed also the least profitable. And companies that trusted each other were more likely to share valuable information like new product designs. Trust between companies leads to more trust, it sets off an upward spiral of cooperative, value-creating behaviors.

Or consider the economic value of an apology. Several years ago the University of Michigan's hospital system embarked on a major revision of its medical malpractice policies. Departing from the standard industry practice of reflexively "denying and defending" most claims, doctors and hospital officials started sitting down with plaintiffs and their lawyers to discuss complaints prior to any formal litigation.
In many of these meetings the doctors apologized directly to patients for any harm that their professional actions had caused.

If it became possible to put a price on virtue, even more companies might be compelled to take the high road.

Failure of Leaders ......

A good leader is to understand it’s organization differences within as well as compared to other competitors or business models adopted outside. Management is the collecting and organizing of data and with actions plan, leadership is creating the desired action and end results in favour of the company’s mission.


Leaders fail because no matter how outstanding their strategic thinking, which is typically generated at the top of an organization, it is only as good as it is understood and executed at every level in the organization. But such will be hard to follow.

Some frequent causes for derailment of the company's actions by their leaders are :

- The “I’m the boss, so it will get done” fallacy. When the job title gets in the way of reality, failure is sure to result. The label on your business card – CEO, president, VP, director, senior manager, whatever – clouds a lot of perceptions. The best business strategy balances aspiration with perspiration. The humbling part of being a leader is that your fate lies in the hands of least amongst your team. The responsibility of a leader is to enlarge the organizational dialog to include aims and expected targets.

The most important question for a leader isn’t, “What I want to achieve?” but more of “What can we get end of the day working together?”

- It’s not about execution, it’s about focus. Without focus, any organization will definitely fail to achieve its goals. Generally people do what they are rewarded to do. When there is confusion, the essential connection between the strategic plan and the work that gets done is critically compromised.

One way to gain focus is to go into problem area or the crisis. Some organizations operate crisis management as a way to get things done. You must teach your organizations where it is OK to fail: What tasks are imperative to the health of the company and which ones – though important – can be compromised? Failure is not traditionally taught in leadership courses. “Failure is not an option,” is a quip that has become part of our cultural lexicon. Not knowing where you are willing to fail means not being serious about success. Leaders must uncompromisingly communicate the critical path to success and do so at the individual level.

The most important question to ask about execution: “What is your focus?”

- Not knowing how to define success. This seems odd given that the strategic plan is all about the right path to success, but when success has multiple definitions there is neither a cohesive nor a unifying message for the organization. They can provide conflicting evidence of success, be internally focused to a fault, and provide information on past performance rather than an accurate prediction of future outcomes.

- Leaders by nature are motivated and self-driven. These are great qualities but failure occurs when a leader looses site of what is important. If a leader is trying to manage all aspects of the business and lead at the same time, they are sure to get side tracked from the long term goals.

- Poor Self Management. While leadership is great, it can be tiring, draining and exhausting. Most people will not pick up on signs of exhaustion in a leader. As a leader, it is vital that you take care of yourself emotionally, physically, psychologically and spiritually.

- Driven by fear of failure. Being driven is a quality every leader needs, but what drives you is what is important. If the desire to succeed is what is driving you, then you will willingly take risks. But when fear of failure is the driving force, it makes risk taking so much more difficult.


Other factors which could relate to the failure of leaders :

- Huge pay differentials.

Followers often think that their leaders has huge difference in their salaries compared to themselves. Because more pay means more status, leaders can quickly come to believe they really deserve the status their pay suggests, resulting in their thinking they have all the answers and that they have the right to treat their employees less than fairly.

- Impossible standards for leaders.

Perhaps because of the huge pay and incredible demands, followers expect their leaders to be almost “super”. The leadership literature identifies a whole range of personal qualities thought important for a good leader. These include integrity, persistence, humility, competence, decisiveness and being able to inspire the troops. While a leader may be high on one or two of these, it is very unlikely anyone leader will have the full set.

- Psychology of followership?

The psychology of followership is more important than leadership. What is it that makes us follow someone else? And, more subversively: do we need leaders? For example, some research shows that when people know what they're doing, they resent having leadership imposed on them.

- Alienation.

As a result of the strict hierarchies, huge pay differentials, poor decision-making and feeling powerless to change huge bureaucracies, followers naturally develop feelings of alienation, and alienation kills motivation and productivity, along with any hope of job satisfaction.

Another of Steve's money-making toy ??

Those living in the old age, you will be waking up to see the new Apple "toy of century" soon to release in the US market and everywhere perhaps, as everyone in the industry waits to see what Apple's response to netbooks, competitor tablets and E-Book readers will be. The rumour mill has been running and here is some of the news from the grapevine:

- The tablet may or may not be called iPad or iSlate [ To me, the "ipad" does not sound so nice as it sounds like the lady sanitary piece, hope Steve has given some thoughts on this. iSlate also does not sound hi-tech at all ]

- The tablet may basically be a hybrid of between a MacBook and an iPhone. It'll most likely have a metal unibody construction with a glass front that might make it look like a much larger, flatter iPhone.
- The tablet likely has Wi-Fi connectivity, and will be an E-Book reader on steroids (watch out Kindle, Apple's gunning for you). It'll probably be a terrific gaming machine, plus the capabilities for web browsing, e-mail and the ability to multitask.  Hope battery life is not an issue here ! !

The only time in recent history where the hype approached the levels of this announcement was for the introduction of the iPhone 2-3 years ago. The big question on everyone's mind is whether the new tablet will have the same type of response the original iPod and iPhones. I believe personally it will still have some market impact looking at the pricing of this new product, if set at less than S$900 or S$1000.  Manufacturers of E-Book readers are most likely having the feeling of impending doom with their product of limited features and same pricing strategy....
There's also talk of a new, improved contact and calendar synching system for the ipad so it will be similar to that used on the PC tablet.
Another rumour is the possible announcement of a touch-screen version of the iMac. The iMac has become one of the most popular computers in Apple's fleet, and touch screen capability would add tremendously to its appeal with consumers.

Leadership by a Leader ?

Leadership is defined as “the influence that particular individuals exert on the goal achievement of others in an organizational context” (Gary Johns et al. 2005, p. 274).  A leader is someone who can influence others and who has managerial authority.” (Robbins, S et al. 2006, p. 568). According to S.A Kirkpartrick and E.A Locke (1991), leaders are intelligent energetic positive thinking people who have alot of initiatives, ambitious and willing to take responsibility and answer for the consequences. A visionary leader is one with a far-sighted vision and has the knowledge and special experience to forsee or forecast what to expect.

Hence, a leader is an individual who leads people towards a certain goal; being a figurehead who rules, guides or inspires others. A leader is one who is in charge or in command of others.

• leader has to be trustworthy and must fulfil promises made. he must also take responsibility for his own actions.
• One who takes his work and role as a leader seriously. He motivates his followers towards a common objective.
• One who is confident and calm in a crisis, a leader must display self-confidence and exude a calm disposition so that people will believe in him. He is able to adapt to situational changes and adjust to his advantage.

To suggest that leaders do not enter the world with extraordinary endowment is to imply that people enter the world with equal abilities, with equal talents.” (Cawthon, D L 1996, p. 2)

By comparing a person who is musically inclined and one who is tone-deaf, the musically inclined individual will progress further than the one who is tone-deaf when they go through the same training. Although the tone-deaf individual may improve slightly, the progress of the talented individual will be much more evident. This is the same case with leadership.

It is true that people can be trained through leadership programs; however these trained personnel will often pale in comparison with those who have in-born characteristics that allow them to excel in leadership roles.

It is not just the amount of training an individual receives that creates a leader; rather it is the traits an individual possesses that play a crucial role. The training just accelerates the development of the in-born abilities.

Leaders rely on self-fulfilling prophecies in achieving some of his main objectives:

Helping people realize their true potential. Life revolves around a few chores, around a handful of activities. We work, we eat, we sleep. Events start defining our lives, instead of our lives defining events. This all too often leads us to lose our perspective, to stop seeing life in its totality. We start going around in circles. It frequently takes a leader to lift us out of this fog, to point us to a true purpose of our lives so that we stretch ourselves to achieve bigger goals in life.

Motivating people to higher levels of performance. Leaders understand that people don't perform at the highest level if they're not fully motivated. Leaders therefore unleash self-fulfilling high expectations for our talents and instill in us the confidence to do more with the tools at hand, or to stretch more to overcome a lack of tools. They inspire in us a desire to perform better in life, both day to day and longer term.

Aligning people with a broader vision. Leaders use self-fulfilling high expectations to rally people behind a higher vision. They convince those people that they're specially endowed with the talents and capabilities they need to surge toward that seemingly unattainable vision.