Managing: Managing The Downturn: A Primer

MANAGING
Managing The Downturn: A Primer

A manager's treasury of terms she'll encounter, tips for survival, and tenets to live and work by during a rec..., sorry, downturn.

ACTIVIT-BASED COSTING: That's a tough one to begin with, but rest assured, the expensive consultant you hire will suggest it as the best way of finding out which of your products makes money, and which doesn't. Fact is, this advanced costing technique actually does that, and you don't really need a consultant to find that out. Also see C.

BELOW THE LINE: You can't think of a better way to put one across your ad agency. Better still, below-the-line activities like sales promotions and merchandising are far more effective as short-term sales stimulants than high-decibel advertising campaigns. Now some mavens say there's a long-term benefit too.

CONSULTANT: You're sure to encounter this species before the downturn is out. Companies are prone to hiring consultants when the chips are down. These consultants rarely tell them things they didn't already know, but it is far easier rejecting, or implementing an idea that comes from outside in most companies.

DOWNSIZING: Also called rightsizing by those given to euphemisms, this is the one thing most companies caught in a downturn do-slash workforce. The old-fashioned companies offer golden handshakes; the rest simply lay people off. Does it help? In the short-term, definitely, but at the first sign of a boom, the same company will be hiring.

EXPENDITURE: If there is one word that can lay claim to being the most used during a downturn, it is expenditure. All decisions, whether related to marketing, product development, hiring, or research are driven by considerations related to expenditure. Anything that involves an expenditure is bad; everything else is good. Also see F.

FREEZE: Call it the great chill if you will (that rhymes). Companies like to pretend a downturn is like winter, and that they can hibernate it away. Ergo, everything is frozen. The great freeze is also an easy way out for managers unwilling to take decisions that involve expenditure (see E for Expenditure), to put them away, indefinitely.

GOVERNANCE: A downturn is a great time to talk about governance. Business is anyway down, and the stockmarkets are dead. Both the media and the general public don't have much on their minds, and some good buzz about governance will get some column cms.

HINDSIGHT: Learn to use this word often. When analysts and journalists want to know why your company launched an ambitious expansion or market development programme just before the downturn hit, say you didn't have the benefit of hindsight then. And chuckle.

INNOVATION: In a downturn, innovation doesn't mean what the dictionary says it does. So, when your chief executive exhorts you to innovate he wants you to practice some plain old-fashioned cost cutting. Remember, when the downturn ends, the meaning changes.

JUST IN TIME EVERYTHING: Abbreviated JIT, this prefix can be used in a variety of contexts from manufacturing to sourcing, and recruiting to marketing. What it simply means is that, during a downturn, you don't really do something till you have to. You'd be surprised at how much money that saves.

KAMIKAZE: The hr manager who thinks he'll earn his superiors' approbation by ruthlessly pointing out people who do not add any 'value'. Then, of course someone realises that the manager himself (or herself) does little of that.

LONG-TERM PLANNING: Normally involves a time-frame of 3-5 years, but in downturn-parlance this refers to any measure that will not have an immediate impact on the company's next-quarter results; it'll probably take two quarters at least.

MARKET SENTIMENT: The ideal scapegoat for anything that does not work out as it was planned to. With most management-styles veering towards the tentative in tough times, it won't hurt to suggest a half-assessed scheme might have worked better if market sentiment hadn't been down.

NAPALM: (v. tr) Refers to indiscriminate and utterly destructive retrenchment carried out by the corporate headquarters of a company on its branch offices. Then the downturn ends, and the company realises that it needs to rebuild an entire branch-network.

OPENNESS: A word used in association with the communication styles within organisations (like 'open communication channels'). The senior management naively expects employees to accept bad news stoically just because it has been communicated to them in an 'open' fashion.

POWERPOINT: Or presentations, but the two are synonymous. With time to kill, most of your peers will make elaborate powerpoint presentations on the most simple things (like the need for a new water cooler). If you don't, you're toast.

QUALITY CIRCLES: With little line-activity, most shop floor workers and front line employees will form quality circles that will ostensibly help the company use the downturn fruitfully (by improving quality). Try and become part of one; better still, head a QC.

RE-ENGINEERING: Yes, it's back in fashion, and this time there's an infotech-aspect to it too. The underlying philosophy remains the same: there's no time like a downturn to rebuild business processes into what they should have been.

SALVAGE OPERATION: Also called fire-fighting by some. This is the activity most managers will find themselves occupied with. They'll either be trying to salvage something related to business, or they'll be trying to salvage their careers

TRAVEL EXPENSES: This could have been clubbed under expenditure, but warrants a separate mention for several reasons. One, it is the expense head bean counters love to focus on in a downturn; two, it is the vehicle most managers adopt to make that extra bit.

ULCERS: It isn't just ad-people who get them; when things are bad most managers do. The magnitude increases as one moves up the organisational hierarchy, and studies have shown that it is a largely a function of the individual employee's perceived utility.

VALIUM: You'll certainly need this to get some sleep in these troubled times. You'll also definitely need a prescription to buy them from the pharmacy, but with the Kamikaze (see K) gone, junior execs in the hr department can be trained to fulfil this need. It is, after all, another hygiene factor, isn't it?

WORK-LIFE BALANCE: With little work to do, some managers may think a downturn is the ideal time to redress the work-life imbalance some. Unfortunately, those who decide to spend more time with the family, or on the links, will likely find themselves without a job at all.

X, THEORY: Most managers will follow Douglas McGregor's Theory X style of management, which assumes that people inherently dislike work, hate responsibility, crave direction and security, and have to be pushed and threatened into doing what the organisation expects them to.

YESTERDAY: A nostalgic reference to a time when all was well with the economy, and your company; when travel and ad budgets were sacrosanct; when you received four calls from headhunters a week; and the company's cafeteria served four kinds of coffee and five different luncheon options at subsidised rates.

ZEITGEIST: We would have liked to have Zero-based Budgeting here, but Zeitgeist is more relevant to the times. Besides, chances are, you know what ZBB is and haven't the faintest on Zeitgeist. Well, it means the spirit of the times, and it can be blamed for just about anything.

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