I have met more than a few friends who have been distressed with the amount of BS that goes on in their (large) companies. There is real work to be done, but a number of people manage to subvert the primary goal to indulge in petty power-plays and turf wars.
I am sure, this question has bothered a number of us. How the hell do large companies survive with huge departments with large cost structures that seemingly achieve nothing? How do they go on to not just survive, but also grow across decades?
Those of you who have read the title of this post are well ahead of what I am going to say here. My hypothesis is that all these successful companies are propelled by a super-duo. One team of super engineers, to develop a product or service that the consumer really really wants and one super sales team, to sell it.
If the incremental value designed in by the team of super engineers were not so monumentally huge, the company would have the life span of the proverbial shooting star. Witness the large number of dot-coms whose glory days were a flash in the pan. Similarly, the best products or services are only as good as the revenue they can generate. Sony's Betamax video recording system of the eighties was universally acknowledged as superior to VHS, but was left behind by savvy marketing by JVC and Panasonic.
Smaller companies, without the marketing muscle to bring in mega sales to convert the value of their product to mega dollars, need for everyone in the company to pull their own weight just to survive. Perhaps that explains the large failure rate amongst smaller companies.
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