A view of the challenges of the business

This was one of the last sermons I preached at St John's, Digswell and Digswell Village Church before we moved to Fraserburgh in late October. An encouragement to the church communities to continue to seek their way forward by prayer and worship together.

 It’s required quite a lot of piecing together of evidence from many different sources to be able to tell this story. It’s a story of a multinational business which by now has quite a long history. It was founded many years ago, but after a relatively short period of time during which the charismatic founder defined the aims, objectives and core values of the organisation leading by example, he left and continued in communication with the executives and workers in the organisation somewhat indirectly. One of the unusual aspects of the organisation was that, in principle at least, there was no emphasis on management hierarchy. All were known as partners, whatever their role, age or experience.

In its early phase the demand for the products of the business was high. New partners were continually identified and the business aims were pursued enthusiastically and with energy. But this was not without some disagreement. It took a long time to get formal common consent on the key values and aims of the business. This was not made any easier by linguistic and cultural barriers that became apparent with the growth of the organisation into different countries. Partners kept in touch with the founder according to their needs and abilities: perhaps daily or weekly, and they were especially encouraged to focus on this alignment at certain times of the year.

Over the years groups of partners set up independent organisations following policy disagreements and under the influence of contemporary cultural and emerging national and political situations. Whilst they all tried to keep in touch with the founder and his immediate colleagues, for many years these different groups hardly communicated with each other and, worse still, they operated in open and hostile competition.  For a time the business continued to expand but in due course this competition became understood to be seriously counter-productive. In some parts of the world the products of the organisation were no longer in demand and many of them were popularly regarded as obsolete. In parallel with this and partly in response to it, many of the branches put all their energy into maintenance of their plant. Others tried newer and contemporary forms of marketing, but these could seem embarrassingly derivative and outdated and only had limited impact. 

So by the time we get to the present in some parts of the global operation the products are in great demand, but in others turnover is just a trickle of what it was a few decades ago. In these areas the central organisations of the different branches continually try to find ways to motivate the partners and to stimulate demand. Sometimes this seems to have an impact. Sometimes, in contrast, the resources and energy do not seem to be available. On problem is that many of the most experienced partners have decided, with rather closed minds, that they know best what the business should do and how it should respond to the challenges.

Then a very small branch called its partners together and they agreed to hire a small and not very well known consultant group in to help them look to the future. This consultant was operating as the KaiRow group, although it also had other business names in other markets. The consultancy turned out to be a long and continuing process and not really what the branch partners had expected. Explicit solutions were not offered. The current trends in management strategies were explicitly ignored. Questions were asked and then left open. After some time to allow the partners to get to grips with the questions, to understand them as far as they could and to act on them, KaiRow made a return visit and asked more questions.  As they thought about them, the partners realised that these were the same questions as before, but expressed in different ways. And so the process continued over many years, continuing to address the same questions with the aim of getting closer to the aims and core values of the central parent organisation.