I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet to bread to wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
~ Ecclesiastes 9:11
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| Harold MacMillan |
After completing my MBA, I am thinking of this quote for success because be it in Business or elsewhere, is not always the result of brilliant strategy, dazzling tactics, extensive knowledge or general all encompassing ‘talent’ alone. Occasionally it may be but most often it just not. On the other hand it is very seldom for an individual idea or business idea to succeed solely on the back of pure chance either. Business is often unpredictable thing as sometimes most logical and rigorously researched strategies can fall foul of the unexpected and the coincidental. I remember somewhere I read about Britain’s former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan once famously said when asked about the factors which influence successful or unsuccessful political careers; “events, dear boy, events.”
Time, chance and business intelligence have certainly influenced many situations. It is interesting to see what roles do intelligence and chance play in Business venture. Consider the following situation: Imagine you are CEO of company that manufactures consumer electric goods and you personally have sanctioned one of the costliest budgets of development of new revolutionary device. You ask one of your best marketing team to investigate the potential uptake of the prototype (through focus groups, random samplings) and the outcome news is no GOOD. Their consider opinion is that the device will not even sell in sufficient numbers by which they can cover the cost of manufacturing & development, partly because device itself was too revolutionary for the current market and partly because you personally (in their view) have fixed the selling price too low. Even the design team set up to develop the product is openly sceptical of its commercial possibilities. On top of all this your wife/huband/partner does not like the gadget one bit and, to add insult to injury, the marketers have sanctioned a name for it that is, in your considered opinion, truly awful (they did this while you were abroad on business and the cost of reversing their decision would now be prohibitive.
So, faced with the above situation, what would you do?
What actual CEO did was to personally authorise a manufacturing run at considerable cost, stick with the relatively low selling price, stick with the name he hated because it was too costly to change it by then, and to go boldly forth! Why? Partly because he and a sixteen year old relative of his loved the gadget to bits and they believed sceptics had it wrong.
Who was the CEO?
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| Akio Morita (1921-99) |
Akio Morita of the Sony Corporation.
And the Gadget?
The Sony Walkman (Morita detested the name ‘Walkman’ he wanted to call it ‘Walking Stereo’- so a bit of good fortune he was away then!)
As we now know, the Sony Walkman went on to become truly global phenomenon that made the company hundreds of millions of dollars. The question worth reflecting upon of course is this – was Morita’s Decision to proceed (completely justified as it turned out) just a lucky throw, or did it have something to do with Business intelligence?
I believe (in this particular instance at least) that it was primarily the latter. Sometimes the number-crunchers and research-nerds get it wrong and battle hardened managers and sixteen year old kid (who was the walkman aimed at after all) get it right.
The principal objection of the walkman nay-Sayers was that people would not be prepared to pay for tape player that did not also record music. But Morita believed that his target audience’s desire to take their music with them wherever they went would outweigh this deficit. He was right. Morita had gut feeling about the walkman, a feeling predicted on years of experience in consumer electronics. His gut feeling told him it was right time for the walkman and he consequently took the chance. So Remember, Always Time and Chance with gut feeling pay of idea perfectly..!! J
Good one.
ReplyDeleteI had a doubt. If the product is still not announced to out side world and still doing feasibility studies (or whatever name they are called), why changing name would incur significant costs (leave alone prohibitive)?
@Sirji..nowadays when big Organization decide launch new product, they do review of their product on every stage but earlier I believe this was not the same..! In this case, they made gadget tried and tested with few people but result was not favorable but as CEO persisted with 16 year old boy's opinion they went ahead of making first batch from then on there was no chance to reverse it.
ReplyDeleteThere are many disastrous examples are present in corporate world where feasibility studies have shown very different results than real output.
One of them is from Coke..they did focus group tasting before launch of new Coke drink and according to those results people would love this drink. Coke spent more than 4 Million dollar on this but when this drink got launched they could not even recover their manufacturing cost from it.