In search of excellence

It’s over forty years since the seminal book ‘In Search of Excellence’ by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman was published.  I’m probably one of the few people of my generation who have not read it, but I’ll put that down to the fact that the authors worked at McKinsey whilst I started in the mid-80s with A.T. Kearney (where J O McKinsey incidentally started his career).

So it’s the title rather than the contents of the book that came to mind when I was thinking about the lessons that might be learned from the various industry awards that seem to cluster around this time of the year.  In the UK, we’ve just had black tie awards dinners from Autotrader, Car Dealer and Motor Trader for example, and entries are being invited for the AM and Fleet News awards.  With my dealer hat on, we also had an awards dinner organised by our local Chamber of Commerce last week.  Only having been in business for a few months at the time entries were invited, we could only really go for ‘Best New Business’.  We were runners-up, which in the motor-racing world we used to call the first loser, but it’s a start and with the business now in the top 10% of the national Omoda Jaecoo network by volume, we’re feeling quite positive.  Next year…

Over the years I’ve been involved as a judge in various awards in automotive and elsewhere.  Two things stand out for me.  The first is that the people who express total confidence that they’re the winners when they submit their entry, rarely figure in the top ranks.  I put this down to them focusing on how much they’ve improved (from possibly a very poor starting point) rather than on where the opportunities still lie (which is the winners’ trait).  The second is that when you have cross-business KPIs being considered, or the potential to enter multiple categories, you never find a business that is strong in one or more areas and dreadful in others.  The standards tend to be fairly uniform across the board, even if there is a spike in one or two particular areas.

You see this in other disciplines as well.  Olympian athletes tend to be pretty good at a range of other sports outside their own core discipline.  The great actors and actresses have usually tried their hand at a range of styles, not just Shakespeare or whatever won them fame, and musicians can usually play a few, even if they primarily focus on one.

This makes logical sense to me in a number of ways.  Businesses are interconnected, so the used car department does not exist in a bubble, but is drawing on stock from the new car department, and services from aftersales.  They probably share admin and F&I functions to at least some extent with the new car department.  Recruitment and pay policies, training and development will all be shaped by the same HR department.  In that context, there is not a special fast track where outstanding hires all end up in used cars, or processes work perfectly when they’re focused on used, but fall over for new or aftersales.  At a broader level, a single site within a large group cannot excel if the group as a whole has mediocre or poor standards.  There will be variations across sites, but they will tend to be within a band around the average, not single outliers, far away from the average.  The variations will be caused by a combination of internal and external factors.  The latter might include brand and location, but from what I’ve seen the most influential factor will be the head of business for a site – performance follows the man (or woman) as the saying goes.

In top-performing businesses (in our industry, but also true of hospitality, retail and many others I’m sure), first impressions are often a good indicator of the excellence that runs through the whole business.  If house-keeping standards are high, the property is clean and well-presented, stock is presented well and staff are clearly focused on their jobs rather than idle chatter, then a lapse in performance stands out, and staff are getting continual reinforcement that the aim is to deliver the highest standards, not ‘good enough’.  This then permeates the whole business, not just one department or team, so you see that across-the-board focus on improvement.

I do not pretend that we have achieved that level at Auto West London (or for that matter at ICDP), but I am very aware of where the gaps are, point them out to the managers and the team, and it really hurts when we have an issue that is the result of a failure somewhere along the line.  Another lesson learned from manufacturing is that you need to drill down to find the root cause in order to get a permanent fix – the first point of failure you find is probably in itself just the result of something further back in the process.  Attitude is at least as important as aptitude, and we will work together in search of excellence.