I quite like the flavour of a good quote. Earlier this week, however, I may have over-indulged. I’ve just returned from a Sydney management conference which was an all-you-can-eat buffet of words and wisdom from various internationally renowned ‘gurus’. Tuck in your napkin and I’ll give you a taste.
I have to say that I travelled to this meeting with some trepidation. Management conferences have a tendency to serve up a flavourless mix of stodgy, glutinous nonsense. Thankfully this one was different. Perhaps because Sydney’s stock of nonsense had been fully dispensed at APEC the fortnight before. Or because this convention was dedicated to the memory of Peter Drucker, one of the most sensible of all management gurus.
Tom Peters, co-author of In Search of Excellence, served the first course and his main message was ‘have a bias for action’. “Ready, Fire! Aim” was one of the catch cries. He quoted Herb Kelleher, founder of Southwest Airlines: “We have a strategic plan. It’s called ‘doing stuff’”. And a Canadian oil searcher, John Masters: “You only find oil if you drill wells.”
The quotes and examples from this platter kept coming throughout the conference and the urging was clear: analyze less – try more. An idea mightn’t work, but if it doesn’t, you’ll learn from the failure. In particular this message was pointed at leaders. A quote from Gary Hamel: “The bottleneck is at the top of the bottle.”
A complementary course was ‘look after your people’. “Leaders live to serve” captured it most succinctly. Put another way: “In a war zone, officers eat last.”
One speaker used a gardening analogy. “Gardeners can’t make plants grow – they can only create the conditions to promote growth, to give it the best chance.” The best fertilizer, according to many of the speakers, is investment in people: investment in finding good people and investment in developing them.
Two case studies were dished up separately by senior executives of the Westpac bank and IAG. Both supported and illustrated the benefits of the previous courses. And both added another ingredient: ‘think long term’.
For public companies, it was clear that thinking long term is risky in the face of market analysts who find this approach hard to swallow. But it was paradoxically clear that thinking long term is the only way of escaping the dictates of those analysts and freeing your business to cook up its own recipes.
While the pressures may be different, it was clear from these and other speakers that longer term thinking – sometimes at the cost of short term growth – is an essential constituent of sustainable business.
There was plenty more served up over the two days and I couldn’t get it all down. But the flavour that lingered with me longest was this: just because we’ve known for a long time that something is good for us doesn’t mean we’re going to eat it.
In memory of Anita Roddick, a powerful advocate for sensible, sustainable business.
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