Shining nuggets of business nous

As our management columnist, SELWYN PARKER, bows out he reviews some of the best commercial advice he has gleaned during his three-year stint.

If anybody else tells me that "the one constant in business life these days is change," I'll sue him for repetition.

Of course, commercial life involves change. It always has. In this particular millennium, commercial life is not fundamentally different from business in any other.

In Julius Caesar's Rome, warfare routinely ruined farmers' livelihoods. In Shakespeare's day, shipping companies went under when storms sank their cargoes. In late 19th-century New Zealand, primitive communications, distribution and banking services, among numerous other shortcomings, put commercial enterprises at constant risk.

Commerce has always been a treacherous undertaking - good staff have always been hard to find, customers have always been fickle, and Governments have always got in the road.

The difference these days is that there's more help at hand. After all, merchants in the 15th century did not have a massive body of management literature to help them out. And so, for my final contribution, I have mined some 150 columns, scores of interviews and about the same number of books that provided my raw material during the past three years to canvass some of what seemed to me the best advice for coping with the routine chaos of commerce.

These nuggets of wisdom have a mixed provenance. They come from the world's most respected management consultants (although, alas, I never got to interview Peter Drucker), from hard-headed and successful businesspeople, from public servants, from entrepreneurs, from emeritus businesspeople such as Sir James Fletcher, from expatriates who have made it good, and from politicians.

But let's start at the top. Lucky enough to spend a memorable 90 minutes with Charles Handy, probably Britain's most original and certainly most well-read management thinker, I came away with enough nuggets to fill the Bank of England. But the one that stuck in my mind was Handy's conviction that "the best businesses are crusades."

When a business is a crusade, argues Handy, its likelihood of survival is hugely enhanced. Incidentally, Handy laments the American tendency to regard everything, even professional practices, as a business.

"In my view, doctors should have patients, not customers," he says.

The ideas of English-born, American-based consultant David Maister, who wrote The Trusted Adviser and other books, also seem immensely valid in the age of service industries. Maister argues that, ultimately, ethics are what drive the bottom line, as well as providing a more congenial work environment.

Obvious though it may be, most employees want to work for a company they can be proud of.

It's all about people now. When John Morgan, a successful entrepreneur from the private sector, became chief executive of the much-restructured crown agency AgriQuality, he put his gumboots on and went out into the field to talk with his employees, many of them scientists.

He found them dispirited by endless, consultant-driven restructuring. "My employees told me they wanted to be left alone to do what they were good at," he recalled. "Most employees come to work to make a difference." They certainly don't, as an American management lecturer, remarked, "come to work to enhance shareholder value."

In some companies they don't even need to speak English to make a difference. At Telemedia, the telecommunications company that is probably New Zealand's most spectacular start-up, many of the staff bring formidable technical skills, but come from all four corners of the globe and have little or no English.

This doesn't worry chief executive and major shareholder Chris Jones, who hires on expertise and enthusiasm. When an Auckland client complained that he couldn't understand the woman on the help desk, Jones retorted that most of his Asian clients understood her fine.

Generally, I believe in the axiom that "any fool can run a business, but it takes a genius to start one." I have come to admire hugely engineers who battle for years to bring a new kind of pump to market, yachties who build and export luxury boats, tinkerers who produce radical pushbikes, software engineers who sell products worldwide.

But small business is the most turbulent and vulnerable sector of all and needs all the help it can get. As Sir James Fletcher, founder of Business in the Community, says: "Small businesses lack a lot of expertise, but especially in finance and marketing." He's spent nearly a decade helping the sector out and is always looking for consultants who understand the problems of small business.

Over the years, many comments stick in one's mind. Warm-hearted Dick Hubbard, the proponent of the caring workplace, might have run into union trouble lately, but he once memorably remarked: "We say we have SOBs working for us. That's souls on board." Mainfreight's joint founder and chief executive, Bruce Plested, says he learned at least as much about management from his knockabout days as a general contractor than he did from any courses.

Neville Bain, the New Zealander who is chairman of British Post, hates yes-men. "I like irritants on my staff," he says. That is, managers who argue back.

On the importance of a fun workplace, recruitment consultant Heather Kean says, only half tongue-in-cheek: "We should pay extra for staff with a sense of humour." Even in the past three years, women have made a big difference in middle management, especially in human resources. Generalisation it may be, but they tend to be more engaged than some of their male peers.

"We have to try harder," remarked one.

Also, always a good sign, they tend to have smaller offices and fetch their own coffee.

As a final observation, there's a New Zealand style of management which should be cultivated. The best Kiwi managers are direct in conversation, uninhibited by theory, democratic in human relationships, very bright, and hard-working. They could give lessons anywhere.

* From next week, this column will be written by Vicki Jayne.