Mr Mermal’s thoughts on the talk of Mr Patrick D. Cowden on new ways of thinking about leadership and business models for a radical leap in development, which was organized under the aegis of The Managers’ Association of Slovenia on 16th November in the Crystal Palace.
Due to lack of time, I debated whether to attend the MQ Conference at all. The conference was meant for participants, entrepreneurs and managers, who think about new pathways, solutions and challenges, since old patterns, techniques, commercial channels, and a shallow understanding of partners and clients no longer yield the desired results. We have also been caught in various social networks, electronic communication, the internet, which is all very welcome and useful at first sight, but really only alienates us further and makes it even more difficult for us to understand business relations, habits and the true needs of the market and the people.
Not nearly enough thought is given to the way and the quality of life, which is why I congratulate Mr Patrick D. Cowen on exposing the current situation as inefficient and unable to produce good results even in the coming months or years. It is even more important that Mr Cowden showed and proved why we need to put people centre-stage in all aspects. All the hitherto established models have stressed the importance of the stakeholders, the market and the competition, which formed the basis of management, of ideas underlying the creation of vision and strategy, all of which flowed through products, services and the financial industry into numbers and finally into the result shared with employees, partners and suppliers. This model is no longer efficient or implementable in the long run. That is why I personally support the model which Mr Cowden presented at the conference and which sees the solution in employees, business partners and suppliers working together with managers to develop new strategies, business models, organizational processes, to achieve results relevant to the stakeholders, conquer markets, fight battles in a competitive environment as well as fight the environment itself.
I think we at BTC understood this as soon as we took over the company together with managers and employees, because we understood leadership as managing the company and maintaining excellent relations among all employees, stressing values such as dignity and respect, and creating an environment in which everybody, not only the leadership but the entire collective, feels appreciated. For the time being, an environment filled with trust and respect, positive energy and creativity, still enables us to reach good business results, even in this economy.
