This vignette synthesizes consulting work Shozo conducted with a telecommunications company in Sri Lanka, the small island formerly called Ceylon off the southern coast of India. Famous for its tea production, Sri Lanka is known as the Pearl of the Indian Ocean, referring to its beautiful setting and a degree of wealth from its tea exports. While this case study is not an example of how EBT is used to solve a specific problem, it is a good illustration of how EBT can be used to help a business better assess its mission and improve its operations and customer marketing. Shozo began working with the company during one week of training its executives in EBT principles. This case shows how the CEO and executive team were able to use EBT to make improvements. We are interested in knowing what you think of this. Is there anything that you would do differently?
This is copyrighted by the Center for Breakthrough Thinking, February 7, 2012. Please do not reproduce without permission.
Background
This telecom company, one of the biggest in Sri Lanka, had been government owned until 1997 when the Sri Lankan government decided to privatize it. In 2001, the company hired a Japanese businessman to take over the reins as CEO. He was selected because of his background in global businesses in Thailand, Singapore, and Indonesia. The CEO was already familiar with the techniques of EBT and decided to invite Shozo to introduce it to his executive team as a new management philosophy and approach to problem solving. His goal was to revitalize the company in whatever ways EBT would help them determine.
Phase 1: People
The first focus of the team was applied to understanding its market. In this context, people involvement did not mean the usual EBT phase in which the goal is to find out which people to involve in solving a problem, but rather which people should the company target as its primary customers. When the company was publically run, it was highly oriented towards pleasing the government and its politicians, more than its telephone customers. However, the CEO believed that the company needed turn its attention more directly on its actual customers.
He was especially motivated to do this after receiving a late night phone call directly from a customer who found his number in the phone book and called to complain directly to the CEO about the lack of response he was getting from the company’s call center. The customer was very upset that he did not have phone service for a long time and had been promised that a service technician would come out and fix the problem. The CEO promised to help the customer, recognizing that customers, not politicians had to come first. He believed the real users were key to support the company’s growth and profits, not Sri Lanka Government.
Phase 2: Purposes
Shozo next worked with the executives to better understand the company’s purposes. The company had many stakeholders, including Sri Lanka Government and stockholders who had ownership in the company. But was the company’s purpose solely to make a profit for them? The company also had more than 8,000 employees; he had to think about their living too, but was that its purpose?
Shozo guided the executives through a purpose hierarchy. Whereas the previous CEO had believed the company’s purpose was to satisfy the Government and its politicians, the EBT process took them deeper into customer engagement and provided a valuable insight. The purpose hierarchy was as follows:
The purpose of this company is to provide telephone services.
The purpose of this purpose was to provide a connection.
The purpose of this purpose is to create connection among real users.
The purpose of this purpose is to create activities in Sri Lanka.
As a result of this, the executives realized the company had to figure out how to provide the maximum benefits to the users of its telephone services. From this conclusion, the CEO had the insight that he had to create value for the real users. This created a conflict with the existing powers. However, he had to act on his policy of changing staffs mind in order to rehabilitate the company.
One of the important stakeholders were high rank managers. The CEO tried to involve those people and change their mindsets to get them to be customer-oriented. The following story is one good example of what he began doing each day when he came into his office at 8:30 a.m. He began inviting 10 executives to join him for morning tea. Sitting around an oval-shape table, he used the EBT foundation principles to ask about people, purposes, and solutions, all the while using Smart Questions such as, “From our real users point of view, what is the ideal future solution and living solution, based on our focus purposes?” Sometimes he ordered his executives to call in relevant people to the topic of discussion to join them when he needed “hot information” directly from a people involved in the technology or process. In this way, his solution finding was based on real information, which allowed him to solve problems according to real people and real users.
An example of this was the CEO’s recognition that the company needed to establish a brand new professional call center to respond to the problems of real customers. The old call center was dirty, unresponsive, and almost useless. The CEO instructed his team to put together a modern and well decorated new call center where customers could come in to have their problems solved. The center proved very successful, as many customers came there to consult with service technicians and solve problems on the spot. In addition, the staff was proud of the new center and felt empowered by helping real users solve their problems.
Phase 3: Future Solution
When the new CEO came to the company, he had many future solution alternatives to consider, such as restructuring the firm to cut out the waste. However, he wanted to expand his solution space, so working with the EBT process, he realized that he could reassess his options. One of the most insightful of these was to realize that Sri Lanka was not just a small island country, but rather it a potentially strategic island between Europe and Asian. Based on this concept, he started to connect Sri Lanka with Europe and Singapore including India and The Maldives by installing undersea fiber optic cables. Those cables are now in full operation and the company has become very strategic telecom player in the region.
Another insight also proved valuable. In many fields, but especially telecom, the advance of technology cannot be easily predicted and past successes are quickly obsolete due to rapid changes. For example, the old fixed telephone technology cannot be used for future systems. The CEO thus used EBT to expand his solution space and timeframe for thinking. As a result of this, he began planning many new systems based on advanced technologies, such as multi-service networks, business support systems, and media gateways. As a result, the company began integrating today’s business technologies towards tomorrow’s integrated business model, such as from Single-service Network to Multi-service Networks using one IP platform and from Separate Business Support Systems to Common Business Support Systems. Now it is one of the most modern and high-tech systems among Asian countries.
Phase 4: Living Solution
Through the EBT consulting, one of the most important living solutions the CEO determined was the need to spruce up the company’s facilities for the workers. When he had taken over as CEO, he found all the offices at Sri Lanka Telecom to be dirty and disorderly. The chaotic and unattractive environment demotivated employees. As a result, he asked executives to throw away useless and dead inventory, such as a huge amount of dead stock of wire drams in the stock yard. He started to make employees build systems to put everything in order and clean up their work spaces. He provided all necessary human, physical, and information enablers to transform the company’s workplaces into attractive workplaces for employees. The movement gave them a new spirit about the quality of their work life—and it even spread around Sri Lanka and inspired many other companies to make their workplaces cleaner and more efficient. Every year he also sought to motivate his subordinates through an awards ceremony for improvement and betterment. In 2002, the company won the National Productivity Award.
In addition, using EBT discussions with executives, they developed a charitable future solution to utilize the dead stock to found “Project Hope” in Jaffna and the “Bridge Project” in Mannar to help reduce the ongoing conflict, which finally ended in 2010.
Finally, the CEO introduced EBT throughout the company and set up a Solution Center for creative solution finding. In order to improving the company performance, he realized that they needed continuous improvement and breakthrough in the future. He also trained 42 EBT internal trainers for creative solution finding, who are now training employees at the Solution Center.
Results
Following the EBT consulting in 2001, this telecom expanded its achievements for the next five and half years. Mobile telephone subscribers increased nearly 9 fold. Sales revenues increased 182% and profits increased 260%. The stock price increased 2.44 times in the Colombo Stock Exchange Market. The company was ranked AAA by an domestic rating company and BB- by an international rating company as one of the best enterprises in Sri Lanka. It was the first globally rated company for oversea bond issuance in the global debt market.
Through the efforts of the CEO, the company changed in many ways, including:
- from bureaucratic mindset to customer-oriented mindset,
- from headquarters-oriented to on-the-spot oriented,
- from problem finding to solution finding,
- from top-down to bottom-up employee involvement,
- from domestic to global,
- from fixed voice service to a combination of fixed, wireless, and data service,
- from pre-modern systems to modern systems,
- from low productivity to high productivity.
Lessons Learned from Applying EBT to the CEO’s Improvement Initiatives:
1) From the Uniqueness Principle: Although the CEO was a Japanese global businessman, who has worked in Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand and Sri Lanka, he did not attempt to introduce Japanese management principles to this company. He created a unique management style for each area. He understood Sri Lanka people were unique and treated their culture as such.
2) From the Purposeful Information Principle: Conventional executives always request extensive analysis documents to analyze everything before dealing with the problems. This CEO never requested documents to find problems. Instead, he interviewed his staff to get “hot” information; he visited the shop floor to talk and listen to employees; and he collected only purposeful information to find solutions.
3) From the Systems Principle: He thought about his management holistically, not analytically. He perceived Sri Lanka as being at the center of Japan, Europe, Singapore and India. He built cable networks between the north and south regions of the country to connect them. He saw that everything is system inter-dependent.
4) From the People Involvement Principle: He sought to involve real customers and employees to solve the problems and improve the company.
5) From the Purposes Principle: He always thought about the deeper purposes of the company.
6) From the Future Solution Principle: The CEO utilized absolute values or ideal solutions as the bench mark for his solutions, based on his focused purposes. He always tried to learn from the future, not the present or past successes.
7) From the Living Solution Principle: He adapted his future target solution to identify immediate needed changes. The Sri Lanka Solution Center is an example of this.
8) From the List step: He always sought ideas from people and listed them first.
9) From the Organize step: He always put together listed purposed and ideas to have options to consider.
10) From the Decide step: He used company measures of purpose accomplishment along with an effective evaluation process to select the solution.
Postscript
Shozo continues to teach EBT to top managers in Sri Lanka at “The Association for Overseas Technical Scholarship”, where they study Japanese technology.
This is copyrighted by the Center for Breakthrough Thinking, February 7, 2012. Please do not reproduce without permission.
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