It's Not Luck (12 page)

“No, I don’t have the purchase orders in hand. I’ve something even better.”

“The only thing that is better than a purchase order,” I say sarcastically, “is the customer’s money in our bank account. Pete, I understand that you had two good sales calls, but could you be a little more specific?”

“I started by presenting the ‘buyer’s cloud.’ Do you remember: the conflict between the need to get lower prices and the need to have lower inventories?”

I’m anxious to know what business deal he struck; to find out the reaction of the buyers to his unconventional offer, but my impatience has just caused Pete to swing all the way to minute details. Realizing that the quickest way is to let Pete tell it in his own way, I assure him that I do remember the buyer’s cloud.

“Then I established the difference between price-per-unit and price-per-usable-unit. You know, I used the graph of the chance for obsolescence as a function of the horizon of the order . . .”

He goes on like this for a while, giving me, blow-by-blow, what he presented, how it was presented, why he presented in the way he did, etc. I look at my watch. In five minutes I have to be in the bar; not to mention that we are on a trans-Atlantic call.

Finally he reaches it. “In each sales call, the buyer liked my offer so much that he asked for a proposal for their entire wrapper needs. Did you hear that—their entire wrapper needs.”

“What does that mean, Pete, in dollars?”

“We are still in the process of preparing the quotes; it will take us at least until late tomorrow. But in each case we are talking big deals, over half a million a year.”

“What are your realistic chances of winning?” I try to cool him down.

“Very good. Extremely good.”

I make some sounds to indicate my skepticism.

“Alex, don’t you see? Now the buyer has a tangible reference. He can compare my quote to what he is actually paying per year. There is no better way to demonstrate to him the concept of price-per-usable-unit. I’m bound to win.”

He has a point, but . . .

“Alex, I have meetings scheduled with both of these customers later this week. There will be enough time to go over our quotes in detail.”

That’s a good idea. Not to send it by mail but to discuss it face to face with the buyers. It can avoid a lot of misunderstanding, especially in this case, where the offer is so unconventional. “So we’ll know by the end of the week?”

“We’ll have a better idea, but I don’t expect to get the purchase order then; they need some time to digest it. They will also ask for a counter-offer from their existing vendors; at least that’s what I would do. Nevertheless, I think that we’ll have them before the end of the month. Our offer is simply too good, and I’m going to continue to sit on top of them.”

I tell him how pleased I am with the work he’s doing, and hurry to the bar. In the elevator I realize I have a new problem. Right from the start I liked Pete’s solution. My only problem was if the buyers would fall for it. Now that he’s tried it on two tough cookies, and in both cases they understood it to the extent that they are contemplating giving him their entire business, my reservation is over. Yes, we still have to wait and see if the buyers will go through with the deal, but now it’s a matter of refining the presentation, not whether or not the solution will work.

So what is my problem? It’s credibility. Today, when I explained the performance of Pete’s plant, I emphasized that the wrapper department will need heavy investments in order to make it profitable. How am I going to explain that this bottomless pit is, all of a sudden, a gold mine? I have to plan some tap dancing.

It’s not a bar, it’s a typical English pub, jammed with people stopping on their way home from work.

“Here comes my savior.” Trumann waves at me, “What will you have?”

“A pint of lager, please.” I try to adjust to the environment.

“I’ll have a refill,” Doughty calls after Trumann, now winding his way to the bar.

“What savior? What is he talking about?”

Doughty just gives me a napkin. It’s scribbled all over. I barely recognize the cloud I drew on the airplane. So, that’s what Trumann wants. That I’ll explain the dilemma of protect the shareholders—protect the employees to Doughty. I start to do it. Trumann arrives with three large mugs and places them silently in front of us. When I finish, Trumann is beaming over the cloud. “Well, what do you think now?”

“It’s a nice impractical game.” Doughty is unimpressed.

“Yeah, I know what you mean.” Trumann pats him quite hard on the back. “I, too, have such cynical moods, when everything seems no more than a game. Brutal, many times unfair, and whatever we do, the game will continue to be played, with or without us. Cheer up, lad, drink your beer.”

Doughty smiles, wraps the napkin around his glass, and raises it high, “To the game.” We join the toast.

“And I still claim,” he winks at me, “that all the diagrams, concise as this one or as elaborate as the financial reports, do not help us to play any better. At the end it all boils down to intuition, to the hunch.”

“You and your hunches,” Trumann lowers his mug. “But one thing I’ll admit, this ‘cloud’ as Alex calls it, has very few practical ramifications, if any.” Seeing my expression, he asks, surprised, “Don’t you agree?”

I see a golden opportunity to break the good but embarrassing news about Pete’s company, and decide to move on it. “No, I don’t agree.”

As expected, they grab the bait. “What can you do with such a diagram except use it to pass the time in a bar?” Doughty says in a doubting voice.

“Actually,” I decide to be somewhat arrogant, “you bother to write a cloud only if you intend to use it. Of course, if after stating the problem precisely, after writing the cloud, no attempt to solve the problem is made, then I must agree that it is impractical. The real value of the cloud is that it provides a straightforward way to solve the problem, to evaporate the conflict.”

“Do you claim that this diagram,” Doughty carefully peels the napkin from his glass, “can be used to give us tangible results?”

“Yes, that’s precisely what I claim.”

“It can be used to help us win the game?” Trumann sticks to their metaphor.

“The game and even the set.”

“Prove it,” Doughty says firmly.

In an instant I feel like I’m under the microscope, passing through some type of important test. But not to worry. I’m well prepared.

“Let’s take, as an example, the subject we worked on all day—my printing company.” I carefully straighten the napkin. “In order to protect our shareholders we are trying to sell this company, because it is not profitable enough to justify the investment.”

“It is not profitable enough now, and according to your reports, it will be only marginally profitable in the foreseeable future,” Trumann corrects me.

“Yes,” I agree, “that is our assumption. We’ve examined the situation carefully. As you know, the key to substantially increasing profits is to do something about the losses of the wrapper department.”

“If you intend to persuade us to invest in new printing . . . ” Trumann cuts into my explanation.

I don’t hesitate to do the same to him, “And since we know that additional investments are out of the question, we have to figure out how to compose a new offering to the market. An offer based on the existing equipment, very attractive to the market and very profitable for us.”

“In short,” Doughty says, “mission impossible.”

“So it seems.” Smiling, I slowly sip the tasty lager from my mug.

They both look at me. After a while Trumann asks, “Do you mean that you found such a way?”

“So it seems.” I celebrate the moment.

“Alex, I’m going to bring you another pint, but God be with you if you’re pulling our legs.”

Trumann waits until Doughty goes to the bar. “What’s going on? Alex, you told me on the way to Europe that you don’t have a clue how to increase the sales of your companies without increasing expenses. Did something change in the past two days? Or are you trying a kamikaze move to sabotage the sales of your companies?”

“Nothing of the sort,” I assure him. “I know how strange the last five minutes must sound to you, but I’m not playing any tricks. I admit I still don’t know what to do with the other two companies, but as for the printing company, I just got confirmation on the phone that our innovative idea does work.”

“I want to hear all about it.” Trumann is as firm as Doughty.

I wait for Doughty to settle down, and then begin to explain Pete’s solution to them, giving of course the credit to whom it’s due. “So you see,” I end a fifteen minute explanation, “why I couldn’t possibly tell you about it before. I couldn’t expect you to take it seriously. Frankly, until an hour ago, I’m not sure I took it seriously myself.”

“We’ll have to wait and see if the two large deals actually go through, but I’ll admit, it is encouraging.”

“We’ll have to procrastinate with our negotiation on the printing company,” Doughty slowly says. “At least until the situation becomes clearer.”

“Yes,” Trumann agrees, “and we better prepare some more prospects. If what Alex told us becomes reality, this is a totally different ball game. And we cannot go back to the existing prospects with such a change in our story. As much as we explain it, our credibility will suffer. No, Alex, don’t worry about it, we’ll be happy if your solution will actually work. It’s much more fun to sell a company that makes fifteen percent profit on sales than a company that barely breaks even.” They start to calculate how much they should ask for Pete’s company.

Yes. They intend to continue with their plan to sell the company. No wonder; their major concern is the credit rating of UniCo. But if Pete’s idea does work, and I’m becoming more and more convinced that it will, then his future is secure. No one will mess around with a goose that lays golden eggs. And to think that our starting point was to invest a small fortune to replace our fast set-up presses. How stupid could we be?

Doughty breaks into my thoughts. “Alex, were the diagrams used to construct this nice solution.”

“Yes, definitely. Without them we didn’t have a chance. With them we barely made it.”

“Hmm,” is the only response.

12

Many travelers complain about English cooking, but in my opinion English restaurants have one thing that compensates for everything: the way they serve coffee. For the coffee they direct us to another room, furnished with big leather sofas, low tables and a real wood fire.

I’m easily persuaded to try a 1956 brandy. Brandon and Jim are persuaded just as easily. I stare at the fire, trying to digest what I’ve learned in the last two days. If you noticed, it’s not Trumann and Doughty anymore. After two pints of beer and two bottles of red wine, it’s only natural for me to switch to using their first names.

Trumann gained my respect on the flight when I came to better understand his motives. This evening I learned to appreciate the other side of his personality, the “Brandon side,” as I think of it. He is a warm, caring human being. So different from the stereotype of a heartless shark that I glued on him. But the big surprise is Jim. He is not a cold fish. After-hours Jim is quite different from the Doughty at work. Not that he’s very talkative or optimistic, but he is friendly and has a charming but rather cynical sense of humor.

When Brandon notices that I have returned to reality he says, “Alex, there is one thing bothering us. You said that this breakthrough marketing solution that you are testing in the printing company was not invented by fluke, but by systematically using logical diagrams. But you have two other companies, bigger and more in trouble. How come you haven’t succeeded in coming up with marketing solutions for them?”

They are starting to sound like Julie. But what can I tell them? That I haven’t tried? Yes, that is the true answer—but why haven’t I? Because I’m sure it would just be a waste of time.

“Logic by itself is not enough,” I explain. “You must have intuition as well. Pete has spent all his life in the printing business; he had enough intuition to draw from. That’s why working with the Thinking Processes he succeeded in finding a breakthrough solution for his company. But Bob Donovan and Stacey Kaufman are relatively new to their companies.”

“So we are back to intuition.” Brandon sounds disappointed. “If that’s the case, what is the big advantage of using these logical diagrams?”

I can demonstrate to them how important the Thinking Processes are. They force you to verbalize your gut feel, and by that enable true unleashing of your intuition, and the ability to check it. But what the heck. If I do it, they will turn back on me with their heavy question of why haven’t I done it for I Cosmetics and the pressure steam division? So rather than answering, I just finish my superb brandy.

Jim takes my lack of response as an answer, and summarizes, “If you don’t have intuition, no method will help you. If you do have intuition, you don’t need a method.”

This provokes me. That is totally wrong. “If you don’t have intuition,” I reply, “no method will help you. I agree. But if you do have intuition, you can still flounder. Intuition is a necessary condition for finding solutions, but in my experience it is far from being sufficient. You must have a method to unleash, focus and critique your intuition if you want to arrive at practical, simple solutions.”