Amateur Photographer Magazine

Roger Hicks is Back From the Front - Why change things for the sake of change? If it ain't broke, don't fix it...

Thursday 10th April 2008

Roger Hicks

Grow or die. That's the mantra of management consultants, and a company that is not growing is already dying.

This is, of course, arrant nonsense. Then again, look who is peddling it. A management consultant doesn't actually produce anything; it is in his or her interest to keep things in a constant state of turmoil – literally, change for the sake of change.

Once they are out of their teenage years, few people relish any more change than is necessary. If you have mastered a skill, you are rarely keen to abandon it, especially on the whim of a consultant. To be sure, you can take your unwillingness too far, and become hidebound, but there's a big difference between change that will make life easier or make the product better, and change for change's sake.

No, say the consultants. We must learn to embrace change; to love it, even. Well, this is easily countered with an old saying – so old, in fact, that it is often expressed in Latin: 'Cui bono?' Or in plain English, 'Who benefits?'

Who benefits from constant change? Anyone who has created a business out of 'managing change'. And if there's not enough genuine, useful change, then the trick is obviously to manufacture some, via a new management theory.

It is comparatively easy, after all, to look at different businesses and see what they have in common. This is the basis of professional management, the belief that you can switch managers from, say, the manufacture of ladies' underwear to the distribution of motor cars, to the administration of the National Health Service.

What these professional managers miss is not what the businesses have in common, but where they differ. Yes, businesses grow out of one another, and if one business declines, another (with any luck) takes its place. But often, there is a manufacturing culture, an endless array of hints and tips and tricks of the trade that are passed around more or less freely. There are old men who can say, 'Well, actually, we tried that, and it isn't as easy as it looks,' and there are young men (and sometimes wise old ones, too) who can say, 'Yes, but if you tried doing it this way instead of that way…'

Nor is this confined to manufacturing. There is surely a culture or ethos that characterises the armed forces, academia and the best service organisations, be they banks or hairdressers… the list goes on.

The very idea of a fixed culture is, however, anathema to the professional manager, and consultants (who are in effect meta-managers) are as terrified of the concept as vampires are of garlic, crucifixes or daylight.

In photography, the most poisonous results of professional 'managerism' and consultants has been 'brand extension': the idea that if you make one product that is the best in its field, you can lend your name to almost anything, which will then benefit from the perception of quality. To avoid offending the many companies that have been led down this primrose path, I'll make up an example about one that hasn't: Gandolfi.

Gandolfi makes some of the finest traditional wooden cameras in the world. Wooden cameras are widely used by photographers who walk long distances, sometimes in adverse weather. What, then, could be more logical than Gandolfi-branded hiking boots and foul-weather gear? Almost anything, actually. Gandolfi couldn't make them in-house, so they would have to be bought in. This adds an additional layer of cost. Also, superb engineer though owner Eddie Hill is, he's not a clothes designer or manufacturer, so he would have to rely to a considerable extent on someone else's design expertise and quality control. Taken together, these considerations constitute a recipe for disaster. At best, the choice is between the best available, at a price no one would be willing to pay, and indifferent products that could only diminish Gandolfi's reputation.

So I'll go on supporting Gandolfi for cameras, but for boots and shoes I'll turn to Brasher and Mephisto, and for waterproofs I'll stick with Musto and Gill. They all enjoy the highest reputations for the products they are known for. So why would any sane person, manufacturer or customer go for 'brand extension'? AP

Roger and Frances website

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