What's in a name?

 March 2 – Bunked off to company number two for most of the day to facilitate a working party of most of the senior manages to talk about new names. For many of them this was their first serious engagement with me, and vice versa. I greatly appreciated that – there’s nothing better as a way to judge people than to see how they work when slightly out of their own comfort zones, and this lot were. It’s easy to appraise the survivors who have the initiative to deal with the vaguely unknown in situations like this, and those who can only work within the narrow confines of their job. Surprisingly, more showed initiative than did not. I found that a basis for real optimism. Two showed no willingness to participate at all, making quite clear throughout that they did not see any reason for this exercise. That was, I suppose their right. I can’t imagine it has helped their career prospects. But I’m not in culling mode, yet, and you never know, we may never need to be. They were however released from the exercise at lunchtime somewhat to their own bafflement. I made clear that if they didn’t want to be present then there was no advantage to their presence. Such a reaction seemed almost as baffling to them as all that had gone before.

For those who committed to the process – and they ranged across the company, the day was rewarding. The sales team clearly thought they’d wipe the floor with their skills. Maybe they found it a little sobering that the factory team were as least as innovative (once they’d shed their recalcitrant member) whilst the admin team were just first rate. It was really quite amusing to watch them at work. They realised the issue was serious. They also took it, quite correctly as a team building exercise as well, which was meant to be fun and where if at the end of the day there was no solution then it was not the end of the world if better understanding had been created.

That goal was more than achieved. Better still, some really good ideas on branding emerged – one good enough that we’d bought the web address for the made up but highly onomatopaic brand name that had emerged. Some sub-brand ideas for particular products had also emerged that had the considerable advantage of saving cost because they massively reduced the requirement for product renaming for different markets allowing considerably enhanced flexibility in manufacturing and stock holding – and that was a joint production and admin initiative.

We haven’t solved all the issues, but the MD was staggered at the end of the day when he and I went for a quick debrief in the pub before heading for home. He’d seen a side to his time he’d been quite unacquainted with before. They’d enjoyed themselves and real value added had been created. Amazing what a little initiative and the addition of one team member (in this case me) can do.