Professor Leon van Vuuren | Executive | Business and Professional Ethics | The Ethics Institute | mail me |
Our strategy
We know that the Art of War, by Sun Tsu, is prescribed reading in many business schools around the world. This gives us, as business executives, licence to equate doing business with making war.
We may therefore be strategic in our thinking and planning. Be tactical in executing our plans. We launch products. We target consumers and their markets. We take no prisoners. Lean and mean is good. Our offices and factories are adorned with posters of our competitors’ brands, to which we have added the words ‘know thy enemy’. To accomplish our aims, we need to get involved in the war for talent. Since we tell the world how powerful our brand is, we have slithered our way onto the list of the best companies to work for. Our competitive mindset makes us strong and broadly admired. After all, business is not for sissies.
PODCAST
An interview with Professor Leon van Vuuren, Executive Business and Professional Ethics, The Ethics Institute and Dr Ivor Blumenthal, CEO, ArkKonsult, discussing how ethics impacts management and workplace culture.
Our shareholders, cutting costs and heads
This year the shareholders again demanded ‘more’. As investors, they take huge risks and have the right to demand higher returns on investment. Gordon Gecko in the movie Wall Street (1987) proclaimed that ‘greed is good’. Although our political correctness does not allow us to say ‘greed’ out loud, we can and will insist on our pound of flesh. We are conscious of our rights in a capitalist economy. There is nothing wrong with always wanting more.
So, to please the shareholders, we have to work smarter, be more creative and insist on cost-cutting across the board. The Chief Financial Officer reports that the salary and wage bill of employees amounts to 73% of annual expenses. This is preposterous. As executives, we need to spend the company’s money on the right things. So, let’s embark on an intensive cost-cutting strategy. Put out the word to squeeze suppliers, sweat the assets, pass costs on to customers and use more aggressive sales tactics, even if we have to cut a few corners to appropriate some of our competitors’ customers. All is fair in business and war. Hopefully our pitch to the Board for bonuses and phantom shares is approved. They had better not hold the loss we made this year and our lethargic share price against us.
Down-sizing is our mantra going forward. Some call it re-engineering, rationalisation, trimming or right-sizing. Instead of using the real R-word (retrenchment), we refer to ‘issuing Section 189s’. Thus we say that we are ‘reducing our headcount’ (or ‘cutting our payrolls count’, as our colleagues in the USA call it). This is far easier than admitting we are putting 60, 600 or 6,000 people (human beings) out of work. We’ll just tell employees that downsizing was our last resort to save the company from doom. Let’s not be too concerned about the effect on them and society – other companies do it all the time. Having a job, after all, is not a right, but a privilege, and they should know that. In business, one has to ‘break a few eggs to make an omelette’, or so the saying goes. Make sure that everything is done by the book, though. If you have to run it past the ethics department, run it fast!
Our customers
We probably have to ascribe to the TCF (Treating Customers Fairly) initiative as the other companies are doing. Time to get Marketing to ‘massage’ our advertisements to get them in line, and then target other markets, especially the untapped ones where customers don’t know so much about fair treatment. Credit is the placebo of low disposable income – we are simply giving the people what they want! Make no mistake, the fine print is in order and the consultants in the call centre are ready to field any nasty calls.
Our suppliers
It might be a good idea to use the money we owe our suppliers to…
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Read the full article by Professor Leon van Vuuren, Executive Business and Professional Ethics, The Ethics Institute, as well as a host of other topical management articles written by professionals, consultants and academics in the October/November 2019 edition of BusinessBrief.
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