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Then your management aren't very good. The reason is that every business, or system gets worse if you don't improve it. Call it entropy in physics. If you don

by zpeti 6y ago

Then your management aren't very good. The reason is that every business, or system gets worse if you don't improve it. Call it entropy in physics. If you don't try and improve, pay attention to the market, adapt, move, change, or at least maintain or build a moat, competition will inevitably want to have what you've got. It's why capitalism works. If you get old, and don't satisfy your customers, someone else will. Now, if you plan on keeping your job for 1-2 years, then you don't really care. Fine, that's your point of view. But management and shareholders certainly would like the business to be around for as long as possible. And for that you always need to develop and change. And this is not about some crazy capitalist mentality that destroys the planet. Nature is the same. Inevitably the tribe leading lion will get challenged and taken down. It's just what happens. Unless you at least try and work against it.

chii 6y ago
> If you don't try and improve, pay attention to the market, adapt, move, change, or at least maintain or build a moat, competition will inevitably want to have what you've got. It's why capitalism works. If you get old, and don't satisfy your customers, someone else will. only in a competitive market. There are markets which don't behave freely, and some would call those market failures. Health insurance, and healthcare, for one, is like that.
- zpeti 6y ago
  Fair point. Of course a lot of those industries have sown up regulation and spend enough of lobbying to not have to do shit. Unfortunately.
aynyc 6y ago
> But management and shareholders certainly would like the business to be around for as long as possible. And for that you always need to develop and change. I agree with everything you said except this part. Maybe I'm jaded, everything I've read and seen on the market and job shows investors/management only really care about the next quarter, maybe a year the most. Only a few companies who are capable of looking at and committing to multi-year plans.
- edmundsauto 6y ago
  Be careful drawing conclusions from what you read on business. There are significant selection biases about what stories you hear. Anecdotally - whenever I have read about a company I work for (F500), the outside perspective gets a lot of very basic facts wrong. Often they take small incidences and turn them into broad generalizations. Sometimes their sources have agendas. Etc. This is one case where it's important to tag information that comes in. The spectrum extremes, IMO, range from "did I observe this fact" to "is this someone else's conclusion". The more from the latter you have, the less faith you should put in your own conclusions drawn from it.
  - aynyc 6y ago
    Agree. I don't pretend to know everything that's going on within a business. However, long term strategy/direction of a company is fairly easily observable.
abdullahkhalids 6y ago
This is a very simplistic take. Capitalism as it is practiced in its various forms across the world, has thousands of levers that are pushed in certain direction by laws and regulations, and by norms and cultural philosophy. If you change the latter, you change the values of the levers which changes how much businesses have to _compete_ and _grow_ in order to remain _profitable_ in the long term. So yes, the current climate is our choice, and we can make different choices if we decide to.
flohofwoe 6y ago
I have the impression that businesses that are not publicly traded are in a better position to plan for the long run instead of having to cater to the quartely whims of shareholders. As an example, see the family-owned businesses in Germany which are often doing quite well over generations in competitive international markets, despite only growing slowly or not at all. Innovation is the key factor to survival, but why should innovation be linked to growth? Why is "growth" even an indicator for success, isn't a big organization almost by definition much less efficient than a small one?
Qwertious 6y ago
"If you don't try and improve, pay attention to the market, adapt, move, change, or at least maintain or build a moat, competition will inevitably want to have what you've got. It's why capitalism works. If you get old, and don't satisfy your customers, someone else will." So, the Traditional Sake corporation example aside, I agree - you do need to have some improvement over time. This is not what public stockholders demand though. Public stockholders demand that intangibles be sacrificed in an attempt to improve tangibles. Sacrifice quality of service in an attempt to increase the profit margin. Sacrifice the lifetime of the product in an attempt to lower the RRP. This isn't improving the product, it's just moving things around. At best it's shifting market demographic in hope that the new demographic is more profitable, at worst it's burning your customers for a short-term windfall. The core issue here is that there are limits to what you can improve in a given timeframe, and if you don't respect those limits then you end up just making things worse. Management often just tells themselves otherwise and keeps pushing until they've already killed the golden goose. At that point, the lesson they've learnt is irrelevant - it's too late, customers are already leaving and their reputation is irreparably tarnished.

by zpeti 6y ago

chii 6y ago

> If you don't try and improve, pay attention to the market, adapt, move, change, or at least maintain or build a moat, competition will inevitably want to have what you've got. It's why capitalism works. If you get old, and don't satisfy your customers, someone else will. only in a competitive market. There are markets which don't behave freely, and some would call those market failures. Health insurance, and healthcare, for one, is like that.

zpeti 6y ago
Fair point. Of course a lot of those industries have sown up regulation and spend enough of lobbying to not have to do shit. Unfortunately.

aynyc 6y ago

> But management and shareholders certainly would like the business to be around for as long as possible. And for that you always need to develop and change. I agree with everything you said except this part. Maybe I'm jaded, everything I've read and seen on the market and job shows investors/management only really care about the next quarter, maybe a year the most. Only a few companies who are capable of looking at and committing to multi-year plans.

edmundsauto 6y ago
Be careful drawing conclusions from what you read on business. There are significant selection biases about what stories you hear. Anecdotally - whenever I have read about a company I work for (F500), the outside perspective gets a lot of very basic facts wrong. Often they take small incidences and turn them into broad generalizations. Sometimes their sources have agendas. Etc. This is one case where it's important to tag information that comes in. The spectrum extremes, IMO, range from "did I observe this fact" to "is this someone else's conclusion". The more from the latter you have, the less faith you should put in your own conclusions drawn from it.
- aynyc 6y ago
  Agree. I don't pretend to know everything that's going on within a business. However, long term strategy/direction of a company is fairly easily observable.

abdullahkhalids 6y ago

This is a very simplistic take. Capitalism as it is practiced in its various forms across the world, has thousands of levers that are pushed in certain direction by laws and regulations, and by norms and cultural philosophy. If you change the latter, you change the values of the levers which changes how much businesses have to _compete_ and _grow_ in order to remain _profitable_ in the long term. So yes, the current climate is our choice, and we can make different choices if we decide to.

flohofwoe 6y ago

I have the impression that businesses that are not publicly traded are in a better position to plan for the long run instead of having to cater to the quartely whims of shareholders. As an example, see the family-owned businesses in Germany which are often doing quite well over generations in competitive international markets, despite only growing slowly or not at all. Innovation is the key factor to survival, but why should innovation be linked to growth? Why is "growth" even an indicator for success, isn't a big organization almost by definition much less efficient than a small one?

Qwertious 6y ago

"If you don't try and improve, pay attention to the market, adapt, move, change, or at least maintain or build a moat, competition will inevitably want to have what you've got. It's why capitalism works. If you get old, and don't satisfy your customers, someone else will." So, the Traditional Sake corporation example aside, I agree - you do need to have some improvement over time. This is not what public stockholders demand though. Public stockholders demand that intangibles be sacrificed in an attempt to improve tangibles. Sacrifice quality of service in an attempt to increase the profit margin. Sacrifice the lifetime of the product in an attempt to lower the RRP. This isn't improving the product, it's just moving things around. At best it's shifting market demographic in hope that the new demographic is more profitable, at worst it's burning your customers for a short-term windfall. The core issue here is that there are limits to what you can improve in a given timeframe, and if you don't respect those limits then you end up just making things worse. Management often just tells themselves otherwise and keeps pushing until they've already killed the golden goose. At that point, the lesson they've learnt is irrelevant - it's too late, customers are already leaving and their reputation is irreparably tarnished.