Years ago, I read a book entitled The One Minute Manager by M Spencer Johnson, M.D. and Ken Blanchard. I followed it up with The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey. As I recall, I was younger at the time and I was pretty sure that, with just a bit of effort, I could single-handedly shift the earth’s axis of rotation. At least, that is, if I was not expected to handle everyone else’s problems at the same time. That monkey business, therefore, meant something to me. Apparently, I was not alone. Meets the Monkey made it big. Pretty soon there was the full and exhaustive One Minute Manager Library, a colossus that covered a spread approximately equal to the Ottoman Empire.

According to legend, a short while after the OMM became a phenomenon, the good doctor went through some personal stuff. He created the story of Who Moved My Cheese? to help him deal with a difficult change in his life, “learning”, say the promos “how to take his changing situation seriously without taking himself seriously” and, eventually, turning a negative into a positive.

Who Moved My Cheese? is a simple story about two guys and two mice and how they had to deal with cheese being moved around in a maze. Two decades after the story was created, Who Moved My Cheese? was finally published. It became a #1 international bestseller, with one million hardcover copies in print within the first sixteen months and over ten million copies within the next two years.

Cheese Wiz

Critics of the book say that the story is simple enough for a child to understand and that it insults their intelligence. Simple it is. And insulting it is. Even allowing for the child-like drawings of cheese (you know… Swiss-style wedges with holes) that are strategically placed as filler between thoughts, there is not enough substance here to fill a… well… a ham and cheese sandwich.

The author claimed that it is not what is in the story of Who Moved My Cheese? but how you interpret it and apply it to your own situation that gives it value. I hope so, because there is virtually nothing in the story. If you are determined to part with a twenty, find a homeless person in the street and hand it over. Look closely at both your circumstances and see if you come away with anything of value. It is likely you will and, best of all, the twenty you part with is almost assuredly money better spent than had you bought the cheese book.

Cheese is touted as the world’s #1 book on change and Johnson the world’s #1 business author. Ridiculous hyperbole…unless you are referring to sales $. Then it’s just ridiculous.

Here’s the Poop

We move from the paper thin veneer of pop business culture to the thicker one of poop culture. Kirk Weisler, who is managing to carve himself a neat career as a motivational speaker, also draws from real life in his narrative, The Dog Poop Initiative.

The ‘essence’ of the story, done in rhyme, is that a dog poops on a soccer field. Coaches, refs and little tykes play around it. Finally, one coach takes the initiative and picks up the offending lump. To quote, “The Scoopers take the initiative and are the ones who lead the way. They make the field a better place for all the rest to play.” There you have it. All of it. Leadership in a nutshell, so to speak.

At least the drawings are cute.

I admit to having attitude. But then I also admit to having standards. I probably shouldn’t be so crotchety about this thing, but I believe that if business people are going to commit valuable time and hard-earned money to reading, they should be rewarded with substance, something that passes for original insight, and at least a smidgeon of scholarship.

I’ve nothing against best-sellers. But spend the time with those who’ve taken the time. You want to change your life? Try Stephen Covey. You want to change your company? Read Jim Collins. There are just too many good books, serious writers and deep insights out there to waste your time on poorly written pap put out by cynical publishers.

My last post (Chaos Theory and the Economy) looked at the ripple effect of what might, to the untrained eye, look like isolated events and localized market dynamics. These ripples sweep outwards in ever widening circles, washing over near everything in their paths, capsizing anything not large enough or small enough to ride the waves. The chaos doesn’t just roll outwards, however; it reaches up and trickles down as well. The trickle is, actually, more of a crunch.

There is a story worth telling that speaks to the trickle-down effect. One plain-talking CEO I knew, during a break in a tough round of labor negotiations, decided to get personal. He dropped in on the union leadership and told its members that while the company was owned by shareholders, the plant they were representing ultimately belonged to the workers. The Board was far away. He, as CEO, would likely move on in one year, three years, maybe five at the outside. But most of the workers had been with the plant for decades and few were about to leave any time soon. They had helped build it and they had made it run through the good times and bad.

If these negotiations were to lead to a shutdown, he told them, a strike would impact their future and the future of their families far more than it possibly could him. They had few options now and would have fewer options were the plant to close. In the current environment and with outsourcing now an economically and politically viable option, a shutdown – and even permanent closure – was a real possibility. This little chat was a break in protocol; there were certainly all sorts of reasons why it was a bad idea. At the very least, it could be construed as a threat. I knew this CEO, though. It wasn’t a threat; it was a plea.

As it happened, the union missed his point. The employees walked out. The company then kept them out long enough for it to really hurt.

I tell this story not to decry union tactics in this particular case…or in any other, for that matter. It is not meant as a commentary on the GM/UAW negotiations…which just happened to be mentioned in the first Chaos Theory post. I relate this story because this particular CEO was stating what I have learned over the years to be an important truth. As the economy slowly but steadily sinks, companies will – as they must – rationalize their operations. Plants will close. Workers will lose their jobs. Their fates are inextricably tied. And so, when it comes, the wave will swamp not just the plant, but its workers and their families. The chaos will have become very specific before it inevitably becomes general.

“The field of consciousness is tiny”, wrote Antoine de Saint-Exupery. “It accepts only one problem at a time.” Would that the economy were so accommodating. The bad news keeps popping up as if the economy were a giant Whack A Mole gopher bash game.

Well before the nuclear blast that was the sub-prime mortgage fiasco, well before the subsequent fall-out spreading like Mt. St. Helen’s ash over the U.S. economy, there were troubling signs. One by one, we were seeing the elements fall into place for a perfect storm.

We focus on the super novas, like the JPMorgan acquisition of Bear Stearns Cos that sent analysts into a tailspin, but what I have found most worrisome are plant closings being announced with unsettling relentlessness and regularity.

There are the biggees. General Motors, for example, has a plan to close or eliminate shifts in a dozen plants as part of a plan to cut 30,000 hourly jobs in the U.S. and Canada by the end of 2008. The controversial agreement recently signed with the United Auto Workers union not only sanctions the closings, but lays the groundwork for drastic wage cuts and opens the door to further unsettling moves.

And then there are the smaller, less known punches to the economic gut. Pilgrim’s Pride, the largest chicken processor in the U.S., is closing a chicken processing complex and six of its 13 distribution centers. The catalyst is soaring feed-ingredient costs resulting from a surge in corn-based ethanol production.

This post is not going to question the corporate strategies that hinge return to profitability on cost-cutting. That is an issue for another day. What I do wish to point out here is that none of these cuts occur in isolation.

As the Pilgrim’s Pride closings indicate, downstream effects, near invisible to the untrained eye, are taking their toll. The chaos theory applies to the economy. With oil profits soaring in a way that gives additional bite to the term ‘crude’, refiners are investing in cokers and other technology to maximize their yield from each barrel . High value extractions like ethanol are being favored in the refining process. As we have seen, this hurts the chicken industry, for one. It also means that the availability of Bunker C (heating oil) as well as paving and roofing asphalt will be diminished and that their costs will also rise dramatically. And, with the rules of supply and demand being adhered to with religious fervor, the cost of natural gas and other oil alternatives will most assuredly keep pace. Plant operating costs will continue their upward trajectory.

The escalating cost of gasoline has, of course, been especially hard on truckers, who also have to contend with reduced backhauls in a downturn economy. To say nothing of regulatory changes and enhanced security measures. For trucking companies to survive, they will have to pass on these costs and inconveniences to customers. Logistics will prove an increasingly troublesome challenge.

With the housing bubble burst and demand for building materials down dramatically, we have seen the shutdown of numerous lumber and OSB (Oriented Strand Board or waferboard) mills. With the closure of sawmills, there are less wood chips available. There is also less recycled paper available thanks to, among other things, increased consumption by the Chinese. The combination makes things tough for manufacturers of LDF wall board and MDF furniture who have also been hit by the downturn in housing expenditures. This downturn is, of course, related to the mortgage mess and the resultant tightening of credit. It is also a reflection of growing consumer nervousness engendered by continuing bad economic news, including plant closures.

And so on.

There is an intertwining of relationships between industries and a cascading of effects as a result of each change in any one industry’s fortunes. We can see the overall impact of all these linkages, but the subtleties are not as obvious as they are telling.

People talking without speaking
People listening without hearing.

Remember those lines from Paul Simon’s The Sound of Silence? Obviously, he had been to one too many company meetings.

A quick corner-of-the-napkin calculation says that I have survived in the range of 7,000 meetings over the course of my career. Somewhere around the 4,000 mark, I figured things out. You might think, therefore, that I’m slow but, hey, I was in a meeting.

So, here is one veteran’s Top 10 take-aways on meetings and facsimiles thereof.

1. Meetings are neither good things nor bad things. But, depending on your objectives, they can be necessary or unnecessary things. So when you are planning a meeting, begin by asking yourself these questions: Why have a meeting at all? Can we achieve what we need more efficiently and more effectively in another way?

2. What kind of meeting is this going to be? Brainstorming sessions are not the same as information sessions are not the same as planning sessions. The objectives are different; therefore, the organization of the meetings should be different, as should their participants.

3. So, who should be invited? Only those that have to be. This is, apparently, not as obvious as one would imagine. The tendency is to invite everyone and anyone who is remotely attached to the issue at hand or remotely related to someone else who, by invitation or by chance, will also be at the meeting. There is more fear of insulting someone by leaving him or her out than there is of having the wrong people or too many people involved in the first place. This is not a quilting bee. The only people you should worry about insulting are the people who actually should be there; you don’t want to waste their time. Oh yeah, the maximum number of people at a meeting: seven.

4. There should be an agenda prepared for any meeting, no matter how small. If you deem an agenda superfluous, then so, likely, is the meeting. An agenda, sent out in a timely fashion, ensures people come to the meeting prepared and makes clear the purpose of the meeting and its desired outcome.

5. Meetings can easily meander, with conversations wandering off in different directions. There should be one key objective going in and one major accomplishment coming out…which is achieving the key objective. Get what you need out of a meeting or get out of the meeting. There has to be a single-mindedness about this. Anyone who is of two minds on the subject should not be invited and certainly not invited back. I am reminded of this line from comedian Fred Allen: A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done. You’ve got one objective. Get it done.

6. To make sure there is no meandering, there should be a facilitator at every meeting. Most people assume that the chairman should play the role of facilitator; after all, it is the chair’s meeting. Wrong! You can’t play leader, scribe and facilitator at the same time. You may be the mouthpiece of the project, but you shouldn’t have to be its eyes and ears. The facilitator will make sure the meeting starts and ends on time, will keep the meeting on track (i.e., stay on topic), will stop side conversations, will ensure everyone gets a chance to speak, and will take notes so that no good idea gets lost. The facilitator is invaluable.

7. Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits. Apply his dictum from Thomas Edison to meetings…or, more precisely, to between meetings. People must meet their commitments, must do their assignments. I have seen teams energized and I have seen projects grind to a halt simply because someone did or did not complete a pivotal assignment. In other words, the between time is as important as the meeting time itself. You don’t want to have to have a meeting (as I have had) to agree that you agreed on something at your last meeting.

8. Be aware of each meeting’s dynamics, which really means, be aware of the people dynamics going on in each meeting. These change in dramatic but predictable ways when senior managers are present. It is important for managers to subordinate their ideas until others have had a chance to speak and that, if others speak, said managers do not shoot down or shrug off suggestions or even offer yes-but-wouldn’t-it-be-better-if improvements.

9. Meetings are to be survived and to do so sometimes means you’ve got to find a way to amuse yourself with the small things. I love whiteboards. I dislike laser pointers. I hate arrangements where table legs get in the way of mine. Speaking of legs, though, I have to admit to being a student of seating protocol. And seating habits. Where people sit is predictable and, as it turns out, inviolable. Okay, so the boss sits at the head of the table, opposite the drop-down screen. Others jockey for position and eventually sit where they sit. As time passes, you will notice that where they sit is where they always sit. Just as you will sit where you always sit. Seating is a security blanket, so if someone sits in someone else’s seat, there inevitably ensues a bizarre dance of the lost, a silly milling about. Like I said, be amused.

10. Lunches have become a staple of the North American meeting diet. Lunches meaning pizza and barbecue chicken. Not meaning tuna and bell pepper pockets. They say armies march on their bellies. So do meeting participants. Feed them wisely, which means that if the meeting continues after lunch, do not feed them too well. Nothing slows down a meeting like having all its participants take a communal nap.

So there you have it: 10 things to note for your next meeting of the minds.

It shouldn’t be this tough.

There is no company that has too many good people. So, if you interview someone bright, ethical and enthusiastic, someone with a good work ethic, someone whose training matches the position you are seeking to fill and whose attitude is a perfect fit with the group he or she would be hired to join, go for it.

Hiring While De-Hiring

Companies take hiring especially seriously when they are in re-engineering mode. The ingress and egress of people come and go in turns; they must, therefore, be handled carefully so as not to get in each other’s way. But serious and cautious do not necessarily mean wise. Re-engineering sometimes gets in the way of intelligent thought and intelligent hiring. If a critical position needs to be filled, fill it. Quickly! I have seen companies stall hiring, saving salary and losing invaluable momentum in the process.

Inside Hiring Outside

I have been privy to numerous debates about hiring from within as being a virtue or a vice. One CEO said to me, “If a company cannot find anyone from within to fill a senior position, then management, starting at the very top, has failed”. I know of several Fortune 500 companies that move people up in spiral fashion, alternating between staff and operating positions. Others, however, see things differently. Companies, they say, need to refresh themselves, need to add new blood, new ideas, new energy. They see recycling employees as slowly grinding companies into mediocrity. I have even witnessed debates about what constitutes inside and outside. For example, how would you qualify a long-term temp being made permanent? Or the rehire of a former employee who has gained valuable experience elsewhere? Trust me, those competing for the position have very different – and not altogether generous - views of the issue.

Family Matters

Then there is the matter of hiring family. Generally, the more paternalistic the company, the more likely it is to hire employees’ relatives. Not surprisingly, this maximizes loyalty and minimizes turnover. Not surprisingly, those who prefer hiring from the outside see reasonable turnover as healthy and the lack of turnover ossifying. What is healthy? Between 5 and 10% annually. I am of two minds on the family issue. It should not prevent a hire, all things being equal. But, things are never quite equal. When family members are involved in anything negative (a layoff, for example), emotions will run somewhat higher than usual. Conversely, when family members do well, there is always a suspicion (even if there is not a hint) of patronage. Many companies would rather not take the chance. It’s a shame.

When Too Much is Not Enough

It is easy to understand why you wouldn’t risk hiring someone you believe is too junior for a position and likely not up to the job. It is more difficult to accept not hiring someone because they are too senior and likely to quit within six months because the job would not be enough of a challenge or provide enough opportunities for growth. Surprisingly, I have seen the second case occur more often than the first. The problem is clearly bigger than the people involved. If any job situation does not provide enough scope or latitude for growth, then the company is not worth the time applying to in the first place. Jobs must be clearly defined. Job situations, however, should never have boundaries set so tight that we cannot foresee growth, laterally or vertically, for quality people who are placed in them.

Running the Gauntlet

In some companies, even lower level hires are expected to meet a variety of difficult thresholds, to say nothing of a host of senior managers, before getting the nod. I find it strange bordering on the scary to force entry-level prospects to run a gauntlet of managers, with gusts up to vice-presidents, to get a job. They are repeatedly put on the spot, a spot that I imagine seems to them somewhere close to the guillotine. I can understand – and, in fact, always insisted on - the process for senior hires. I personally have interviewed over a dozen candidates for senior positions. But I can also recall the process once being used in a way that completely intimidated a wonderful candidate for a relatively low-paying clerical job. I must confess, though, I kinda sorta didn’t follow the process. In truth, I counseled the candidate on how to navigate the gauntlet, how to handle the pressure and the people involved. Perhaps I helped, perhaps my help wasn’t needed, but the candidate did just fine. And two years later is still doing fine, thank you very much.

There are a number of excellent books on corporate strategy that merit your attention and that will provide value for your time and for a twenty. There are, of course, others not so excellent, books that at my most generous I would consider hollow in content, penned by pop authors contemptuous of their readers. Unfortunately, in business books as in so much else, popularity is not necessarily reflective of value.

There are times, however, when strategy junkies need a quicker fix than can be provided by books, good or bad. These cravings can be satisfied by reading various business magazines and blogs. Not all are of these are of equal value either and some blogs, especially, are thinly-disguised platforms for selling services and are unabashedly self-serving.

All this is to introduce a business magazine I discovered quite by accident in a store that offers for sale obscure magazines, toy soldiers and Marvel comic memorabilia. The discovery was the Spring ’08 issue of Strategy + Business. Published by Booz Allen Hamilton, the huge strategic management and technology consulting firm, Strategy + Business is - to their credit and my relief – neatly disguised and only mildly self-serving.

Interestingly, it wasn’t the feature articles that most captured my attention but the front section columns. A number of these should get you thinking :

Upturn Thinking in Downturn Years

In market downturns, the companies that emerge strongest are those that, while retrenching, push ahead with long-term strategic planning. One example of a company that did just that is Lucent; even while the telecom hardware business was in decline, CEO Patricia Russo pushed ahead with an initiative to identify new growth areas that would make use of Lucent’s core capabilities and provide stable revenue and income streams going forward.

New Metrics for Media Campaigns

The reach and frequency metrics used in assessing traditional media campaigns are losing relevance in this age of the web, social networking platforms, cell phones, PDAs, podcasts and video games. Marketers are looking to deliver “contextually relevant messages” to specific, i.e., targeted concentrations of potential customers. They are seeking more precise information on how this digital activity correlates to actual sales. As this information becomes available, they will increasingly embrace the pay-for-performance advertising model.

Undiscovered Riches in IP

In an age of commoditization and globalization, you might imagine companies would dig deep to find and exploit assets that yield sustainable differentiation. Among those assets, Intellectual Property may well be the next frontier. Companies are getting wise to the significant revenues that can be gained through patent and technology licensing. IP is moving out of the legal counsel’s office and into the corporate development arena. In fact, in the past 15 years, licensing revenues have burgeoned from $15 billion to $110 billion. To take it to the next level, companies will have to make their intellectual property both serve the business and be a business in its own right.

New Life for Tired Brands

Ford is attempting to revive the Taurus brand out of the ashes of the Five Hundred, and Proctor & Gamble is using Red Zone antiperspirants and deodorants to reposition Old Spice among teen males. Should and can old brands be revitalized? Have the attributes which once made the brands successful been eroded or been made irrelevant by competing brands? Are the products suffering from the poor opinion of its original customer base or poor awareness from new, potential customers? A proposed four-step Brand Vitality Assessment (which, no doubt, Uno Who could conduct) would provide the answers.

All in all, I rate this magazine a lucky find, one for which you might keep an eye out. You might also want to scour the back issues. Go to www.strategy-business.com. Of course, with Booz Allen Hamilton being a mega consultant, you should not expect a free lunch. Not while they’re trying to build the brand at any rate.

A few days ago, marketing maven Seth Godin made a wonderful observation: An inbound phone call is the ultimate in short-term permission. The customer or prospect is taking the time to call you. (See Who Answers the Phone?)

Every marketer has been taught about contact points, where stakeholders’ paths, direct or indirect, intersect with those of the company. It can be a trucker asking for directions, or a dealer following up on an order, or a consumer with a complaint, or a shareholder with a query. It can be opening your package or looking you up in the yellow pages. It can be reaching you – or not – on the phone, via e-mail or in person, at the door. For marketers, each point of intersection is vindication, at least, that something is working, and a valuable opportunity to make that something (and the relationship if nothing else) work better.

Too many companies underestimate – and therefore, under-resource (in manpower and funding) customer service in all its various forms. Time is money but, when it concerns customer service, the money is seen as spent rather than earned, outbound rather than inbound.

I once had a bright employee who was asked to coordinate shipments during a period of tight supply. Since we had cleaned out most of our inventory, we were operating on a just-in-time or, as we put it, on an as-needed basis. To keep all this transparent to customers, we had to keep one step ahead of them, knowing what their needs were before they did. This required constant tracking and communications, a maximum of effort and empathy for a minimum of 12 hours a day. It was reputation-making stuff and, precisely for that reason, this employee had a request – that her title did not include the words Customer Service, which would have devalued her role dramatically. When and how, I wondered, did this unfortunate devolution of customer service begin?

Branding is ultimately about how people see your company, its products and/or services. Customer service is what you do at that critical moment when people get to see your company as it really is. The two are inextricably linked. Companies that spend a ton of marketing dollars to build the brand should remember this.

My thoughts on loyalty (as stated in my last post, Whose Bread I Eat, His Song I Sing) run counter to conventional wisdom which currently holds that loyalty between supplier and customer and between employer and employee are tentative at best, subject to change without notice and likely with little regard. Loyalty, it seems to most, is a quaint notion that has neither place nor purpose in a globalized, commoditized world. Perhaps Thomas Jefferson was right: The merchant has no country. Even I do admit that there are circumstances where my confidence in loyalty is put to the test.

Acquired Rights – and Wrongs

Being acquired or merged usually has its down-side or, more precisely, down-size for the acquired or merged company and the people therein. The rationale given invariably revolves around synergy. In the new math, one head is better than two. Redundancy is good only in IT and nuclear deterrence. For example, there is no need for two finance departments, especially since there can be only one treasury into which all cash flows and one set of books into which all the numbers flow. The problem with most rationalizing is that expediency and incumbency trump quality. You go with what and who you know; both are highly prejudiced by proximity, that is, you go with those close to home. The take-away of an acquisition is that something has to give.

It is the same at the commercial level. Looking for synergies will almost always mean the rationalization of suppliers, large and small. This reflects not on the greed of the purchaser but on that of his suppliers, for acquisitions often provide the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have it all.

A Changing of the Guard

A change in leadership will likely create a measure of vulnerability for direct reports. As in the case of the acquired company, loyalty can work in reverse, accruing to the original stakeholders or based on prior knowledge. The new CEO will assess the staff he inherits using both objective and subjective measures. At the end of the day – usually by the end of the first 100 days – he will go (or stay) with whom he is comfortable, from whom he knows he can command loyalty through thick and thin, and to whom he can confidently delegate difficult but necessary tasks. Not surprisingly, this may mean bringing along old staffers with whom a rapport has already been built and a necessary level of confidence already established. To the discomfort (though not the discredit) of incumbents, ‘may mean’ very often does mean.

Once again, a new buying team at a key customer could well entail the end of an enduring relationship, contractual obligations notwithstanding. A change may reflect not just pre-existing loyalties, personal and organizational, but also policy shifts. The new buyer may, for example, decide to move from split accounts to sole vendorships or vice-versa. Uncertainty is to be expected and you’d better have a good story to tell.

When the Going Gets Tough

When the numbers don’t add up to where they ought, odds are good that budgets will be cut. Management will, at one point, begin to talk about productivity, i.e., output divided by headcount. To enhance productivity, you can either increase the numerator (always desirable) or decrease the denominator (almost always the default) or, of course, do both. Any of these options becomes a driver for reengineering which, for most, does not mean refocusing the organization but shrinking it. There is a widespread belief that, in any restructuring, less is more. True or not, for those who are victimized, it is certainly less.

So, yes, there are circumstances that will shift loyalty into reverse (as in our first two situations) or move it to a back seat position (our third). Those circumstances invariably arise from a significant change – of leadership or of fortune. Even in explaining loyalty, more of the one would likely mean less impact from the other.

A recurring theme from the corner office will be an argument that the foundation for all successful enterprises over the long haul is integrity. Integrity is a concept impossible to understand if you don’t have it and unnecessary to understand if you do. The cornerstones of integrity are respect, commitment, consistency and loyalty. Each will be dealt with in time; this post is about loyalty.

It is too easily taken as a given that loyalty can no longer be found in business, that it goes as far as the nearest turn of corner and downturn of market. There is no real loyalty between companies and their employees, nor between suppliers and customers. When the slightest push comes to the merest shove, goes conventional - or, more precisely, convenient - wisdom, people will switch on a dime for a dime.

Three decades of experience tells me that this is simply not true. Of course, nothing is so simple, but I would most strenuously make the case that loyalty is alive and doing rather well under difficult circumstances. It takes a great deal of push to topple the walls that most employees build around themselves to maintain the security of their jobs. It takes a most egregious shove to overcome a buyer’s resistance to change.

The case could well be made that employees care more about their jobs than they do about the companies that provide them, that their loyalty travels only so far as their pay cheques will carry it. I would posit that people will almost always try to do their best for their employers and that given the opportunity and appropriate tools, most would succeed. They, equally, want their companies to do well, understanding full well who butters their bread. Despite all the griping around the water cooler and over Kokanee beer, most would be more than happy to wear the company colors and wave the corporate flag. Because now, as always, job security trumps job satisfaction.

Does this loyalty go both ways? Most companies – at least the good ones – know that you can never get enough good people. Most managers – at least the good ones – know that their success depends as much on the support of those below them as on that of those above. It is the sheep, after all, that make the shepherd.

Corporate buyers look for value as much as price. Even those charged with the purchase of commodities know that a secure and consistent supply chain is invaluable. Price will get an order, but relationships will get – and barring catastrophic screw-ups – keep the business. Incumbents will get the first call and the last look. They will be given the benefit of the doubt because buyers have no doubt about the short- and long-term benefits of doing so.

Suppliers will seldom chase business – even potentially more lucrative business – that would jeopardize their relationships with existing customers. Those that do will find out soon enough that what goes around comes around, that loyalty - or lack thereof - cuts both ways. They will come to realize that there is a lifetime value to customers that, while not easy to calculate, is impossible to ignore. Mostly, they will learn that shareholders are not interested so much in profit as in sustainable growth. Sustainable growth comes with protecting the base and growing with key customers.

Everyone will have a tale to the contrary - and nothing upsets the equilibrium of loyalty faster and with more finality than a changing of the guard - but it is precisely these exceptions that define the rule. And so, in general and on principle, I am in agreement with American writer, publisher and philosopher Elbert Hubbard who said, “An ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness”. At a minimum.

Where lies the future of management? Are the days of top-down management over? Is hierarchy dead? Has Catbert used up the last of his nine nasty lives? Gary Hamel thinks so.

In The Future of Management (Harvard University Press, October 2007), Hamel makes the case - showcasing several companies that have abandoned traditional models - that we are slowly but inexorably moving towards more democratic, bottom-up systems of management.

One example given is Whole Foods which has the people in, say, the vegetable department, managing the vegetable department. Managing includes hiring, buying, pricing, merchandising and selling. The theory is that the people at ground zero would be in the best position to know who would fit comfortably in the group, what products people are looking for and how best to serve them.

Of course, one might argue that hiring in these circumstances would be self-serving. A traditionalist would claim that buying is best done by professional buyers who understand the dynamics of pricing in the context of a global supply chain, who keep close tabs on the fluctuating prices of commodities (including vegetables), and who are skilled negotiators. Old style marketers would protect their turf by pointing out that the value of the Whole Foods brand is predicated on convincing consumers that they are buying non-industrialized foods and that this image requires careful nurturing and merchandising. Pricing would be particularly sensitive since consumers buying into the Whole Foods positioning strategy are generally willing to pay more.

Senior managers protecting their creaky hierarchies would insist that building an organization requires a broad accounting of human resources, that hiring, developing and rewarding staff must be seen - and managed - globally. Those who cannot escape their administrative and financial roles would want to centralize reporting, perhaps impose an ERP system, track GMROIs and the like. All in all, it would be tough to keep old style managers at bay.

Over the years, I have seen companies decentralize and then, some time later, recentralize. I have witnessed, first-hand, the effectiveness or lack thereof of a variety of organizational models, including something that on paper looked vaguely like a pizza. I have lived through corporate de-layering or flattening (take your pick). In the end, none of it means anything unless everyone, at all levels, executes.

Trust me on this: if an organization’s head is screwed on straight and each person does his or her job properly, the old management system works just fine.