TESTIMONY                                                                                             Wins and Losses

Introduction

Because of its focus on sensitive strategic issues, Bridges does not generally reveal the names of clients, following the precedent set by Bain & Company and Kissinger Associates. In the 70s the partners at Bain & Company (founded 1973) carried no business cards and referred to clients by code names. Kissinger Associates (founded 1982) to this day does not reveal clients and allegedly forbids them from disclosing any relationship with the firm. Bridges´ policy is similar, albeit not quite as strict.

In exception to our general reticence about clients, seven wondrous wins and their counterpart, thirteen lamentable losses, are revealed, "full disclosure," or almost. For examples of really flagrant failures, where not merely 100s of millions, but billions of dollars, were just pulverized, cf. Strategy Repair.

Everyone writes about winning, but writing about losing is more important!

Why? To learn from failure, even failure long ago, is far easier than to try to repeat yesterday’s successes in today’s turbulent times. What delighted the customer 50 years ago ("It even comes in color!") may not impress much today. However what enraged a customer 50 years ago -- to the point of suing the company -- has a pretty good chance of enraging a customer today. Therefore the wondrous wins are described in paragraphs, the lamentable losses in pages. 

The presentations of wins and losses reflect differences among cultures, especially between those of the U.S. and Germany. Germans may be compared to coconuts, with a hard shell covering a huge, fleshy, fiercely protected “private fruit” sphere. Bragging, admitting failure and sharing information all tend to fall within that private sphere.

Americans may be compared to peaches. Propounding personal success (bragging), publicly admitting and recounting failure and sharing much information all belong to an unprotected “public fruit” exterior, with privacy limited to the small hard nut in the middle.* "Testimony" deliberately selects the U.S. approach.

* The idea for the coconut/peach analogy stems from the classic Building Cross-Cultural Competence, How to create wealth from conflicting values, Charles Hampden-Turner, Fons Trompenaars, Wiley 2000, Chapter 5, Specificity-Diffuseness, The Dilemma, Public and Private Cultural Space, p.156 f.

            “Do (a culture´s) members locate themselves in a shared public space or in mutual private spaces. The distinction carefully drawn in Figure 5.12 (the “fruit” circles) derives from the work of the German-American psychologist Kurt Levin. . .”

Kurt Levin (1890 – 1947) was one of the first to study organizational development and became the director of the Center for Group Dynamics at MIT in 1946, unfortunately dying of a heart attack the next year.

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For executive coaching, to have experienced failure is a better background than uninterrupted success. One has done it the wrong way -- and knows the warning signs all too well. One has failed, overcome, and learned how to do it right: not "vini, vidi, vici" – I came, I saw, I conquered; but rather "vini, defeci, devici " - I came, I failed, I overcame."

As an example of how difficult it is to repeat success, let us consider a low technology business, which delivers pretty much the same service today as that which was offered 50 or 100 years ago, viz. dance instruction. Arthur Murray (born in Austria-Hungary in 1895, deceased in the U.S. 1991) began teaching people how to dance in New York City in 1912.

Before the advent of World War I, he had the idea of teaching dance steps with simple footprint diagrams. Within a couple of years he sold over 500,000 dance courses by mail order. In 1925 he started one of the very first franchise systems for a service business in the U.S. (Today the initial franchise fee ranges from ca. $15,000 to over $100,000.) He eventually employed 200 dance teachers in New York City alone, 1,500 in the U.S. His business was grossing $5,000,000 a year in the days when a single dollar would buy a meal at a decent restaurant and when taxes were a fraction of what they are today.

Munich has an active Salsa scene with 15 different Salsa studios. (The Arthur Murray web site, www.arthurmurray.com, opens with music from Salsa, a popular Latin dance.) None of the three largest Munich Salsa studios has even a half-dozen dance teachers. Most of the other studios are run by a dance couple or are one-person operations. Talk to any one of the owners about how Arthur Murray built his business and his brilliant marketing, and they would immediately blurt out the absolutely legitimate objections: "Why the man started out with no web site at all. He did not even have a mobile phone. How can you build a business like that nowadays?"

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