Farmer Brown’s Survival Dilemma
By Gene Levine - www.genelevine.com
There is mounting evidence of an impending disaster. Some companies have become shortsighted and interpreted their need to survive as a carte-blanche program to sacrifice employees on-the job satisfactions. I find too many companies have abandoned sharpening of their human resources and returned to economic reprisal as the way to get things done expeditiously. I equate these acts as trying to put out a fire with doses of gasoline.
Although today’s most fashionable theme is "Survive," I believe that today’s survival should not be at the expense of tomorrow’s profits. Keeping today’s events in perspective, firms can thrive as well as survive. Since people are a firm’s most valuable asset, if their needs and wants are denied today, as sure as the sun rises . . . they will deny their employer’s needs tomorrow.
Take Luke Brown. He was a farmer. With his mule he plowed his field of oats and harvested his crops. He was enjoying the good life. Then things started to go wrong. His plowshare got dull. He had to work longer to till less. The farmer’s yield of oats declined; consequently, the mule consumed a larger share of the dwindling harvest. Farmer Brown ended up with fewer oats to take to market; less money was realized. Dollars to sharpen his plowshare were not available.
He pondered his problem. How could he get more oats to market? In a state of panic he came up with a solution. He mixed a little sawdust with the mule’s feed. The mule seemed satisfied and the farmer now had more oats to sell. In a state of euphoria he put more sawdust and less oats into the feed.
He was delighted. He had more money for what he saw was the good life, but he never got around to sharpening his plowshare. He did not realize that the mule was getting weaker. He thought his problems were over. They were, that is, until the mule died of starvation. Only then did Farmer Brown realize how shortsighted his solution had been.
If you limit your firm to a survival quest, you put yourself into Farmer Brown’s position. Your edge, like his plowshare, will become dull. And, as in Farmer Brown’s case, solutions being pursued by unknowing apparel manufacturers to bring them back to the good life, are starving their mules. Their technological, industrial and human resources programs are getting fed sawdust.
Regardless of today’s pressures, if you are to have the good life tomorrow, remember that you will not survive or thrive without a strong production base. That base is built on people’s performances. I suggest you keep your quest for survival in perspective. It makes little sense to begin paving the way for tomorrow’s failure by tunnel . vision and narrow thoughts today. Why must you compromise your future? It is not good business to think about tomorrow, tomorrow. The time to think is today. Furthermore, it is your responsibility and immediate challenge. It is not impossible to meet. The way to solve tomorrow’s problems is to anticipate what they will be and formulate solutions now before you are challenged for solutions tomorrow.
The goal of good management is also the test. Good management keeps a business healthy and, a healthy business can be compared to a healthy person. The test is the ills it does not have and therefore does not have to cure. Isn’t it possible that if you had done a better job yesterday, when you were supposed to, you would have had a more profitable business today?
In all crises there are opportunities. Basic strategies to maximize today’s available opportunities should be planned and executed now while operations are tight. It is possible to turn this bleak period into an era of opportunity for you and your firms if you want to. Now is the time to stop reacting and start acting positively. As the scouts say, "Be Prepared!" Your future success is going to depend upon what you are doing now to anticipate the needs of your customers and how to satisfy those needs more efficiently than your competitors.
I believe success is when preparedness meets opportunity. Success has nothing to do with chance or luck. If it were so, your customers would toss the names of all their resources into a hat and buy from names which they had picked out. You know that is not the case. Opportunity is always present. It is our preparedness that helps us see it and grab it. The important thing is not where you were, or are, but where you want to go.
Begin by thinking of ways to get there. The ability to think, to reason and to express that logic sets us apart from the animals. Archibald MacLeish, the Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, once said, "The only thing about a man that is a man is his mind. Everything else you can find in a pig or a horse." A man is what he thinks about at all times. What he is thinking about on the inside reflects itself on the outside. If he thinks positively on the inside it will show on the outside. It will show in how he acts and conducts himself and his business. If his thoughts are negative his actions will reflect it.
In the second act of the great play by the same name, "Hamlet" is tossing things around with Rosencrantz and Gildenstern. The conversation turns to prisons and Hamlet says, "Denmark is the worst of prisons." Rosencrantz says he does not think it is a prison. "Why then," says Hamlet, "tis none for you. For there is nothing either good or bad, only thinking makes it so." I feel this is true. Nothing is good or bad; only thinking makes it so.
The success of one’s business is not so much determined by the size of one’s business but by the size of the thinking of the people who make up that business. Therefore, I cling to the belief that what appears to be the problem is really the solution. What appears like an impossible situation today, is really a threshold of a new world of opportunity and profit. It is how you look at it. Nothing is good or bad; only thinking makes it so.
Today, what is needed most is . . .
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