Views from the Hills by R. E. Stevens, GENESIS II (The Second Beginning) E-Mail views@aol.com

Failure Requires Effort

Most people will tell me that failure is the result of a lack of effort.  I'd like to add a slight twist to that thought.  I think failure is the result of a conscious effort to ignore the obvious.  I'd like to take the thought of effort from the physical activity to the mental activity.  For instance, consider the following memo sent to me by a reader of the ViewsThis memo is over nine months old.  I wanted to hold it until the person left the company in question for another more promising career.

Last September, I wrote a Views titled "Customer/Consumer Satisfaction and Communication."  The Views focused on how frequently a company will ignore obvious problems when they appear out of context.  The following is a memo from a reader and a friend.
 

I put your last Views on my desk until I could get around to reading it this afternoon.  When I picked it up, I noticed that my desktop was scorched and blistered.

But I want to tell you that I listen!  A couple of months ago, I happened to be at a quality check meeting with some plant people.  One of the dozens of products was a new XXX XXXX item.  In passing, it was mentioned that a new XXXX was disproportionately causing some (consumers) to choke.  No action was subsequently taken -- not even any follow-up questioning from anyone.

I told this to my boss, who got on the line and finally made it an issue to her boss.  In other words, it had to go to the VP for Marketing before anyone said anything at all.  Then, research takes the heat from the junior marketing folks for pushing the "panic button."

To make a long story short, they have finally decided to change the formulation.  Ironically, they have refused to consumer-test the product for taste performance.  THEY SAY THAT THEY DON'T NORMALLY "TEST" PRODUCT CHANGES FOR ANY PRODUCTS AMONG CONSUMERS!!!!!

Is the company in question a rinky-dink company?  No, it is a very large company.  I doubt that anyone outside the company would expect this type of behavior from this company.  They are an international company with many brands, but not as many as they had a few years ago.  They have been losing share in almost all of their categories.  I know of two of their facilities that they have closed recently.  Am I surprised?  No.  Would I have been surprised a couple of years ago?  Yes.

The mental effort to ignore the problem identified above had to be more than the physical effort to address and resolve the problem in the beginning.  Some may call it laziness.  Some may call it stupidity.  I'd like to believe it is FEAR, fear of rocking the boat.  The environment many of us work in makes it difficult for us to step out of our immediate area of responsibility to address a problem.  Too many companies cultivate an environment that sets up barriers between departments encouraging work to be done in separate units rather than as teams with shared responsibilities.

Do you encourage comments from members of other departments -- and do you listen to them?


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