There is an old saying, American I believe, that goes something along the lines of “If you can’t learn you ain’t worth whipping”. It sounds vaguely Texan and refers I think to the image of a recalcitrant animal that resists training to the extent that it is better to give up on it and accept it as it is than continue trying to train it. I know a few people like that, and indeed I’ve met a few people in business like that as well, and one thing that they have in common is that they don’t seem able to learn from their mistakes. When things are going well, or when it is happening in a company that you have nothing to do with other than being an observer it doesn’t present a problem, but when it is a company that you work with, or worse still work for, that is far more of an issue.
Let me give you an example of a company I am familiar with. The owner of this company is great at coming up with ideas and plans and schemes, but is pretty much useless as seeing those schemes through to fruition. Now this per se is not a major issue, there are plenty of successful people who are ideas focused and find productive and efficient people to work with and for them who can organise those ideas and drive them forward to create a very nice business indeed. In business as in life we all have our roles to play. However, in this particular case it does present rather more of an issue because this particular business owner is not very good at discriminating between a good, solid completer/finisher and a complete chancer who has little if any idea of how to run a successful business.
Consequently this fellow has so far had an idea for a telecoms company that he left the running of to a twenty two year old lad who could barely manage himself let alone a telecom sales company. He then moved on to web design, having seen the telecoms company disappear in a cloud of debt, and handed the running of it to a sales guy who funnily enough was also twenty two, and could also talk the talk, but was functionally illiterate and struggled to manage himself let alone a web design business. Now letting this happen once is a mistake that anyone can make. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, letting it happen twice smacks of carelessness. But it gets worse. Having had the web design company disappear, funnily enough into a remarkably similar cloud of debt to the previous telecoms business he is now planning an online retail business, the running of which he is giving to…..yes you’ve guessed it, a twenty two year old sales type who can talk the talk, although not, it has to be said in English…..oh dear oh dear oh dear.
So, what does this tell us, other than that this guy is not someone on whom it would be good to rely? Well, it suggests a fundamental lack of insight, or the ability to analyse previous mistakes. What is interesting in this case is that the gentleman in question is very much in the habit of apportioning blame to the people that he puts in place to run things, rather than perhaps considering that it is his judgment that should be called into question for picking them so poorly in the first place. It seems, from an observers perspective that he invests complete confidence in these people without understanding or questioning whether that confidence is well placed or not. The consequence of this is that his plans invariably fail but he considers himself blameless.
I have begun to consider why this might be. His plans are not necessarily bad, his puts together business plans that have merit, and starts them well, but I wonder if there is at some level an aberrant psychology that is causing him to feel that the business may fail but that he must do all he can to avoid having to shoulder responsibility himself. I know from his history that he has been responsible for several businesses failing at significant cost to suppliers and employees, and I wonder if he is just not willing to face that possibility again, leading to him shifting responsibility onto these youngsters who are relatively easy to blame when things go wrong, as they inevitably do.
It seems an odd way to go about running a business, but each to their own I guess, and I’ve heard that denial is a very pleasant place to live…..
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