First, read the welcome letter:
http://anthem-llc.blogspot.com/2010/02/welcome.html
All of my comments are written from the perspective of turnaround management in a manufacturing or industrial service company. These companies typically have many facilities and are labor and asset intensive. Inherently, the commentary is generalized – I have employed these tools and methods in industries ranging from aerospace prime contractors to automotive suppliers, and in many regions throughout the world. Every company presents unique challenges and certainly unique business models. Because of this, I have found it most successful when I practice being a good listener to those with experience in the specific industry while working to educate them on principles and practices that make for good businessmen and businesswomen.
It is the consistency from business to business that is remarkable – and this, in my view, makes the problem quite simple to solve.
So, this blog is about those commonalities, about themes that I have found to be quite regularly present in almost every situation. For example:
1) The sales department sells without any involvement or even ground rules from finance.
2) The treasurer is about the only person in the organization who monitors cash, and no one has a cash plan.
3) Management (in a broad, global sense) as a group never spends time together.
4) Housekeeping is a mess – a symptom of the attitude about "care" of the company's assets.
5) Management rarely "walks the floor" or otherwise interacts in a meaningful way with the employees.
6) There is little in the way of continuous improvement – regardless of the fancy sounding acronym given to the program.
7) There is an attitude of "the customer is not reasonable," therefore the customer is ignored.
8) Little care is given to the balance sheet.
9) "We can't control [fill in the blank] costs."
Keep in mind, my observations come from the universe in which I participate – looking at companies that were run into bankruptcy, or were well on there way. Obviously there are many companies that "get it."
So this blog is written from the perspective of this unique experience.
