This afternoon walking past my local shops (in an unusually sunny Manchester) I noticed that two establishments seem to have closed for good. Both relating to food, which is particularly concerning to me as I'm a fan of eating out! One was a cafe, one an Italian restaurant (with a notice on reposession now in the window).
We all know that the odds are stacked against new businesses succeeding. In the case of the cafe, which I visited a number of times I feel like I could have offered them some suggestions on how (from my perspective as a customer and regular cafe goer) they could have made improvements.
I wonder if they could see things were going wrong early enough to try and be innvoative and make changes.
When you work in a large company, you are largely protected from making decisions/choices that end up in major disaster - and that have such personal consequences. You might start to see your budget overspend, then your boss might start to coach you/put pressure on you to reduce the costs ...... often the worst case is to replace a manager with "new talent" .. but in the process the site hasn't gone out of business, and no-one is looking at the job pages. How differently would managers act if the stakes were higher? What different decisions would they make? or would they not see the signs?
I'm sure that management text books says that standing back and reflecting and making sure you haven't lost the way is crucial ...... what stops us from doing this? I think there is an action points here for me this week.
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