Every business is a market place
Colin discusses the vibrancy he discovered within the village markets - in every business every individual is running his or her own “stall” buying or selling or both. Trying desperately to sell more than they spend and attract their customers to buy more – and tell their colleagues of their goods and services. Corporate markets have very little of the charm of village markets. Colin looks back on a long corporate career and wonders what a happy experience it would have been to create a true market place of unique skills and talents, akin to that of a stall holder in a village market.
Market place within a market place
My wife and I spent a week in Provence last summer and a highlight of that visit was the weekly or even daily markets in every little village. Toy makers, cheese makers, bakers, farmers, butchers, musicians, jugglers happily peddled their unique talents on the village square.
We came back to Cape Town and enjoyed Greenmarket Square, Rondebosch Park, Kirstenbosch and Green Point markets with a new respect for the wonderful array of human capability on show.
And then it struck me that every business is a market place – a market place within a bigger market place. In every business every individual is running his or her own “stall” buying or selling or both. Trying desperately to sell more than they spend and attract their customers to buy more – and tell their colleagues of their goods and services.
Corporate markets have very little of the charm of village markets. Rules abound, competition is ruthless, stalls aren’t on very long leases and you don’t often hear music, whistling or singing. The “owners” seem to behave sometimes as if they owned majority stakes in the stallholders’ businesses.
This metaphor has made me think differently about people who work for me.
We are all partners – whether we own the market, or just own a stall.
A CV is a listing document – an invitation to an employer to become a minority partner.
A newcomer to the business is a greenfields business venture calling for venture capital from both sides.
Every meeting is a stallholders meeting to discuss
a joint investment strategy: What should we do together?
a new investment strategy: Who should we add to “us”?
the curtailment of an old strategy: What should we stop doing?
a new strategy: What should we do differently?
with everyone making and baking and bottling and cooking like mad
doing the very best they could and going home as honestly rewarded as the market folk seem to be.
What a vibrant market square that would have been. And what crowds of tourists and neighbours it would attract! But it’s never too late.
Creating the conditions for high energy effective individuals to work in high energy effective relationships with one another creating high energy effective market places – or in our corporate jargon – teams, is what fascinates us. And it is what we do best.
COLIN HALL
30 May 2005
