We’ve all faced difficult business situations when there are No Good Options. Every way you face presents an un-surmountable barrier. No way forward makes sense. Managers are frozen. Each day that passes the situation worsens. Usually these situations result from years of not-benign neglect; not making the appropriate and necessary smaller decisions along the way. Need an real-life example? Daily headlines and blogs scream one such: our involvement in Iraq. But back to business! Waiting and hoping day by day is a loser; it won’t get you anywhere. There has to be a solution but you may need to search and investigate way outside the current dialogue and debate boundaries. Apply some adventurism to your thinking process, go outside the mainstream of thought, solicit inputs from lower organizational levels-individuals not typically asked and not politically tangled up in the throes of the current debate, take a detour. The following example, highly condensed, illustrates the value of this approach:
Condition #1: A large conglomerate-FMC's largest single product line was sodium tri poly phosphate, made from elemental phosphorous, and used in the production of home detergents primarily by Proctor and Gamble. P&G was FMC's largest single customer for all its products and obviously needed to be treated as such. Elemental phosphorous was produced in a facility similar to a steel blast furnace.
Condition #2: P&G's detergent business continued to grow and they demanded from FMC an ever increasing supply of this product or they would reformulate their product to FMC's detriment.
Condition #3: Increasing the production of elemental phosphorous was the problem: FMC was already operating beyond sustainable capacity in its four furnaces; adding a "fifth furnace" faced these prohibitive barriers:
*high intensivity of capital
*major environmental contamination concerns
*the core ore was mined on Indian lands who resisted increased intrusion
*state government resistance
And it was known that, in the long term of say 10 years, the use of phosphorous would inevitably decline. So FMC was frozen, either (a) proceed to build a "fifth furnace" against all these obstacles to protect its business position with its most prized and major customer but eventually have this facility shut down as demand fell, or (b) don't proceed but face rapid revenues and profits decline as well as a hostile customer for this and all other company products.
This internal debate had gone on for a year; both company and customer nerves were frazzled. I inherited this situation and quickly concluded were in a box canyon and that continuing this debate was a waste of time. I spent a week at the phosphorous furnace facility in Idaho, told the plant manager I wanted to wander unescorted, and had dozens of long conversations with workers, foremen, supervisors, and engineers becoming familiar with the operational issues. There was a lot going on, this was a big facility, with giant furnaces and major conveying and mixing systems for both the raw materials and the finished product. Elemental phosphorous is highly volatile adding to the operational complexity. I gathered many seemingly disassociated inputs. One engineer felt we could increase conveyor speed, another talked about the frequency of preventative maintenance downtime, another about certain exhaust control opportunities. A lot of ideas were buried in these highly experienced operators. We started putting them together like assembling a jig-saw puzzle and determined that, by concurrently doing a lot of little unsexy projects, the opportunity for an environmentally friendly, non capital intensive, rapid expansion was available without adding a "fifth furnace". The capacity increase was judged to be almost equivalent to the "fifth furnace", the time to implement about 12 months vs. 3 years minimum, and the capital about 1/5. P&G was thrilled, our business expanded, and we were out of the box canyon. A major detour in this case saved the day.
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