Dubai: There's much to be said in favour of these testing times, even where businesses are concerned. At the very least, what it does is wipe the field clean of the also-rans.
And you certainly won't have Verne Harnish, consultant to a Who's Who of Fortune 100 companies, lamenting their departure from the scene.
"As far as I'm concerned, what's been great about the downturn is it has cleared away all the bad companies and the good ones now have an unbelievable opportunity to take on more market share," says Harnish. "I love these periods what's taking place is effectively a pruning of the garden."
In fact, Harnish has a distinct preference for old-fashioned virtues, and no where is this more apparent than his insistence on discipline. More so as a tool businesses and entrepreneurs to steer a clear course out of the morass the recession brought on.
"Left to me, I would emphasise that ‘disciplined' is the one word that will mark out the companies who are going to win the next decade," says Harnish.
"We are already seeing signs of businesses reworking strategies and trying to go back to what made them good in the first place. After a generation of craziness, companies are getting serious of their business model. That, to me, suggests a disciplined approach."
Sceptics might content that discipline by itself is too ephemeral a concept upon which to rework entire business strategies.
Particularly when many of the tried and tested concepts have proved to be singularly ineffectual in meeting the challenges of the present.
Routine sets you free
Harnish who was in Dubai to launch ‘biz-strategy', a division of biz-ability, the corporate training company gives it a moment's reflection.
"Discipline might sound non-entrepreneurial, but what I see is that routine sets you free. In times of very rapid growth, business leaders find they are sucked into doing a lot of things at the same time.
"By managing disciplines better and this is as good a time as any to do so business leaders can drastically reduce spending time at the office and out at the marketplace. That's where they ought to be."
Apart from consultancy works for blue-chip corporates, Harnish's fame has rested on the best-selling status of Mastering the Rockefeller Habits. Its theme attests that the same skill sets John D. Rockefeller brought to the American oil industry back in the time when it was run on a frontier town mentality still hold good in the New Economy.
Stripped to its bare principles, the book suggests businesses should get their senior managers to identity a common set of problems and work out ways to resolve them within a given three-month timeframe.
The process gets repeated every quarter and divisional barriers are gradually pulled down, the best minds work towards a common goal and the organisation stands to benefit… ultimately.
Harnish prefers not to get drawn into whether the size of a company has any impact on how nimble it will be to stage a turnaround in the current economic environment.
Harnish insists, "It goes beyond shapes and sizes if you ask me; there is no particular advantage to being a start-up or a company that's been around for long. Personally, I believe companies which have been there for around five years or more will see most of the growth going forward. They have had the time to figure out what they are doing well and what needs to be done to make it better."
Lean machines
"I could think of many things, but saying ‘No' a lot more than ‘Yes' should be good. Businesses should say No to anything that prevents them from being lean organisations."
The down side is this makes it that much more difficult for a start-up to get going. Harnish doesn't necessarily buy into this argument.
"Actually it's a great time to start, many people are thrust into it," he says. "Companies are downsizing, those laid off are saying to themselves they don't have anything more to lose by starting up businesses on their own. More people will get pushed into it, that's how I see it."
But it will not be easy. "I realise money has dried up and more so if you are a business just starting off," Harnish contends.
"But I see businesses going back to the strategies they deployed in the mid-90s, well before the dotcom boom set in. If we look at tech companies, many had one big customer for whom they did a specific solution.
"Later on, the customised solution got converted into a packaged software and the business took wings. Of course, then the dotcom boom started and everything changed.
"A good many businesses did extremely well during this phase, but what they did not have was the DNA to survive when the times got tough. Now since we are moving into the pre-boom times, businesses have to learn to integrate this DNA into their systems."
