How to Sustain a Successful Management
Success creates its own difficulties. One of them is especially tricky. What do you do for an encore? This question of strategic management mainly arises in business if your mine has run out of gold. Or, to change metaphors, if you’ve climbed the highest mountains – and there are, by definition, none higher to scale. The analogy applies to both the person and the business. Careers peak as well as markets. The instinctive reaction is to soldier on. But that must usually mean condemning yourself and/or the business to a process of diminishing returns.
The rarer path is far wiser: to strike out in a new direction, to launch a second life. The necessity that afflicts corporations, and sometimes individuals, has been brilliantly described by two very different experts on management – Charles Handy, writer and management philosopher, and Andrew S. Grove, one of the few top managers to have written a serious and original book on management – in fact, two of them, High Output Management and the more famous Only the Paranoid Survive.
Grove’s belief in paranoia is deeply understandable, since his company, Intel, nearly went under as the Japanese assault on its core business, memory chips, drove the company to the wall. Memories were Intel’s core, an industry which it had created and dominated.
But the Japanese made their memory chips better and cheaper. In what had become a commodity market, Intel couldn’t make a profit, no matter how hard a brilliant management strived.
But the golden days are numbered. At Point A on the Curve, some way below the coming peak, the writing is already on the wall. But customarily, nobody reads the message. Profitability is still marvellous, the shareholders are delighted, the customers are happy, the market is still strong. But inexorably the business moves on from Point A, rounds the heights of the Curve, and then heads remorselessly downwards.rotary kiln:http://www.hxjqchina.com/product-list_38.html
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In 1987, I published a book, based on broadcast interviews, which dealt with 17 UK companies selected because of their strong comebacks from a severe Thatcher recession. The stories and the short-term results were convincing enough at the time. But the long-term outcome, 17 years on, is fairly lamentable. Of the 17, only three can be called strong survivors of their management wars and leaders of Important industries: Glaxo (now the major part of GSK), Rolls-Royce and BOC.
Such a device could be programmed – and thus was born the microprocessor, the computer on a chip; the tiny foundation on which the entire digital revolution came to rest in jaw crusher production. Intel’s encore created a new industry for itself and its customers and allies (not least Microsoft). It provides a blueprint for the return to Point A – in Intel’s case from well below the fateful Point B.
Those quotes are the very opposite of McColough’s Terrible Three and go a long way to explain the speaker’s superiority as an encore manager of a cone crusher manufacturer. He’s Andy Grove of Intel, who adds that: ‘If it is hard to make a success of something, it is an order of magnitude harder to sustain the success’. You’d better believe it.
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