Owning “The Reality Inc.”
There is a “The Reality Inc.” in every company.
It is the people at the frontline who touch the product and/or look at the eyes of the customer.
There is a “The Reality Inc.” in every company.
It is the people at the frontline who touch the product and/or look at the eyes of the customer. But people in the middle and at the top of the organization usually do not see and own this Reality Inc.
At the age of 29, I was blessed with a chance to be a COO and run all engineering, operations, and anything IT/technical for a pretty sizable manufacturing business with five sites. My time in this company brought spectacular success and awards for me and the company.
This company had been struggling in all aspects of the business for a long time, making deep losses, and losing customers and reputation. The average tenure of my 5 predecessors was 3 months, the shortest tenure being 2 days, which I didn’t add to the average.
Within 2 years of my service, we tripled the daily production output with zero Capex, reduced 95% of overtime, eliminated the 3rd shift, and reached 100% customer satisfaction regarding product quality and delivery performance. This success was and still is attributed to a lot of operational excellence, lean, kaizen, IT transformation, and Industry 4.0 stuff we did at the time.
After lots of introspection, I am sure the root reason for this success was my being too inexperienced to be a political CXO, being too naive to genuinely believe that mess can be fixed, and hassling on the shopfloor shaking 800 hands, walking 15 miles every day, helping every problem being solved and doing overtime to lead transformation.
At the beginning of the war in Ukraine, most experts found Zelensky inexperienced and even ridiculed him as an ex-comedian while portraying Putin as an experienced and strong leader. I will later write more on what experience should mean. But in short, I think experience comes from owning The Reality Inc.
Experience is the sum of future-relevant know-how gained by doing things and imagining the future. So, it is about the richness and diversity of events. It is about imagination and keeping the future in mind. It is about the stakes, how close the person is to the center of events, and his/her ability to absorb and formulate know-how for the future.
With this perspective, Zelensky, even after his few years as a president is far more experienced than Putin. Because he owns The Reality Inc.
Putin is being briefed by senior leaders
© Saip Eren Yilmaz, 2023
