Unit 4 Success Business brief

People are fascinated by success. Business commentators try to understand the success factors that make for successful individuals, products and companies, and for economically successful countries.

People Different types of organisation require different types of leaders. Think of start-ups with their dynamic entrepreneurs, mature companies with their solid but hopefully inspirational CEOs, companies in difficulty with their turnaround specialists. Each also requires managers and employees with different personality make-ups. Think of the combination of personality types needed in banks compared to those in advertising agencies.

Products Successful products are notoriously hard to predict. There are subtle combinations of social, cultural and technological circumstances that mean that something will succeed at one time but not another. People talk rightly about a product 'whose time has come'. The technology to meet a particular need may exist for a long time before the product on which it is based takes off. In the beginning, cost may be a factor, but after a time, a critical mass of users develops, costs come down, and no one 'can understand how they could have done without one'.

Companies Success factors here include energy, vision and efficiency, but many of the companies that were thought to possess these attributes 30 or even five years ago are not those we would think of as having these qualities today. Management fashions are a big factor: gurus and management books have a lot to answer for. Once something becomes a mantra, everyone starts doing it, but objective measures of the relative efficiency of each type of company are hard to find.

Countries Economic success stories such as Japan, Germany and Sweden became models that everyone wanted to imitate. In the 1970s, government experts and academics went to these places by the plane­load looking for the magic Ingredients. In the 1980s and early 1990s, they went to the emerging economies of the Asian tigers. Now the US economy is again held up as a model for all to follow. At various times, commitment to self-improvement, entrepreneurial flair, efficient access to capital, vibrant Institutions and a good education system are held to be important factors for success, but the countries mentioned above possess these to very varying degrees. The exact formula for success at a particular time is hard to pin down.

In any case, how do you successfully imitate companies and countries? Companies have a particular culture that is the result of their history, short or long. If managers and their consultants change them radically, for example by downsizing them, they may be ripping out the very things that make them tick. On the other hand, change may be really necessary, and companies with cultures and structures that were successful under earlier conditions are very hard to change in a genuine way, even if they go through the motions of adopting the latest management fashion. Unless convinced otherwise by a charismatic leader, there will always be a number of refuseniks: managers and employees who refuse to change because they can't understand how the things that made the company successful in the past are no longer valuable, and can even be a cause of failure. One reason for developing new products in start-ups is that they can develop a culture and a recipe for success from scratch.

With countries, how do you imitate social structures and habits that have evolved over centuries elsewhere, often with an entirely different starting point? The old joke about not wanting to start from here if you're going there is applicable. In any case, by the time the model has been identified as one worth imitating, the world economy has moved on, and your chosen model may no longer be the one to follow.

The ability to adapt is key. Here, the US is world leader in adapting old organisations to new technological conditions-Ford and IBM, for example, have had amazing turnarounds from earlier difficulties. But radical innovation is equally important. The US is also good at generating entirely new companies that quickly become world leaders-witness Microsoft and Intel. The US economy is as dominant as ever.