Trust ourselves to find the solutions

17 Apr, 2020 - 18:04 0 Views
Trust ourselves to find the solutions President Mnangagwa

eBusiness Weekly

One of the most interesting remarks made by President Mnangagwa last week was that the Covid-19 pandemic and the response of Zimbabwean industry and universities had shown him that Zimbabweans could do a lot more and that there had been an over use of external consultants.

He foresaw a culture change, of using far more of the expertise in the country wielded by Zimbabwean citizens in future State programmes.

But this culture of downgrading the advice from local experts and wanting just about anything done or confirmed by external consultants is not a preserve of State systems.

The private sector has led the way, with many large concerns terrified of making even the smallest step without bring in the foreign “expert” to tell them what to do, how to do it and quite often asking that foreigner to actually run the project and hire other foreign experts, even in areas where local talent is probably better.

This is strange. A Zimbabwean company that is rich and profitable enough to pay the sometimes outrageous fees demanded by foreign consultants is presumably doing something right.

It must have highly skilled people on its own payroll and a management team that can make the decisions and select the options generated by its own competent teams, at least in day to day business.

Perhaps it is a fear of making a mistake, or, to be more precise, to be blamed for making a mistake, that leads to the desperate search for a foreign consultant, who can then carry the can if something goes wrong.

Yet if you are the board and CEO of a large company, one of your duties is to carry the can. Not every decision, even if checked and rechecked by an outsider, will be right.

It has been said that if a CEO gets 75 percent of CEO-level decisions right, gets 15 percent not wrong but probably not the best solution, and gets 10 percent wrong then that top manager is not useless.

In fact, such people can lead the largest companies because they are really rather good. Boards and shareholders need to understand this.

Of course, a smart and wise CEO will know sufficient detail of the business that the wrong decisions are highlighted early, and remedial action or even a U-turn can then be made.

The great classic was Coca- Cola changing its recipe 30 years ago. Fortunes had been spent on market research, every sign was positive. So the formula was changed and it bombed.

CEO Donald Keough was willing to ride out the storm from diehard customers who hate all change; that is standard. But the sales figures were something else, hard fact.

After a modest rise, as people tried out the new cans, they started falling steadily. So he carried the can, said it had been a mistake and made the decision to order a U-turn. His genius was making a profit on that U-turn as he returned to the “real thing”, a slogan he invented.

There are still some who want to believe that the whole fiasco was dreamt up as a way of obtaining huge free publicity. It was not.

What it showed was that a clear-minded CEO was willing to put his error behind him, play no blame games and resisting the temptation to blame the market research consultants that had been hired, and instead figure out a way to climb back.

After the U-turn, a very successful U-turn mind you, there was some investigation into why a lot of very expensive market research got everything wrong.

There were two sources of error. One was fairly obvious, that people are always willing to try something new but then start thinking.

The second was more interesting, that Coca-Cola was not just a drink, it was part of American culture and that changing the formula was destroying childhood memories; it was a bit like shooting Santa.

This is often the case with consultants. They get paid for the work they do, but they are not to blame for the result if they offer bad advice.

Many consultants, when they are bidding for a contract, are amazingly self-assured, giving the impression that they know all the answers and have huge teams to back them up.

And they are often wrong, having missed a crucial factor that no one had ever even considered before. And when they are advising, or ordering, something in another country and with a different culture they are even more likely to miss something.

Admittedly many Zimbabwean companies are not set up to use the vast range of skills they possess.

There is a tendency to concentrate decision-making in small layers of management and to use staff grading processes at management level to ensure that managers both compete and are careful to avoid error.

So sometimes an outsider can make people think, change corporate cultures and then use their own in-house skills base to advance.

The most spectacular example of this is the influence William Edwards Deming had on Japan’s economic miracle after the Second World War. He was an engineer who became a statistician.

He was sent to Japan in 1950 when General Douglas MacArthur was still running the show and asked for a census expert to help the Japanese run their first post-war census.

But some Japanese engineers had read some interesting articles he had written, and asked him to give a course of lectures.

This lead to the most famous of all lectures, attended by some of the top leaders of Japanese industry where Deming urged them to rethink their businesses and start emphasising quality, that multiple inspections to throw out defective goods were less effective than getting it right in the first place.

At that time Japanese products had a reputation of being shoddy and rip-offs, probably exaggerated.

But while Deming had been laughed out of court in his own country, the Japanese industrial leaders saw his main point, and saw his point that they needed to involve their own engineers on their own payroll to create the new culture and ensure that processes were designed to stress quality and innovation.

A lot of his ideas are still considered heretical in many circles, such as the stress on the actual product or service, rather than the hype in adverts, and on ways of involving all staff, including his total dismissal of staff assessments. But Japan showed that they worked.

Deming did not run projects. Sony, Toyota and the rest were perfectly competent to do that. His consultancy was creating a mind-shift that Japanese companies then implemented themselves with some very interesting new wrinkles, and it took them several years to dump their over-hierarchical structures, dump their American management books and come up with a whole new way of doing business, on their own.

Most Zimbabwean firms can do the same. They can look at international trends in their own industry and then generate solutions that fit Zimbabwe’s climate, culture and raw materials.

They can almost certainly find, if they need an expert in some arcane technical skill for a year, a Zimbabwean that can do this. But essentially they need to dump the idea that one size fits all countries, be open to new ideas and to innovation, but then out together their own solutions

It has been done before. One of the fastest eras of growth and industrialisation was the first half of UDI. Local expertise had to be used, and some very innovative solutions generated with the near total blockade on the illegal regime. Some things did not work out, but a lot did with that emphasis on what the country needed, rather than trying to copy someone else’s designs and processes.

A lot more of that now would be useful. The top UDI concerns did not copy processes, in fact they sometimes chose a solution that could only work locally, but they looked at the final product they were creating.

Some of the things the President was referring to are the protective products needed when dealing with Covid-19. The World Health Organisation, rather usefully, publishes standards based on global research.

But it does not tell anyone how to mix a sanitiser, for example.

Zimbabwean firms and universities might well use different equipment, but the makers are simply meeting the standard, not duplicating someone else’s industry.

And other things, like the long-needed renovation of hospitals and the like. An American hospital is highly unlikely to need boreholes to ensure a decent supply of pure water and solar panels and batteries to cope with power outages. This is essential in a Zimbabwean hospital, as local combined health and engineering teams recognise.

In fact, a lot of the successful work already done involved professionals from health sectors and engineering sectors actually talking to each other and working together, so the technical solution was tailored for the health requirement.

It sounds simple, but would a European or American or even a South African expert have managed to do this, and managed it in a few weeks?

President Mnangagwa hit the nail on the head in his usual blunt way, talking of moving that cultural change that sprung into action in an emergency and making it part of the new Zimbabwean culture, that we face our problems and work out, together, the best solutions ourselves.

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