Fundamentals...

Good afternoon dear reader & welcome to my world for another week. Firstly, today a warning & an apology. I think this could be construed as a rant! Because businesses are still failing way short of the mark on fundamentals. I attended an Institute of Directors luncheon on Thursday this week & the speaker was one Andy Symons from PWC speaking on Innovation & the Essential Eight technologies. Absolutely fascinating stuff, if you can believe these things will happen.

For example, you would think today as we move well into the 21^st Century & the concept of business racks up more & more experience as each year goes by, the same businesses would grasp the simple reality, there is only one place their money comes from. As I listened to Mr Symons extrapolate the rapid advances, if you did think these things you would be mistaken, wrong & wide off the mark.

With a few exceptions there appears to be very little evidence to suggest businesses either understand there is only one place their money comes from, or when & if they do, they orientate their very existence to this source. Personally, I am tired of (& in no particular order):

• Finding the experience of purchasing products & services so bloody difficult, irritating or unsatisfying.
• Having to deal with nincompoops who seem to struggle to know their own name or what day it is, let alone what it is they ought to know in order to fulfill their role.
• Increasingly poor quality design & manufacturing. It appears now as accepted practice for manufactured products to be regarded as disposable within a very short period of time (& let us not get into any discussion regarding the plastic surrounding many such objects…).
• Increasingly dreadful standards of support, back up & after sales service.
• Loud, aggressive, mind bogglingly awful marketing communication campaigns which promise the earth & deliver not a fraction of the promise.
• Governments who do not have the faintest idea for the true concept of business & what is required to nurture, support & reward (or at least incentivize) successful business performance.
• Marketing buffoons who have become obsessed with social media whilst demonstrating a complete lack of understanding for the marketing concept itself.
• ‘Beanies’ who have driven costs down to a bare minimum (& sometimes beyond) without any understanding oo the need to drive sales up & how to achieve this.