Professionalism or Profitism ?

There was a super market. It started with a great idea of giving discounts to people every day on every product. It was a great hit when it was a small store. It was an instant success. The super market started opening more stores. The founder thought in simple terms. If one store can give him “X” amount of profit then 10 stores would give him 10X profit was his thinking. Anyway the people liked the concept of real discounts that the store offered.

It went well until the day when the number of stores increased to an extent where one family was not able to manage the entire operations.

Then came the concept of professionalization of business. Then came various departments. HR, Marketing, Infrastructure, Accounts, Finance, Operations, Training, Sales, Supply chain management, Purchase… the list is endless.

Now each department is headed by a person who is called as a” professional manager” who is distinctively different from rest of the people in the department because of the suit that he wears, phone he carries, laptop he uses and finally the language he uses.

Each of his sentences will have words like profitability, bottom line, cost control, long term strategy, values… He is the messiah of that department.

He was given targets to meet.

A purchase manager purchases

A store manager stores

A sales manager sells

A finance manager manages cash

A HR manager recruits all the above people to do the job.

Everybody has a job to do. Everybody does their job. Everybody excelled in their own function. They met their targets.

But the company went into losses and it suffered an irreparable loss after this sophisticated professionalization of business.

Managers won. Organization lost.

I am not going to do an analysis on balance sheets or profit and loss accounts or any dimensional studies to find out what went wrong.

It is a simple thing that went wrong with this company. It is the same thing that is going wrong with so many so called professionally run companies.

A purchase manager is given a task of buying at prices lower than the market price. He had an excel sheet to show that he did buy the things at lower prices and the amount he saved by doing his job.

But when it came to the store, the sales team found that the purchase department bought something that they can’t sell even at dirt cheap prices. But they found a way to sell that. They sold it to local wholesale agent by offering him the incentives that they make on such sale. Incentives that are given to build loyal customer base are diverted to wholesale agents. Sales team excel sheets showed growth.

Marketing team made colorful advertisements that advertised about products that were never bought by purchase department and never sold by the sales department.

When customer walked into the store he was welcomed by the empty racks (as wholesaler already bought stocks). But marketing team could capture customer footfall in the store in xl sheets too.

At the end it was XL sheets that showed growth and the balance sheet that showed erosion.

A confused owner took a call and decided to close this professionally managed store.

Professionalism is not about power point presentations, xl sheets, using some jargons.

 It’s all about using your expertise to ensure that your work is productive for the organization, not just for yourself.

Somebody hires us not to make us great. But to make his organization great. If in the process we too become great then it’s a different issue.

Just think of a human body that consists of more departments or functions than any organization can have.

A heart to pump “X” liters of blood

A kidney to filter “X” liters of blood

A lung to treat “X” liters of blood

What would happen if each of the organ just bothers about it’s own function and doesn’t care about other organs.

Answer is the person would die. But the organs too die.

If we are organs in a company, then the company is an organ in the industry. Then the industry is an organ in INDIA.

Let us understand that our work has a bearing on everybody, when we work in an organization.

A professional is somebody who knows how to manage his work in all the circumstances with the end result in mind, that is organizational health.