How to veer away from wasting opportunities

“There may be comfort in numbers” © Roger La Salle

Slow to move

Large organisations are usually very slow to react to new ideas. There is of course an upside to this as it serves well in risk mitigation. Everything that is done that is outside the norm is second and even third ”guessed” before being embraced or discarded.

A previous article referred to as “The outrigger model” told of how IBM overcame its internal inertia in developing the PC in record time*.

At least IBM understood the problem. A further article on “Pushback the Opportunity Killer” also addresses this issue.

However, there is also a great risk that organisations, or more likely people within them, take advantage of this inertia as it can allow them to keep their “heads below the parapet’s” and stay largely invisible as they collect their monthly salaries.

This approach is relatively safe, involves no career risk for the individual and maintains the status quoi. But what opportunities are foregone?

Management reporting is aimed at keeping senior management and particularly the CEO informed as to how the organisation is functioning according to known norms.

Such norms may be sales revenue, profitability, headcount, productivity, debtors and the like, but what of non reported activity.

For example what if an employee is approached from an outside party with some new innovative initiative of that employee has neither the vision nor experience to see the potential, or worse still is too comfortable with the statues quoi to bother.

Consequently the opportunity may well be lost. Indeed experience has shown that this is more often than not the case. A case in point Below is an e-mail exchange between one party in a large company and an outside entrepreneur trying to get traction within this company for an opportunity that could completely transform their business.

In failing to capture the interest of the employee the entrepreneur tried to make contact with the company CEO.

Unfortunately, the call was intercepted by the CEO’s PA and without the CEO seeing it, ultimately it found its way to the initial contact.

The following is the e-mail exchange that followed: (Names and places have been changed to protect the parties involved)

Dear Entrepreneur,

As per our conversation yesterday, we do not see this as a new product opportunity for our business. As I stated yesterday, our business is not is not into the infrastructure or XXX markets where such systems are predominantly used.

In the markets that we service, there is little demand for XXX systems. As such this potential product is not the focus of this company.

I have heard, that even after this conversation, you are still calling our company touting your product idea. As we have made our position clear, can you please deice and desist from calling us.

Kind Regards

Harold Glagg

The entrepreneurs reply:

Hi Harold,

Your response astonishes me, and it is NOT MY technology and I am not even being paid to promote it, but I do believe it is simply too good to ignore!

Here is a company, just a couple of miles from you with the very best XXXX technology in the world, they have installations in almost every country in the world and more than 15,000 sites running.

They specialise is XXXXXX, even the biggest worldwide names in this business cannot compete with their offering, and you are not even interested to explore this as a new business opportunity.

Have you ever thought of expanding your offering with the world’s best technology? We call this “Business Development” in my world.

OK, keep selling whatever it is you sell and overlook a milt-million innovation you could bring to market.

PS. Further to the above e-mail exchange, I challenge you to forward both your e-mail to me and my response to you to your Managing Director.

Now there’s a challenge?

Cheers -

The entrepreneur

Needles to say, the CEO never did get to see this exchange and thus the opportunity died, all for the want of perhaps a one hour meeting with a few people from both sides.

Other examples

One wonders how many times this happens in businesses in the course of a day? Perhaps KODAK had just such an experience when they apparently overlooked the threat of the emerging digital age of photography.

Perhaps the Swiss too when they ignored the advent of quartz crystal watch technology only to now be playing catch up in the wake of Japanese success with quartz controlled timepieces.

Doubtless there are many other examples.

A new Reporting Regime

What is needed is a new reporting mechanism whereby opportunities, no matter how trivial they may seem are input to a Dashboard as a matter of course for all for all to see so that no possible opportunity escapes scrutiny. And lo and behold any individual that takes it upon themselves to discard an opportunity without a second opinion.