Change of business Czech Republic: Searching your own way

We are living in a world of accelerating qualitative changes. These changes are not only common changes from enterprise management handbooks but unprecedented, fastest and most profound changes of production, consumption, values and behaviour, manner and style of life of individuals, groups and nations.

Everything will be different, nothing will get back on the rails. We are entering an age of entrepreneurship, or if you prefer, business. Everyone´s own way, idea or innovation enriches not only us but the whole world. It expands differentiation and eliminates monoculture. Every adopted or imitated way is not competitive and impoverishes not only us but the whole world around us. In this way we support monoculture and contribute to the artificial uniformity of the human race and do not perceive the results of the process. Our concept of benchmarking failed including “best practice“ – they generate uniformity and kill competition (see McKinsey´s report). Professor Milan Zelený says that if we are doing the same and think in the same way then we are not able to cooperate. Cooperation is a privilege of those who can complete one another, who think and perform differently. What remains for all others is only to “fight one with another“. Strategic planning failed – in the era of frequent and sudden rapid changes planning on a longtime basis cannot be performed. A “first step“ must be made and then flexibly adapted to the changing environment. Strategy is not what we are saying but what we are doing. Copying old books, adopting 50 year old rejected practices or consuming trendy “bestsellers“ may not be rewarding.

Think different

Nobody up till now succeeded in his activity by copying Toyota or Apple, let alone GE or Google. No one could copy the Czech entrepreneur Baťa. The original doesn’t need to be afraid – nobody can copy it. Benchmarking and “best practices“ will bring us where many of our teachers brought us when we attended school – to a greyish average. Let us perform benchmarking and gather all methods applied by all other firms and as a result we will all be the same. Let us try to address the broad masses with our product or offered service – all we will create is a dull product and/or service. We will not create anything exclusive, nothing that could bring us hope for a longtime success and the right to survive. Seth Godin speaks about a purple cow, Steve Jobs stuck to the motto “think different“ and the firm Toyota follows the motto “nothing is impossible“.

Many entrepreneurs and top managers search for best practices and ways leading to success. They record their visions and present strategies and then try to turn the wheels of their “machine“. However an enterprise in not a machine and no results appear. Then they start searching for a correct information system by means of which they want to manage the system which they lack – and make lots of nonsense only much faster than before.

Compiled from ideas of Prof. Milan Zelený and Prof. Ján Košturiak.

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