I feel let down today. Let down by a business that was once extremely entrepreunerial and let people have their head to solve problems and often threw money at them too. While the latter was unsustainable and probably led to a lot of the issues ntl now faces, the former was always the saving grace.
I have watched people work their socks off to deliver a project. Their passion comittment and I suppose love for their job was evident and their loyalty to the company astounding. I may even have done a little of it myself at one point.
These days croporate governance is in the acendency. Money is certainly not thrown about. This I believe is generally a good thing. Decisions are mae on sound business sense with 'some' analysis thrown in for good measure. Unfortunately it also has the effect of slowing down decision making, of second guessing powerful shareholders and perhaps worst of all making people cover their arse.
Why is that worst of all? Being in business is about taking risks. Generally these should be of an acceptable nature, but ultimately they are risks. Its an uncertain world, imperfect and wonderful because of it. It means we get things wrong, but usually its Pareto saying, 'Hey! isn't there an 80:20 thing here?' 80% is good enough (or better) and 20% just didn't work out.
So in a good business the effort goes into delivering the solution and mitigating risk where it can be mitigated. At the moment though I feel like its 80% of the effort is going into attempting to eliminate risk and follow a process to the letter when in order to achieve business objectives, to please the customer, flexibility is needed.
A phrase paralysis by analysis has been heard mutter on a number of occasions, which is odd, becuase it seems the big multi-million decisions get made easily but the lesser ones get analysed to death.
I miss the old days. There was bad management, especially of money. There was bad decision making based on zero analysis and lots of gut feeling, but there was passion, there was belief and there was pride. And a lot of humour.
The humour is still here but its quiet, cynical, and I don't see anything resemblinh passion. I feel worn out by it all, because I never was a good little corporate solider, I was always the outsider pitching the idea, and these days I have to make so many pitches, and no one is even prepared to take a swing.
Rant ends... ;.(
Posted by Paul Goodison at September 29, 2003 10:52 PM | TrackBack