Management Speak

Management Speak, Management Lies

Management in big and small companies constantly spout bullshit.

Disclaimer: none of the examples I am about to list come from my current manager or the company I work for and I am not going to describe where they do come from.

Quitters never win and winners never quit

This is transparently false. Obviously if you quit in fight A you lose fight A, but that does not predict what the results of any other fights may be. In recent years there has been a lot of disquiet in the British media about the way football clubs in the English Premiership treat lesser competitions, especially the once extremely prestigious FA Cup. The top clubs concentrate on the Premiership and the European Champions League somewhat at the expense of lesser competitions, often fielding teams of youngsters and resting their best players. These are quitters who are winners. This year Manchester United won both the European Champions League and the FA Premiership. Not also winning the League Cup and the FA Cup hardly counts as dismal failure. If they had played their hearts out to win one of the lesser trophies there is a chance they could have damaged their chances of winning the two most prestigious (and lucrative) competitions. The correct strategy is surely what Sir Alex did, focus on what really matters and field the strongest sides in those competitions, keeping the very best combinations of talent for the most important matches. Fielding a team of all reserves would be wrong, it would insult the opposition, the fans and the competition but to commit 100% to winning a lesser competition would be a mistake. Nobody likes to go on record as saying so but everybody knows that this is correct. Making everything a 100% priority is a mathematical impossibility.

There is a time to call it a day and to back off from a potential sale. The point will vary depending on the nature of the product you are selling. Something which is likely to be a once in a lifetime purchase such as double glazing or a kitchen calls for going further the down the road of pressure and commitment than something sold by a company which has a long term relationship with a customer. When I was selling kitchens I was encouraged to be much more of a bulldog than when I was selling electrical appliances for the rather obvious reason that an electrical shop has much greater prospects of further sales to the same customer whereas a company that sells kitchens only gets one bite of the cherry (or indeed light oak). When I worked with a company that tried to visit customers every six weeks the attitude to pushing sales and resisting returns and cancellations was completely different. If an item represents 100% of the likely business a customer will ever give you then you should be prepared to be nastier and fight a little dirtier than if it is a tiny fraction. From a supermarket you are far more likely to get a full refund and a bunch of flowers rather than a letter to tell you to meet them in court.

Quitters do win. I can just about guarantee to you that every silverback gorilla, every elephant seal with a huge harem and every magnificent stag you ever see is a quitter. This is the way nature works. In large mammalian species (and no doubt probably also in dinosaurs before them) the males are usually sexually mature at least two years before they have any realistic prospect of fighting to gain control of a harem of females themselves. If they had the bulldog spirit they would be killed or die of exhaustion and sexual frustration. But sexual frustration is very rarely fatal in any species because males instinctively know when they can’t win and they withdraw from the fight and live to fight, and perhaps to win spectacularly, another year. So every gorilla, deer, elephant seal, horse and orangutan contains the genes of quitters who were ultimately winners, along with a little contribution from the odd male ancestor who managed to get lucky against the odds when the big male wasn’t looking or had been wiped out by hunters, disease, meteorites or what have you.

Bulldogs of course are different, quitters never get a sniff of a bitch, but then again bulldogs are now so inbred that they couldn’t survive without their owners and abusers paying for caesarean sections to get the freakishly massive puppy heads past the absurdly narrow pelvises.

The moral of the story? Sometimes quitting is the only way to survive. If Britain really had fought like a bulldog in the Battle of France the war might have been lost. As it was the correct strategy was to withdraw, keep the army intact, lick the wounds, grow stronger and like every winning stag or silverback gorilla to attack when there is a chance of victory. Losers go down fighting. There can be no victory without survival and many times quitting is the best way to ensure that survival. I have no doubt that there are many boxing trainers whose biggest ever regret in life is not throwing in the towel when their man was losing but while he was still in a fit state to recuperate and box again. Sometimes quitting is exactly what you have to do. It is absurd to caricature quitting as the easy option or the way of the coward. Deciding to quit takes courage as well as judgment.

Millionaires don’t become billionaires by never quitting. Success in business requires that you have the courage to admit mistakes rather than battling on waiting for a lift off or bounce-back that will never happen. Winners do quit when the indications are that quitting will be the right decision. Many products and services that top companies launch don’t catch on and so they drop them. The best retailers close shops as well as open them. If any company or general never seems to make any mistakes they are probably being too cautious or they are allowing their pride to lead them into either not admitting or covering up mistakes.

Buyers are liars

When I was selling kitchens I was constantly told that buyers are liars. The idea is that the only reason anybody wouldn’t buy a kitchen from you at a quarter to midnight when they were due to up for work the next day was that the sales designer hadn’t done the job right. Whatever they tell you is lies, either they don’t like something about the product or the price is wrong, find out which one it is and do what you can do. There was a mantra that buyers had to be liars, there could be no other objection. They didn’t like the product, the plan or the price. Because it was official company policy that the buyer is lying when they say they need to think about it the designers were encouraged to think they had every right to retaliate and lie back to the customer and make up bogus justifications for why the special price they might be able to do could only be offered that night and never again. Of course it was a lie. If you can do it for significantly less than the list price tonight what reason is there to believe you can’t do the same or something very similar next week? Some of the price deadlines were real, if engineered by changing official prices in official promotions, but the majority were entirely bogus. The “show home” close was a classic bit of bollocks. What kind of an idiot believes that people buy home improvement products after being taken to see a modest example installed at a discount in somebody else’s mediocre house? Obviously some people either did believe or went along with it when those with the chutzpah to launch such a lie put it forward with what passed for a straight face.

“I’ll send Terry around, he’ll be there at 6.”
“Hello, I’m Tariq, I’ve come to design your kitchen.”
“Gladys, he said Terry on the phone didn’t he?”
“You must have misheard love, it’s an easy mistake to make, invite the lad in then.”

No means tell me more

The product is so good that the only reason to say no to it is that you weren’t paying attention or the salesman missed something out of the presentation. Of course you’d never get a job selling something that didn’t sell itself, would you? You do believe in the product, don’t you? Clutch that magic feather and find out what they missed, start again at the beginning if you have to. Have faith, my job depends upon your success.

People buy people

In a way it is hard to deny the idea that people buy from people but I can’t help but notice that some of the most successful salesmen I have ever known were total shits. Alcoholics, people you wouldn’t trust to feed your puppy and people who would not only sell their own grandmother but boast about how they got the customer to pay a premium because she was a virgin. It is wholly remarkable how many first class salesmen are Billy-no-mates who can act like everybody’s friend while selling something but can’t get anybody to sit at their table.

That’s Retail

Shitty things happen, that’s retail. What? That’s show business I can understand, and that’s war. But that’s retail? Pah. Give me a break.

You make your own luck

Nonsense. Some things are simply outside your control and there is nothing the individual can do to change them. Nobody can become lucky by an act of will, believing that you can make your own luck is superstition, magical thinking. You can be better prepared, you can be better motivated, you can focus on the positive but in the final analysis shit happens.

Believe and it will happen

People who make it in show business are not those who work the hardest and believe the strongest, more importantly than that they are actually talented and people like their work. With a fire in the belly strong enough to power a steam locomotive you are not going to make it if you can’t actually play tennis, act, sing, sell insurance or whatever it is you are trying to do. Drive and self belief are not sufficient. If you’ve got the talent you can hire agents and shrinks to do the believing and striving but if you haven’t got the talent you will not make it, and believing you’ve got the talent does not cut it.

The customer is always right

Utter bollocks. The customer is often wrong, ignorant or barking mad, but little ever comes from telling them this. Think about your own experiences as a customer, how do you feel when speaking to somebody who knows less about the product than you do? I was in PC World just after Christmas and I asked where the graphics tablets were. The assistant looked a bit blank and said they didn’t do them. No doubt she went off to make a joke to a colleague along the lines of where did I think I was, a chemist? Twenty seconds later I found a shelf full of them. I don’t want to deal with people who know less about the products they sell than I do. As a customer I expect somebody in a shop to know quite a lot about the products and I expect that they want me to buy one. I know I have a problem that could well be solved by me buying a product from that shop, otherwise I wouldn’t be there. I would be a fool if I expected the assistant not to try to sell me something. What I as a customer want is honest questioning, probing what I want and going beyond what I say I want to discover what would best suit me.

It does not follow that what I am asking is for is what would make me happiest. I would not regard it as rude for a salesman to ask what I expected a product to do for me. I would see it as rude if they kept on challenging what I said or did not appear to be listening. A good salesman should paraphrase what the customer is saying rather than parrot it. They should also translate between features and benefits. If I as a customer asked for a 100% cotton shirt a good salesman should come back with something like so you’re looking for something natural and extremely comfortable, even at the expense of being hard work to keep looking at its very best. To that I can either agree or say something along the lines of I know I want cotton or I can ask about alternatives, or look a bit confused and so invite the salesman to offer an alternative suggestion. A good salesman then has the opportunity to sell me two polyester cotton mix shirts for just slightly more than the price of one pure cotton shirt, then once he has got my trust no doubt he can tempt me with an obvious additional purchase such as a tie to match.

Your failure is your problem

Your failure to hit your target cannot possibly be down to anything beyond your control or under the control of people higher up the pecking order. All failure must be owned by the people receiving the bollocking. This is of course nonsense. A target may be missed for any number of reasons and simply stating that external reasons are to be defined as excuses and dismissed as being by definition false and lame does not mean that the reason for the failure is down to whatever the person giving the bollocking has chosen to blame it on. Just because a manager can legitimately only shout about A, B and C it does not follow that the reasons for failure cannot be with more fairness blamed on X,Y and Z which are not under the control of the underling being roasted. Being in a superior position does not make you God. Being in a superior position does not make your assertion correct and the underling’s assertions incorrect. In a one-on-one situation a decent manager should not make an underling nod agreement to something they have not agreed.

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