07-05-2014, 10:49 AM
Marketing & Sales – Replenishment-to-consumption – Peoples’ attitude towards change
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Have you ever classified people as open-minded or conservative? What about action
oriented people or procrastinators? After more than fifteen years of trying to induce
organizations to change, such classifications were so deeply ingrained in my thinking
that they did have major ramifications on my actions. I tended to decide early on
whether or not I would like to work with a company based on the classification box I
had slotted the top management into. This assignment forced me to realize that that
classification might lead to grave mistakes. Let me describe what brought me to such a
radical conclusion.
The company I had joined early 2005 is producing soaps, an FMCG, in Zambia. I am
specifying the country because most people who have not done business in Zambia do
not comprehend the scale of this country. I think it will suffice to highlight that in Zambia
the number of FMCG shops is close to half a million. Our company was an infant player;
it had close to five percent of the market. Still, in the vast Zambian market that means
that we were selling our products through fifteen distributors serving one hundred and
ninety thousand shops.
The company’s eagerness to grow had driven them to the dangerous situation where
instead of taking the time to open the bottleneck, they had taken the shortcut of
buying their main intermediate product from a single source- their competitor. (To
understand how dangerous this situation can be, consider a company that produces
soaps. The crucial element in soap is PFAD. Now imagine that the company has no
facility for PFAD production. A shortcut would be to buy the PFAD from their competitor.
Taking this shortcut, the company is now at the mercy of its competitor.)
To rectify the situation it is vital to find ways to overcome the bottleneck. Using the
standard techniques of TOC, within a couple of months with some additional
investment, the situation was reversed. Instead of buying this intermediate product, we
started selling our excess intermediate product to other manufacturers.
What caused such a drastic change in behavior?
I pondered this question for a long time. On one hand, all my experience with our
managers had led me to believe that these were people who were more open-minded
than others. On the other hand, characterizing people as open-minded people or
conservative people, as action-oriented people or procrastinators, would have led to
the ridiculous conclusion that the managers of this company all went through an almost
instant transformation.
A plausible explanation might have been provided by the wide spread opinion that
people’s behavior is dependent on their comfort zones; when people are operating
within their comfort zone you can expect open minds and action; when they are
pushed outside their comfort zone, expect hesitance and resistance.
Personally, it was not easy for me to accept such an explanation, not without a precise
definition of the term ‘comfort zone,’ not without a clear description of the mechanism
that connects comfort zone to attitudes.