September 1996 € Volume 6 € Number 9
Is Tomorrow Really
Another Day?
By Claude Henrion
Chairman
LaFarge New Materials
For a Frenchman, being a speaker at the 1995 APICS International Conference
and Exhi-
bition in Orlando was unforgettable, as were the warm (and hopefully long-lasting)
contacts made with people from all over the United States.
But enough about yesterday. Each and everyone of us knows that tomorrow
is where we will be spending the rest of our lives. I suspect that most
people would recognize this sentence as obvious. However, it is worth asking
ourselves two questions: "Are we really prepared for what lies ahead?"
and "What do we mean when we say `tomorrow'?"
First and foremost, we tend to forget that tomorrow is a world of stability
and continuity; and I dare write that hot dogs, apple pie, baseball and
traffic jams in big cities will still be around in 2005 or 2015. But tomorrow
is a world where "change" also will be among us, and when we reassure
ourselves by saying "tomorrow is another day," well ... do we
mean a doomsday or a dreamday?
Self-proclaimed gurus project their own perception of today's most visible
tendencies. They call their perception a "vision," which it is
not, and they predict that we are heading for a cyberworld of intense communication
where information will replace action in a virtual universe on a global
planet, etc.
Very few of these self-proclaimed gurus tell us the truth. A sound vision
of the future should consider tax level, social welfare, quarterly results,
value of currencies, Dow Jones index, and urban violence, not to mention
local wars in little-known countries (where oil or uranium can be found
in large quantities, or where pollution can be generated in similarly huge
quantities). All of these problems will be as important to us tomorrow as
the Internet is today.
Many of us know that a vision is a sort of concept that should be put to
work. We know that what is really at stake is our capability to simply adapt
as we have always done in our businesses and industries to a pace of change
that proves acceptable and therefore efficient. It's as simple as that.
Change is the only factor that doesn't change throughout the years.
Maybe change is becoming faster, more radical, more dramatic, more compulsory
these days; that is why we need to double think, to learn to cope, to develop
new skills. This acceleration of change comes from several major causes:
- Technology advances. We are still very influenced by the old way of
understanding the world through the visible progress of science and technology
that has produced such technological advances as the automobile, telephone,
household equipment or even the computer. Let's call this change the technological
drive, and it will certainly continue influencing our need to evolve.
- New methods and organization. This technological drive will apply
not only to products or tools, but also to methods and, therefore, to organization
at the factory level as well. This drive will be strengthened by international
influences that have to be considered at several levels.
- Working conditions. For the first time in a U.S. presidential election,
one of the candidates has stressed that dislocation, international sourcing
and lowersalaries are affecting our own daily lives. Whether one supports
the argument or discards it, the fact is that the argument could be formulated.
- Worldwide competition. Chinese commercial airplanes, Korean automobiles,
Taiwanese toys, and Singaporean banking mean that the world is no longer
a U.S./Japan/Europe commercial battlefield. Furthermore, salaries, productivity,
imagination, methods (kanban and the like), and exploding local markets
are new challenges with which we must learn to cope.
- Demography. Return on some investments can be rather long, particularly
when capital-intensive activities are considered. It might be useful to
bear in mind that some countries (Germany and China among them) are already
entering what scientists call a "demographical collapse," meaning
that within one or two decades they will be populated by aging citizens
with little or no replacement of generations. The demographic problem will
probably prove to be the most impressive and hard to solve, in business
and in perceptible daily consequences, as well as in politics.
Preparing for change
So, what is at stake today? What are the foreseeable issues, arguments and
challenges for tomorrow? Change of course is here to stay: pace of change,
space of change, race for change and, moreover, change for the sake of change.
What's more, all of this will happen amidst crises, upsurges and even some
soft landings.
Key APICS-related issues are workplace education and employee development.
If managers want to play their role, it is time they started to make sure
that they are not responding only to visible challenges. There is a difference
of scale between visible (actual) and vision (prospective). We must definitely
open our employees' minds to the situations that they undoubtedly will have
to face in a very near future: We must put, in proper words, vision at work.
Learning to adapt
The challenge of business will still be to live, to survive, and to win
in a world of uncertainty. Therefore, we must learn how to adapt-even to
adaptation itself-as all the rest is by and large unforeseeable. As learning
curves are becoming shorter and sharper, it is also time we started changing
our minds and our way of envisaging change. As we say in France, "plus
c'est la même chose et plus ça change"-"the more
things stay the same, the more things change." The beauty of this sentence
is in the fact that, as a tool, it works both ways!
Claude Henrion is currently chairman of Lafarge New Materials, a
$1 billion U.S. company that he founded in 1986. LaFarge produces and sells
cement and various construction materials in 17 countries worldwide.
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