Let’s say that you make business decisions where the impact on the future of the business is not well-thought out. The decisions are praised by Wall Street but, even so, turn out to waste the resources of the business over the long term. Let’s also say that in an effort to grow the company fast, you buy assets above market value to close the deals quickly, hire talented employees and pay them outlandish wages in order to get up and running as soon as possible. You also have little understanding of how to effectively motivate people but believe that money is most effective. In particular, you believe that money will buy you the right talent, since you believe money is what matters most to talented people. Therefore, you either use salary, bonuses or other perks to motivate them.Then let’s say that as the result of current economic conditions, your company has fallen on hard times in no small part due to the excesses created by your growth strategy and financial excesses. (more…)
Aubrey Daniels' Podcasts
Speak of the Devil
In OOPS! , mergers and acquisitions is one of the 13 management practices that waste time and money. In a Business Week article, Drug Mergers: Killers for Research by Catherine Arnst she quotes Dr. Joseph Schlessinger, Department Head of Yale’s School of medicine who sold his company to Pharmacia in 1999. Arnst quotes him, “Until the merger is completed, everyone in the labs of Wyeth and Pfizer and Merck and Schering-Plough will stop doing anything except talking about ‘what is going to happen to me?’ They are going to stop producing for a long, long time,” he says.
This is the classic problem that I wrote about in the book. How much will it cost these companies to have professional researchers sitting on their hands for a day, a week, a month? If they are talking about what might happen in the future rather than concentrating on their research, who else in the company will be affected? Eventually, most. You can bet that the competition is not sitting on their hands. (more…)