Forget Strategy. Get Results.: Radical Management Attitudes That Will Deliver Outstanding Success

9

Fun

“I completely agree with Napoleon Bonaparte: in victory we deserve champagne; in defeat we need it.”

The Problem: Eyes firmly glazed

When I was working for Tricord Systems in Paris in the early 1990s, my primary task was to open up the market for super-servers, way back when Windows NT first came out: it was the first multi-processor operating system that could take advantage of a computer incorporating several processors. These super-servers looked like giant toploading washing machines, extraordinary objects. Although I was based in France, I was setting up distributorships around Europe, and put one in place with Unisys in the Czech Republic.

I established the initial contact, went out to Prague, and sold them a number of machines that they were to resell. They asked Tricord to train the sales team. I went back out to run the training and discovered that the sales team was extremely unsophisticated. It was not their fault. The most complex technology that they had been selling previously was fax machines. Now they were suddenly moving onto super-servers, which at the time were the state of the art, and required a high level of technical understanding. On top of that I was talking to them in English, and they were struggling to follow both the language and the high technical level. By the second day I could see them wilting before my eyes.

I returned to Paris with the sense that I had not achieved what I wanted to: which was to bring them up to a certain level where ...