Vitaly Demin Senior Strategy Consultant Read about Vitaly

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March 2011

Earlier this year I consulted a large national company. I worked directly with several Vice Presidents. One day I ran into one of the executives in the hallway (let’s call this person Mark) and asked him how his day was going. He could hardly catch his breath (which was normal for him). He said that he was crazily busy and didn’t have time to do all the things he needed to do. And then he said what instantaneously got red flagged in my head: “If I could only clone myself.”

I’ll get straight to the point. The reasons you don’t want to hear this from a VP are: 1) this clearly indicates that he is not a good manager because managing is all about delegating tasks and managing people who execute them, 2) the person is arrogant because he thinks nobody in his team is good enough to do this, 3) instead of doing a high level work, this person spends his expensive time doing all the little things himself instead of managing his people and achieving large scale goals as a team.

The thing is that you shouldn’t get to this level if you plan on cloning yourself. People become Vice Presidents exactly because they know how to get the job done without cloning themselves. If you’re a VP and you say this, then you either got there too early or you need urgent training.

I wouldn’t be judging this too fast if I didn’t know this person long enough. He was the only VP in the company who tried to do everything himself and also get credit for all the work. It caused late night work days, exhaustion, frustration, etc.

Bottom line - top management and executive type of jobs are all about delegating and managing. If these two things are not in place, hopefully the CEO is able to spot this and do something about it.

My two cents, looking from the outside.

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Free on iBooks

This eBook is a brief insight into the core of the executive management of Sony Corporation, the core that is unfortunately filled with one of the most perilous human qualities – arrogance.

For a very long time now Sony has been known as an organization permeated by arrogant attitude toward their suppliers, their distributors and now their customers. This culture is felt everywhere in the world. I remember having meetings with Sony people in Moscow Russia when I consulted the largest electronics retailer in the country. These meetings were very adversarial and not a most pleasant experience. Also, as I worked with electronics retailers in Kuwait, Emirates, India, England, US and other countries, the opinions I received about Sony were the same. Nobody liked them and nobody wanted to do business with them because it was just too painful. Obviously, they could not stop carrying Sony products in their stores but some of them did try to reduce the assortment. Sony rarely partners. They dictate.

This work is an attempt to show how corporate arrogance affected the decisions Sony made along the way, the decisions that led to mistakes, mistakes that got them dethroned from the position of being the best and the most admired consumer electronics company in the world.

I hope this eBook helps other companies see a bigger picture of how decisions that are made inside their organizations affect their brand, their customer loyalty and profitable business growth. Very often top managers do not realize that many of wrong decisions are made not due to the lack of knowledge about the problem but due to the mentioned above human flaw – arrogance.

The 2nd edition includes financial updates from 2010 as well as other recent events associated with the Sony organization.

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