People, Process and Profit

This week let’s take a few minutes and talk about 3Ps; People, Process and Profit.

“Profit is not the proper end and aim of management — it is what makes all of the proper ends and aims possible.” — David Packard, cofounder of Hewlett-Packard

A number of writers want to discuss people, process and technology. Many others write of people, process and sustainability. We suggest the critical third P is profit. Getting people to understand the great game of business and to balance customer satisfaction, quality and safety are all part and parcel to profits.

People at work are the foundation of excellence. In the large corporation, the small business, the law office, the school or a professional practice – wherever people work together. We have an urgent need to attend to the corporate spirit. Corporate comes from the Latin root, corpus, or body. The word corporate denotes first and foremost a body of people with shared interests and concerns. People are not motivated to be and do their best unless they feel some significant degree of satisfaction at work.
 
Process is a naturally occurring or designed sequence of changes, of properties or attributes of an object or system. The Latin root is processus, or movement. In business, we fulfill the requests of customers, internal and external, by creating and following a series of actions, processes. There are processes in all parts of what we do including thinking, communicating, decision analysis and delivering goods and services. In some cases, this chart is referred to as a Value Stream Map.

Profit is one of the two critical factors in a business; the other is to generate cash. Profit comes from the Latin, profectus, to make progress, move forward. The only way to be secure in a business is to make money and generate cash everything else is a means to that end. Safety, quality, efficiency and customer satisfaction are channels to profit and cash generation. As a team, we need to understand these facts and the difference between the two.
 
“It’s Not Luck” is the title of a book by Eliyahu Goldratt. It takes the Theory of Constrains (TOC) from the factory floor to sales, marketing and the Boardroom. Running a successful family business requires setting the direction, tailoring the marketing and sales, production, distribution, project management and a powerful cadence. The best closely held firms constantly right their work. They know which items they need to sweat, pay a great deal of attention to and keep a finger on the financial pulse of the organization.

Great family businesses have many channels of information. They don’t act on every data point. Solid businesses trust each other and know that the leaders do not get all their facts from just one source.
 
People, process and profits are some of the keys to a successful business. All the runners in the race compete. Only one wins-Run to win…..