BANISH BUREAUCRACY

Is bureaucracy good? Yes, for the dustbin!  Know that excellence and bureaucracy are strange bedfellows. How many bureaucratic organizations do you see serving the customer with passion and care? In Nigeria the when the electricity utility bureaucracy  was called National Electric Power Authority (NEPA), Nigerians called it ‘’Never Expect Power Always’’. Today in the bid to privatise the company the name has been changed to Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) but to most Nigerians it remains NEPA. So your guess is as good as mine. No bureacracy ever serves its customers with distinction, except perhaps, the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. Yes, and the Salvation Army. Alcoholics Anonymous too! And Doctors Without Borders! That’s about all in the whole wide world! The truth is, these not-for-profit organizations are manned by volunteers and not ‘staff’ as your typical Ministry of Works!

More than any other person in the UK, Richard Branson has spent all his energies lampooning British bureaucratic organizations, like the (old) British Airways, and to prove his points, he has set up rival outfits under the Virgin Group. Branson believes in speed, urgency and simplicity. When next you see Branson, look closely and you will notice he doesn’t wear tie. Tie is synonymous with bureaucracy and establishment thinking. All his business associates told Branson that the world did not need another transatlantic airline and Branson turned the impossible   into a highly profitable business by launching Virgin Atlantic Airline. And boy, is Virgin Atlantic profitable! Branson thrives on contrarian thinking!

                                     

As Marvin Bower once alluded, though in another context, as organizations grow and become more successful, they tend to become more self centred, and with myriad of committees and high hierarchy. As a direct result of growth and self-centerdness, the customer becomes relegated to the background as relationship managers are saddled with responsibilities unrelated to their core duty of serving the customer. Bower no doubt was castigating bureaucracy. Unbelievable as it might sound, in bureaucratic environments, sometimes, you hold meetings to decide when to hold meetings! Take the case of Nigeria’s National Assembly, for over one month the committee of the two chambers of the National Assembly set up to review the country’s constitution could not meet as the members could not decide whether the deputy speaker of the house of representatives should be addressed as co-chairman or vice-chairman. That’s how stifling a beaureacracy can be! Can you imagine the board of private sector company, say GE or IBM or MTN, not being able to meet due to the inability to decide how to designate one of the board members in pecking order to the chairman?

Jackie and Kevin Freiberg of NUTS! fame tell the hilarious story about Don Valentine, a former vice president of Southwest airlines. Jackie and Kevin were personally told the story by Herb Kelleher, the then legendary Chairman and CEO of Southwest. Herb was trying to emphasise his disdane for bureaucracy and how much premium Southwest placed on speed, action and the can-do spirit. Herb was describing the rite of passage or call it baptism of fire that Don Valentine the new marketing top gun that was hired from Dr. Pepper went through. At a meeting called on a Monday morning in one January  to discuss a new television campaign Don was asked to lay out his plan for getting the campaign up and running and he began by saying scripting would be in March, followed by  approval for the script in April, and all being equal the cast would be assembled in June and culminating in shooting the commercials in September. If 9 months preparation was standard for shooting commercials at Dr. Pepper Don soon learnt such standard was for the museum at Southwest. The story concluded by saying, after Don finally came to the end of his presentation Herb Kelleher spoke up,   “Don, I hate to tell you, but we’re talking about next Wednesday.” It was then that the scales quickly fell off Don Valentine’s eyes and as the authors surmmarised, he came to know just as other employees that at Southwest “there are two kinds of people: the quick and the dead”.

The Bridge banish bureaucracy as you may have already discerned is about speed and a sense of urgency. The can do spirit has to be woven into the very fabric of the organization from day one. It becomes the culture and is communicated through heroic stories and sagas of the past. With this mentality, unshackled by bureaucratic slow march, employees are not timid about springing into action and doing whatever it takes to help the company accomplish an objective in record time as yet another  graphic story also from Kevin and Jackie Freiberg’s NUTS! South West Airlines Crazy Recipe for Business & Personal Success illustrates. The story was about Southwest’s expansion to Little Rock. On hearing that the airline was planning to go to Little Rock, a competitor airline that was three times bigger than Southwest tried to scuttle the move by also announcing they were also heading to Little Rock in what they described as “a compressed time frame.” Herb ever the maverick who never shied away from a good fight whereever there was one despatched his SWAT Team to Little Rock barely 48 hours after the competitor airlines’s announcement and within ten days Southwest was ready to begin operations at Little Rock! In case you don’t know what an airline needs to put in place before it begins operation, this is what: you need to get departure and arrival gates, draw up  a flight  schedule, get your computers and servers up and running, buy planes of course, and decorate ticket counters. Southwest accomplished what needed to be accomplished within ten days, sub-leasing all available gates from Continental airlines and when the competitor finally arrived Little Rock, they found to their dismay that there were no gates as Southwest had secured all.  Talk about matching action with words.

In bureaucratic establishments whether government or private sector, talk and inaction are always the orders of the day, action is always the exception. In Nigeria, Zenith Bank is no doubt the action Bank. It is not uncommon to see a branch of the bank literally springing up overnight on a street where none existed before. Jim Ovia the MD/CEO of Zenith bank has no stomach for sloppiness and inaction, as an ex-staff of Zenith who is now in private practice but still works on contract capacity for Zenith related to me on my enquiry how Zenith does it. Zenith has over 300 branches in Lagos metropolitan area (my guess as the bank would not divulge the information), Nigeria’s economic powerhouse. Whenever a suitable location for a branch has been identified and a report made to Jim, the next thing he wants to know is when the branch will commence operation. While it takes some banks over  twelve months to plan each branch development, a typical Zenith branch is up and running within a month from the date the decision is made to site a branch.   Bureaucracy and profitability are common enemies. Any wonder  Zenith is one of the most profitable banks in Nigeria today!   Though Marvin Bower, the founder of McKinsey and Company was of the opinion that the list of ‘primary goals’ of a successful firm should not include profit. He felt profit should be subordinated to the overarching goal of providing sterling service. In his opinion if you did your work well the profits would come. He was quoted as going to the extent of saying ‘’any service business  that gives a higher priority to profit deserves to fail.”

 If you didn’t know, Zenith’s service is sterling. I remember my very first interaction with Zenith. That was around April 2007. I needed a debit card to pay Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) for my international passport (only Zenith and UBA issued the card as at then) and had to go to the Zenith branch not far from AP petrol station at Awolowo Road , Ikoyi. I was attended to by Mariam Musa, one of the customer service officers. She was extraordinary. She was engaged in tens of activities at the same time. The systems as usual were ‘hanging’, but she handled every thing so meticulously to divert attention from the fact. Ever smiling, she came back to me now and again to reassure me that my card would soon be ready. I played along and pretended I didn’t know what was going on. Finally my card was ready. It was now time to compliment her having satisfied my curiosity whether Zenith was up to scratch in customer service. When I told her she did a great job she appeared taken aback, and replied, ‘Sir I’m sure if I came to your bank I would get a higher standard of service, thanks all the same.’’ That is not the end of the story. Within an hour I received an email from Zenith inquiring whether everything went well. No wonder, in Nigeria today, to own a Zenith bank account is a status symbol.          

Both Peter Drucker and Joseph Schumpeter have in different contexts decried bureaucracy. Both men have said that “retaining the spirit of entrepreneurship is accomplished primarily by defying tradition, challenging orthodoxy, breaking up the old, selecting niches, and recognizing that bureaucracy and success are irreconcilable.’’