Entrust market strategy to frontline employees.

AT THE CLOSING OF THE EXCHANGE THE BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP BEGINS

In sales terms, closing means closing the sale. Get the customer to sign. Finish with the explanations, take the transaction away, and move on to another customer. It means knowing when, how, and above all with what result to exclude from the exchange portions of information not essential to the ratification of the purchase contract (the sale, as such).

TO DECIDE IS TO STOP PLANNING

In terms of management, this would mean deciding, acting, stopping planning, discussing, and postponing deadlines. Sooner or later, and the sooner the better, action will have to be taken. However, the only way to decide is to be well-informed, and no one can claim to be fully informed. In describing the state of information prevailing at the time of the decision, Herbert Simon spoke of limited rationality. The decision-maker cannot "gather" all the existing information on his own; in fact, he will never be able to "collect" it anyway. Worse yet, having it in hand, he could not manage it intelligently, usefully, and economically. Alvin Toffler talked about Future Shock, to describe the stage of information accumulation where not intelligence but confusion reigns, which makes the decision risky at best and crazy at worst.

MANAGEMENT BY NUMBERS", AN ABSTRUSE PRACTICE

To make decisions, the organization's staff must have the power to act freely. However, the decentralization of decision-making power, which this suggests, usually exists only in word and not in deed. The immediate supervisor tends to control everything that subordinate staff do. This leads the latter to no longer exercise their duty to optimize the resources they have acquired for the execution of their tasks. Everything is controlled, thanks to "management by numbers", which Ghoshal described as a perfectly abstruse practice.

ENTRUSTING MARKET STRATEGY TO FRONT-LINE PERSONNEL

For performance to exist, in a competitive organization, at least if it is assessed from an optimization of the resources used to make the activity through opportunities, capacities, and potentialities, it must go through the execution of the task. However, it is the line staff that closes any consumer business in the market, not the management. The staff is directly connected to the market, therefore to the effective demand; the management is too far away from it. Market strategy should therefore be the responsibility of front-line staff, not management, because circumstantial adjustments are only possible, at least on a just-in-time basis, at the point of service, and not at the top of the job pyramid in the competitive organization.

WHAT OUR BUSINESS SCHOOLS TEACH FUTURE LEADERS

But leaders in our business schools are learning to control everything and to trust only themselves. Of course, things are not presented to them as such, but the management principles they are taught are all strongly stamped with the seal of absolute stewardship of the business by the highest level of decision-making in the organization. The rest of the staff must obey the management's finger and eye, even if the management announces that it subscribes to and practices participatory management. Management reserves the profit for itself and leaves the absorption of costs to the rest of the stakeholders at the risk (the staff) of its activity. Case close !

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