Complacency Leading to Disaster

I recently gave our vision brief, the one we give all visiting VIPs, to a group of engineers and scientists at our company. The brief shows our vision of a new and glorious future and our major part in it. It is very, very popular. I explained that this vision was what separated us from our competitors. Our customers bought our products because they could see that they were buying part of something larger. I also explained that this vision was the way people saw us.

The audience worked on projects not represented in the vision. They could easily have been a part of it, but they had never put the time in to even seeing the thing, much less participating in it. They enjoyed the presentation, asked good questions and when it was over, sat in uncomfortable silence until their manager got up and led them out the door. I do this all the time. At least once a week I give this brief to an internal group of 15-20 people who have worked with us for years, but never bothered to see the presentation.

I’ve said before that we are the best in the world at what we do and it’s true. We are fully employed. We even have to turn some work away because we lack resources to do it. We are not hungry. Not at the top and not at the bottom. This is a prelude to disaster.

We are in a high tech industry. High tech firms live on very short time scales. The time between success and failure is one product cycle. We are crushing everyone right now, but if one of our competitors gets their act together, we can go from boom to bust quickly. All it will take will be a unifying vision that excites people. It doesn’t have to be technical achievement at the product level. When that happens, our people will become very hungry very fast.

While our business cycles are short, our marketing is still done through personal relationships. The time scales for personal relationships haven’t changed since the time of Oorg the cave man. When the downturn comes and our product line no longer excites people, it will take time and effort to rekindle atrophied marketing relationships and recover. At our company, there will be angry meetings and accusations in all directions about who lost this or that customer. All the while, our competitors will be pulling away.

It would be a lot easier to prevent that than recover it. The question is, how do you motivate complacent people to work a little harder and help reinforce the corporate brand?

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