In the simplest of terms, these two resources and the management of them make or break a business.
The engagement of an organization’s focus and its human energy, backed by the financial support of those choices are the determinant of a business’s outcomes.
When thinking about these resources, the common thread is people – specifically people making choices. The “fabric” of an organization’s decision making labyrinth expands from those who make the strategic decisions in the battle for their business to survive and prosper, to those engaged in the intimacies of decision making in the daily struggle to persevere in an ever changing business landscape. The character and attributes of this “fabric” determine the character and attributes of the outcomes.
For every decision that a business owner or senior leader makes in the deployment of their business’s Time and Treasure, there are a countless number of decisions being made in the execution of those decisions.
With these premises in mind, and in the crush of an accelerating business decline, the need to shed expense is paramount. A business aim of increasing share in a continually contracting market, while fundamental, is pragmatically not going to produce offsets to inherent losses in a downturn. The control mechanism of expense is people – people cost money and they spend money.
So the question confronting ever business owner and leader is how does a business shed people? After all, every business is in the business of selling intelligence, and there is only a fraction of that intelligence locked up in the tangible assets of a business.
So what is the mechanism and process that a business sheds its intelligence – its people? Is there a process? What are the values and thinking behind the choices of who stays and who goes? Does that thinking extend beyond the thinking that went into a spreadsheet?
Questions every business leader needs to reflect on.
