Peter Day's Comment

Business thinking seems to be a theme of Global Business at the moment - not surprising in the light of the mess conventional business thinking has got us into with the Credit Crunch Recession developing so nastily over the past few months.

So when I encountered a book called "Think Again : Why Good Leaders make Bad Decisions, and How to Keep it From Happening to You" I had to hear more about it.

We got one of the co authors on the line from Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, USA. He is Professor Sydney Finkelstein of the Tuck School of Business.

We talked about the recent flush of classic disastrous business decisions : Bank of America buying the investment bank Merrill Lynch, Lloyds Bank in Britain rescuing HBoS, Halifax Bank of Scotland, and Royal Bank of Scotland buying ABN-Amro.

Classic horror stories, but Professor Finkelstein tells me what we can learn from them, and how companies get insulated from the outside world the more successful they become.

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It set me thinking about quite a different encounter, where that corporate distancing from reality made me very annoyed indeed. It's only a tiny example. But it is symptomatic of how companies congeal as they get bigger.

The story is all about a fax, remember them? In fact fax machines still take up a lot of desktop space in offices, getting dusty and just occasionally cranking into blurry action.

Once they were wonder communications devices, in particular ending the tyranny of dictation or hand delivery for journalists with a deadline, popular for some reason with hosts needing an urgent reply to an invitation.

But not now; now they are relics of the pre Internet age, aren't they?

Not, I think, if you happen to be in business in continental Europe. Invitation from Swiss and German companies still ask for a reply by fax; and faxes seem to be the way business works there.

I think I have worked out why. I was recently stood up for an appointment by a leading German businessman. It was quite important, for me, anyway. He cancelled three days before I was due to fly out from London, or rather one of his public relations people did, explaining that business came first.

Hierarchy

Then I got a letter of apology from someone higher up in the firm - or rather a PR person forwarded to me an email attachment which turned out to be a faxed letter of explanation. (Not from the big boss himself, you understand, but a sidekick.)

Thinking about the mystery of the email/fax trail, I realised that top Continental business people are probably ill at ease with the computer, certainly ill at ease sending emails.

The fax enables them to utilise the traditional office hierarchy : Miss Schmidt takes a letter, types it out on the headed paper, faxes it to someone who then copies the fax and sends it on to me.

It shelters the boss from the messy business of having to communicate directly to outsiders; only the little people have laptops, in other words.

It is a minor sign of a dangerous unresponsiveness of corporate life, protective companies using it to shield themselves and their executives from the real world.

I worry about organisations where the boss is too posh or remote to dirty his hands with a bit of emailing.

Corporations build high walls to insulate themselves and their exalted leaders from public life. I fear for the future of companies which rely on fax machines in the Internet era. The writing is on the screen.

Contributor:
Sydney Finkelstein, Stephen Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business.

Think Again : Why Good Leaders make Bad Decisions, and How to Keep it From Happening to You