Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

After ousted by his founded company in his 20’s, he went back and took his company from the bankrupt bench to the largest company by market capital; After became one of the most successful CEO’s in the 21^st century, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Steve Job said “ Stay hungry, stay foolish”.

After working in the supply chain field for over 16 years, I often hear people saying “Been there, done that”. True, after spending so many years in different disciplines of supply chain: distribution, logistics, purchasing, inventory management, quality and manufacturing. I find history often repeat itself. Overage or shortage of inventory is caused by the same reason; commodity price goes up and down; our previous experiences often build the connection between new challenges and current knowledge and helped us identify solutions “intuitively”.

When Apple opened its first retail store, the whole entire industry predicted it would fail, because it will screw up your other distributors when you setup your own conflicting channel. And more, look at how much money Steve threw at it, it was ridiculous and it was selling low margin product – personal computers! You gonna be kidding me, you must think you are a bank office or selling diamond Jewry.

Well, it turned out that Steve had the vision to market, instead of a personal computer, a digital user experience and a luxury consumer lifestyle. Today Apple store became the highest-grossing stores in the world!

Stay hungry, stay foolish! Therefore next time, when there is an over stock, or inventory shortage or a huge price increase, please do not jump to the solution. Go a bit deeper, think out of the box, if everyone of us is not afraid of trying a few new things just because other people aren’t doing them, the whole world may become a little bit better, that includes your entire supply chain.

Focus and Simplicity

From ipod, ipad and iMac to Apple’s black and white website, you can tell Apple’s elegance and sophistication originated from Steve Jobs’ philosophy.

Steve once said “Focus and simplicity has been one of my mantras. Simple can be harder than complex: you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it is worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

In supply chain, because of the nature of the complex process and broad scope,  I found sometimes it can be very difficult to measure. Just use inventory turn measurement as an example. The inventory value can be used from standard costs, purchase prices, or finished goods values; the total inventory can be used from sales dollars or yearly (12 month rolling) total inventory volume; then we add in finished goods, work in process and raw materials, or seasonality adjustment and other factors. Very soon it can be too complex to understand.

I found many supply chain professional can easily immerse themselves in the complex formulas and hence lose their focus. So when someone overwhelms you with fancy excel and pretty charts, don’t forget to ask yourself – can these charts or formality actually solve any issues? Or they are just a simple measurement tool, and your decision or actions based on the data will actually matter the most.

As I always believe, some level of stress in supply chain can be normal and conducive, but excess stress can negatively affect an individual or team’s productivity. In this troubled economy, stress can be even harder to cope with. RIF (reduction in workforce) and budget cuts became common words in the workplace, and the result is increased fear, uncertainty, and higher levels of stress in addition to the stress related to the work contents.

An effective way to reduce the stress is to allow you or your teams to take a break – take a good vacation and break your mind away from work. Recently I was fortunate enough to travel to Europe and had a good vacation.

Our first stop is London. There is lots of history in London, and where I learned the most is at the tower of London. The tower of London is soaked with the rich history of England’s dynastic and foreign wars. It was said that hundreds have entered, only to leave for a miserable march to the place of execution.

Story says, Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII, asked upon her arrival at the Tower “Shall I go into a dungeon?” “No, Madam”, came the reply, “You shall go into the lodging you lay in at your coronation.”… … Speaking of handling stress or despair, Anne would kneel down and weep in the same sorrow and fall into a great laughing. On the day of her execution, Anne inquired, “I heard the executioner was very good, and I have a little neck.” Therefore in the end, she was executed by a clean stroke of an expert swordsman specially imported from France.

So I’ve realized an effective way to handle stress is to conquer your negative thinking. If you see the downside of every situation and interaction, you’ll find yourself drained of energy and motivation. Try to think positively, and give yourself credits for a small accomplishment, even a sharper axe when your neck is on the chopping block.

This reminded me the news when the Fukushima earthquake struck at the coast of Japan and churned up a devastating tsunami that swept over cities and farmland. After many ran out of buildings and stayed in the safe places, some young people stood outside and posture to take pictures when the highrises behind them are shaking.

In my mind, to deal with stress is not to focus on the uncontrollable. In this case when a natural disaster happened, it is beyond your reasonable control. Let us all recognize the fact that many things at work are beyond our control too. Rather than trying to control the uncontrollable, focusing on the things you can control such as your own emotion or reaction to the stress is what you should do.

This seems to chime along with the philosophy of lots of technology companies. Recently I noticed that Google, Facebook and Amazon are fiercely competing for talents. They tried to entice the best talents with promises of high compensations, stock options and unparallel benefits. It made me think how we can identify and hire the best talents in the field of supply chain.

Background and Experiences

For those technology or newly minted social network companies, the background and experiences are sometimes not as important as what the potentials the candidates carry, because they are often tasked to explore the uncharted territory or create things that don’t exist. However, this is different for supply chain.

As technology develops, supply chain has admittedly changed a lot over the years. For instance, the techniques of managing a warehouse are different from before. There are many new software (WMS), robots, forklifts and racking systems have emerged in the past few years, but if you notice, the fundamentals of warehouse management remain unchanged. The new technology helped to improve productivity and efficiency.

So when you look for a warehouse manager, the previous warehouse management experience is definitely a plus, although the candidates might use a different software or technique in their previous job experience.

Skills

Abilities to analyze and solve issues, prioritize and handle stress are the skills that I am looking for when I am interviewing supply chain job candidates. However I found how to evaluate those skills is always a challenge.

In order to identify and evaluate the skills and avoid the scripted answers from job candidates, some technology companies developed those quirky brain teasers, such as how long will it take you to climb Mount Fuji.

One thing for sure, do not ask candidates questions like, “do you have the skills of XXX”, because guess what answer you will receive. Instead, you might want to ask the candidates to describe a scenario from their previous experiences and then draw your conclusions and assessments from that.

Personal Traits (character and personality)

By the end of the day, you are trying to find a member in your team. If you think about it, from 8 to 5, including possible travel time and team outing, the time you will spend with your team members might be more than the time you spend with your family, or some of your relatives.

Therefore before you make your final hiring decision, ask yourself, “will I feel comfortable to travel with him (or her) next to each other in a car for 6-8 hours? Or if I will have a family retreat in the summer with my close friends and families, will I invite him (or her)?” I found these are the best guts check when you are not sure about personal traits of a candidate.

Values

When Jim Collins elaborated about getting the right person onto the bus, his focus was on the value. Because experience and skills can be developed, or personality can be arguably changed, whereas values are the most difficult to modify or even identify.

Value is what a person believes, such as motivation to achieve excellence or integrity. They are deeply embedded in the persons’ believes.  They can be hidden for years. However, when a person is facing a unprecedented challenge or is required to make a critical decision on his own, values of the person actually matter the most. Therefore last but not least, hiring a person who has values consistent with you and the rest of your team, the rest may take care of itself!

The concept of supply chain management was developed in the 1980’s to express the need to integrate the key business processes to manage customer market fluctuations, transportation and logistics, inventory and production, and ultimately product delivery from the original suppliers to the end users.

The idea is if all relevant information is accessible to all relevant functions, every function in the supply chain can work together to optimize the entire chain rather than sub-optimize its local interest. This will lead to better planned production, distribution and product delivery which will result in lower costs and more attractive product offering, thus leading to overall better financial results.

In 1990’s, together with the wave of out-sourcing production, supply chain management concept became more and more popular. Many colleges and universities started offering supply chain management program as a business education track and many jobs were created containing “supply chain management” as a part of their titles. This is when I received my supply chain degree and started working in the field.

After I have worked in supply chain for over 16 years, I found myself overcome, fumble or get stuck by some business related hurdles that other supply chain professionals also easily stumble upon. I call these speed bumps “the supply chain traps”.

Too Broad to Focus

Supply chain practitioners often boast that they cover end to end, i.e. from suppliers to customers. Because of the broad scope, I found we were involved in many initiatives, from marketing and sales, new product development and launch, to engineering and production setup. From time to time, we are perceived as being all over the places, but nothing got accomplished by us alone as the main driving force.

I can see two reasons why supply chain team wants to get involved in everything. One is because by the concept of supply chain management, we are supposed to take care of the things falling between cracks and promote the integration between functions. The other is we can make our other projects or initiatives easier by getting involved, because many of our successes are dependent upon other functions. Therefore in my opinion, the challenge of too broad to focus won’t go away, we just need to learn how to manage it.

Conflicts of Interests

Because supply chain management is to promote integration between functions within the same company or between companies, supply chain team often are confronted by conflicting interests from other departments or even from other companies.

The most notorious one is inventory versus sales, i.e. sales tends to overestimate or underestimate their sales goals as opposed to the supply chain team orders and prepares inventory based on the sales forecasts.

As senior leaders within the organization, our job is to turn this trap into an opportunity, where we can work across different departments, create cohesive objectives and assign responsibilities of forecast and inventory onto both sales and supply chain team.

Take all the Blames

If you have worked in the supply chain field for long, you know things from time to time don’t go as your plan. That is what I call the moments of “sh*t hits the fan”. Only if you have worked as a part of the supply chain team, you know it is not easy to keep the operation running very day. However, it seems that all of sudden, you will receive attention from all over the world when things go wrong. 

Josh, we are out of stock, the factory is down, the inventory is not accurate, the container or the truck is missing or not on time, the cost is sky-rocketing…it seems that fire-fighting is a part of our mission, while it sometimes makes you feel that there is just lack of attention when everything goes right.

Therefore as a supply chain leader, our job is to make the team feel appreciated when everything goes right. A pat on the shoulder, a warm hand-shake, a quick thank you note…will keep the team going and alleviate some stress. More importantly, a very important function of supply chain leader is to stand in the frontline and consistently promote your team at all possible occasions.

Hard to Measure and Hardly Impactful

If you are in sales, you must know your goals and objectives pretty well. Revenue and profits are your clear performance measurements. They are the headlines of CEO’s quarterly or annual reports. They are tangible hard cash numbers.

When you are in the supply chain team, you can easily lose your sights on what are your performance measurements. You may be trapped by the daily routine activities, creating a purchase order, tracking the status of a container, scheduling a pick up time, doing a weekly cycle count on your inventory, and totally forget how these activities tied back the top line of the business.

You will also find the definition of supply chain performance is constantly evolving. In addition to the classic key performance indicators, such as fulfillment, inventory and costs, I found more and more new additions to the supply chain team, such as quality, cash flow, or even your customers or vendors metrics.

Therefore supply chain leader’s job is to link these local metrics to the top line or bottom line of the business. Making them simple, easy to measure and impactful is what I have learned over the years.

Win-Win and Lose-Lose

Supply chain’s overall task is to optimize the chain, which can encompass different functions within a company, or different companies within the chain from vendors to customers.

Optimization is a process to find parameters of each element and generate the best values or results for the entire equation. It is an integration process, however it may generate suboptimal options for an element individually.  When that happens, conflicts will occur and negotiations will follow.

As classic negotiation strategy states, negotiation is to find win-win solutions for both engaged parties, but this seemingly “win-win” can be a real “lose-lose” when the entire chain cannot reach its optimal. An example can be a product cost negotiation due to upsurge of material costs, when the higher cost is accepted, it can cause the customer finally decide to discontinue the product. So the “win-win” is turned to a “lose-lose” situation. Similar example can happen within an organization as well.

Therefore for a supply chain leader, in order to reach our goals and objectives, there will be many situations where we need to conquer some tough negotiations, so that the “win-lose” situation can result in the maximum value for the entire supply chain. 

So have you been stuck by these “Supply Chain Traps”? What did you do to overcome them?

Why Forecast

First , before summer ends, I wish everyone had a nice summer vacation. If you and your family went to a nice location in this summer that you have never been before, I bet one of the most important steps of your preparation is to check the local weather forecast. Because the forecast will help you to determine what date of travel is ideal, how much clothes to bring, and what service level of hotel and transportation to book etc. …

When you are running a supply chain organization, just same as you are planning a vacation trip, forecast is a dominant factor to make critical decisions such as the time and quantity of purchase or manufacturing, inventory and storage needs, and costs of goods as well as the associated transportations.

How accurate the forecast needs to be?

While our supply chain is relying on the forecast, of course, we expect the forecast to be as accurate as possible, so we can make wise and correct decisions. But I bet that you have heard these similar comments before:

“Nobody has a crystal ball…”

“After all, a forecast is a forecast…”

“Forecast cannot be 100% accurate, it is by definition a prediction…”

So my question is if you know the forecast is wrong any way, how accurate it needs to be and how much efforts should go into improving its accuracy.

My Caribbean Experience

We took a trip to Puerto Rico and Virgin Islands this summer. The beautiful ocean scenery took our breath away. We had a great time in snorkeling, kayaking, rock climbing and hiking in the woods, enjoying a wide variety of fun activities.

To prepare this trip, I diligently checked the weather forecasts two weeks prior to our vacation. However about one week prior, I almost cancelled our entire bookings, because the forecast basically said that it would have heavy storm throughout the entire week. I was disappointed and finally said:

“We are going, honey, just prepare to stay in the hotel for the entire time though…”

The first night after we arrived in Puerto Rico, I could not wait to turn on the TV and checked what the weather would be like the second day. I began to realize there were almost 10 different weather zones on the small island. The weather is not only different location from location, but also different hour from hour during the day. How could you possibly prepare for that?

In the past few years, I found myself spent lots of time fire fighting due to the inaccurate forecast. During this vacation, when I went from sunny beach to overcast hills and then got caught by a down pour at the rain forecast, I came to realize it is imperative to prepare for the worst all the time while wishing for the best (forecast accuracy). It made me think – when you manage your supply chain, is it more important to manage your forecast accuracy or to create a process to allow your supply chain respond to any abnormally of the forecast?

Through my Caribbean experience, I came to learn that to reduce the total lead time and lot size of your supply chain, create an early alert system to trigger actions and communicate changes openly throughout the entire supply chain are pragmatically more important than simply setting goals to create a 100% accurate forecast.

So how accurate does the forecast need to be in your mind?

Picture of Puerto Rico.

In this decade, Green Supply Chain has been a very popular topic. Of course, when the Green initiative is associated with the reduction of inventory level, decrease of obsolescence materials, and ultimately slashing bottom line costs, it chimes with other interests of Supply Chain, hence Supply Chain leaders will jump all over it and champion the “Go Green” initiative in their organizations.

However the challenge comes when “Go Green” does not come with immediate benefits, or it even increase costs or reduces revenue opportunities in the short term.

Green Product?

One doubt that people have about “Green” initiative is what product is actually greener?

For example, I noticed that aluminum water bottles are getting popular these days, especially among young people. There is even a fashion sentiment attached to it. These bottles are painted with fancy designs to attract more consumption. Vendors want consumers to buy more than one piece, get one of each kind, get one for each day of the week, or get a different one for different occasions.

These aluminum bottles are being marketed as “Green” products, because they can be repetitively reused so as to save “evil” consumers from using one-time use plastic bottles. Most of these aluminum bottles are made overseas and shipped to the States in container loads, whereas most plastic water bottles are made in the States and filled with water. Now think about it for a second. Are these aluminum bottles really greener than plastic counterparts in their manufacturing and distribution process? Do people really use them as how they are supposed to be used?

Same question applies to many other products, such as a simple toy, among a wood, metal and plastic toy, which one is really greener? How to evaluate them and identify a true Green product? Or is Green product just another new marketing gimmick? And furthermore, do mass consumers really use the Green product as how it is supposed to be?

Costs of Green Supply Chain

Many supply chain managers look at cost as their ultimate measurement, such as cost of product, cost of inventory and cost of transportation…

OK, in a dream world, the ideal path of a product in the Green Supply Chain is:

In this process, materials are converted into finished products and used by consumers. After their usage, they are returned to the form of materials and finished products again, then sent to other consumers for a new usage.  This is what I call full Green process, fulfilling every steps of 3 “R”s – reduce, recycle and renew (or reuse).

However, you will find today going through this cycle is more expensive than using virgin materials. Therefore unfortunately the cost focus of supply chain will mostly lead to the decision of opposite direction. As our natural resources being depleted slowly every day, ironically we have to recognize that they are not scarce enough yet so the high costs of reusing or renewing them can be justified in the economic term.

What Now?

While you might be confused by the Green marketing gimmick, or it may not yet make economic sense to operate a full Green supply chain, I think supply chain managers cannot afford further waiting or run away from their shares of responsibilities today.

In my opinion, in short term, your first step of Green Supply Chain should be simply focused on accomplishing the same or comparable goals with less consumption of natural resources. Whenever you find such an opportunity in your supply chain, you should pursue it relentlessly.

How much do you spend on your haircut?

Last time I had my haircut at Supercut. That was a fast one, I just remember the barber did not even move, instead she swirled the chair, less than 5 mins at the cost of $8 bucks, done!

The second day, I went to work.

My colleagues looked at me.

”You had a haircut!”

”Oh, yeah?!”

“Look nice”, then we quickly changed the subject.

In my opinion, a cheap or an expensive haircut won’t look much different after one or two weeks. People say nice words to you for just being polite regardless if it “really” looks good or not, so why bother spending more than $8 on a haircut?

But my friend has a totally different opinion. He says to me that when you bought a piece of clothes at $30-50 dollars, you can put it on or take it off immediately if you don’t like it; whereas if you had a bad haircut at $30-50 dollars, you have to wear it for one or two months.

My wife spends $70-80 on her hair, because she think it first improves her look and thus confidence, secondly she only cuts her hair once every 4-5 months, she thinks it is absolutely worth it.

… …

In my blog, I have previously posted my views on the Supply Chain Vision and Mission. Now to make these discussions complete, I want to talk about the Value of Supply Chain .

Wearing my Supply Chain hat and looking at the haircut decision process now, I realize that we are actually making our purchasing decisions mostly based on the value of the products (or services), but not simply on prices, quantity or even quality. And the value of a product (or a service) is a subjective experience that is different from person to person and from context to context.

In my previous posting, I mentioned the mission of supply chain is to create Shared Values between parties in the chain and ultimately deliver the maximum benefits to customers. I think it is important to highlight the word ‘Value” here, noticing it is different from a product or service in the traditional view. The Value here rather is a subjective experience that occurs at both sides of the transaction, between supplier and customers.

Therefore in my opinion, Supply Chain Value is to manage a chain of disparate functions through an integrated and holistic approach to deliver the suitable Values to customers’ satisfaction via the lowest total cost of acquisition and most effective and reliable processes.

As an avid book junkie, I read lots of books, magazines and newspapers every day. Of course, lots of them are purchased via Amazon. And I admit that I am a big fan of Amazon. Not only I often click through its website with no purposes, I pay attention to its newsletter emails, sales events, recommended reading lists, or fill out surveys…

Recently I cannot help noticing the duel between Amazon and some publishers. For instance, during last weekend, Amazon unilaterally pulled off all Macmillan’s books from its website. Later it was announced that Amazon surrendered and agreed to raise prices on all its electronic books.

Besides Amazon’s battle against publishers, you might have also noticed the following events in 2010 January headlines related to Supply Chain:

• No.#1 car manufacturer in the world – TOYOTA announced massive recall on its various models due to the sticky gas pedals;
• Major ocean shipping lines in the Transpacific Stabilization Agreement (TSA) announced emergency revenue recovery surcharge;
• LyondellBasell declared force majeure on US vinyl acetate monomer due to a compressor failure at its La Porte plant in Texas; Nationwide plastic suppliers are raising prices;

… …

So all of these events made me question what’s the mission of Supply Chain in this critical year?

For example, let us dive into Amazon’s world:

As an outsider, the traditional Supply Chain of books is:

Author -> Publisher -> Printer -> Wholesaler -> Bookstore/Retailer -> Distributer -> Consumer

During the Internet revolution, Amazon emerged as the superpower in the book publishing world because it successfully collapsed the traditional book Supply Chain and removed many middle layers by using new technology. It became both Wholesaler and Retailer at same time.

This is not it!

Because Amazon removed many middle men and had no brick-and-mortar heavy duty overheads, it quickly gained a competitive advantage and passed a part of the savings to consumers. Very fast, Amazon gathered its clouts and grew to be the No #1. It is the No #1 in front of publishers or printers, so if you are in the business of publishing books, you have to do business with Amazon and undercut your prices; From the other side, Amazon is also the No #1 in front of consumers, if you want to buy a book on line, the first thing pop in your head is Amazon, this is where you can get the quality service at the most competitive prices. So every party in the new supply chain settled in its new roles, we are now peace and dandy until Amazon launched its Kindle.

Kindle is great, because it uses e-Ink technology and looks like a book but without paper. So the printer is gone and the physical form of books is removed, thus no more printing, material handling, warehousing, packing or mailing. A book can be delivered to consumers/readers wirelessly when they are even driving or sleeping, and at anywhere in the world. (Kindle II)

So what is the price for a book now? How to evaluate a book in the new Supply Chain, which now looks like:

Author -> Publisher -> Amazon (Printer/Wholesaler/Retailer/Distributor) -> Consumer

The initial practice is that publishers sell their books to Amazon as a Wholesaler, and also sub-license them via the Kindle platform. Amazon sets its prices as $9.99. This 10 bucks is split between the supply chain: Author, Publisher and Amazon. And of course, Amazon takes the biggest chunk, because it plays multiple roles of Printer/Wholesaler/Retailer/Distributor, wearing 4 hats simultaneously.

But what Amazon wants is:

Author -> Amazon (Publisher/Printer/Wholesaler/Retailer/Distributor) -> Consumer, i.e.:

Author -> Amazon -> Consumer

Who needs Publishers, since Amazon can do the marketing and advertising, and Authors can do the editing themselves? Wow, what a brilliant idea! My blood is boiling as a Supply Chain professional. That is the success of Supply Chain, because it helps to further reduce costs and utilizes the least resources to produce the maximum returns.

Mission accomplished!

But in this new supply chain model Publishers are obviously screwed, so they want to stall this 3 steps model. First, they fiercely defend their roles in the value chain by limiting and timing the sub-licensing eBook supply. Second, they try to create alliances with other devices (Sony) or other channels (Barnes & Noble, Google). In the end, I found the consumer experience is actually ruined. The number of eBooks is very limited and often with a significant delay. And the market is fragmented, with different devices supporting different formats.

Now device giant Apple led by legendary Steven Jobs came in as the Publisher’s last straw. Based on Apple’s model which is designed around iTune and its new device iPad, the new supply chain process is:

Author -> Publisher -> Electronic Distributor -> Consumer

In this model, Amazon will be shoved back into the role of Electronic Distributor. There are still fewer middle men in the supply chain, so the eBooks are still cheaper without cutting into the authors or Publishers profits. Therefore publishers are excited to push more books and standardize the format.

So who is the real winner? The consumer!

This made me realize the Mission of Supply Chain should NOT only focus on cutting costs or removing layers. The Mission of Supply Chain is to create Shared Values between parties in the chain and ultimately deliver the maximum benefits to customers.

Therefore supply chain function can NOT just be cost driven. It should essentially set to maximize customers’ values and satisfaction.

In the end, what is always right – you can only win when your customer wins!

Needless to say Tiger is a “Great” athlete. He has won hundreds of golf tournaments around the world, and hoisted trophies on every continent. Before this scandal, he is the role model for many young people, and his quotes are used in many leadership discussions, especially in the sports of golf, which requires not just physical strength, but also the power of will.

So how did Tiger Woods stumble?

I happened to just finish the book “How the mighty fall” by Jim Collins, he is well known as the author of “Good to Great”.

Jim Collins discerns the following stages of a failing company:

1. Hubris born of success
2. Undisciplined pursuit of more
3. Denial of risk and peril
4. Grasping for salvation
5. Capitulation to irrelevance or death

Mr. Collins describes that every institution, no matter how great, is vulnerable to decline. There is no law of nature that the most powerful will inevitably remain at the top. Anyone can fall and most eventually do. But as he emphasizes, many can recover from their demises, while many cannot.

So as I was reading “How the mighty fall”, I cannot stop thinking how much Mr. Collins study can apply to an individual case like Tiger Woods. In a way, this is a good news because it shows that this study successfully captures some basic fundamentals; but in my opinion, this is also a bad news because it made me realized that this study only stays at the surface and does not get into the true cause of failures.

External Environment

While Mr. Collins quotes Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”, his study uses the same methodology as Good to Great to identify which mighty failed.

However, if you only look at stock returns or earning per share in a certain period and try to create a “timeless physics” of good or bad performance, I think you will be trapped by the oversimplification, because you neglect or underestimate the effects of external environments, such as what happens in the economy, in the industry or in the technology development …

For instance, can a VCR manufacturer dig itself out and successfully transition to other products when its technology is obsolete, can a consumer product company produce a fabulous financial performance in the worst economy recession, or what if a company simply running in a country that is being through political turmoils or natual disasters?

So in my opinion, because of the methodology Mr. Collins is using, he inevitably gets himself into the situation that some “Great” company he identified is no longer “Great”, or not even “Good”, with absolutely no changes in the leadership and values.

Cause and Effect

When the worst economy recession hit us and colossus financial institutes collapsed at the end of 2008, some “Great” companies Mr. Collins identified in his “Good to Great” went into Waterloo. Readers including myself are anxiously waiting to find out why these “Great” companies failed so miserably.

After reading this book and going through the above 5 stages, I frankly don’t feel it can really kill my hunger for an answer. I felt Mr. Collins spent most of his time documenting a pattern how a “Great” company fails, but failed to explain WHY a “Great” company fails.

I will go even further and ask “Why’s” 5 times at least (TPS 5 why’s), because this is how we find the root causes of a failure, and how we can put actions together to prevent it from happening again. So in my mind, documenting “How the mighty fall” is valuable, but is nowhere near as valuable as to finding out “WHY the mighty fall”.

Back to Tiger Woods now…as people are very interested in discovering how Tiger Woods had all of these scandals behind his almost impeccable image, I think people should be more interested in finding out why he made these mistakes. (but not how…) This is the only way we can help him to rebuild himself and so he can rebound from where he fell.