The Tribune

By SIMON COOPER

Res Socius

THESE days the world's obsessed with feedback, and often for good reasons. I am not sure whether it was the marketing industry that navigated us from the days of "Joe's a great guy" and "Mary does a fantastic job", but that's history. Governments publish department league tables as if they owned a baseball league. Virtual suppliers and customers on the Internet closed the loop with formal feedback systems.

People often try to fool themselves by influencing the feedback they receive. This extends to website owners paying contractors to make repeat visits to their sites. I have even heard of gym fanatics manipulating exercise machines to get good scores. To me, that seems at least as pointless as recalibrating a car's speedometer.

Some employers fool themselves in similar ways by holding one-way meetings with dutifully nodding employee-servants. I can think of a few government leaders who fell out of with their citizens recently by not listening. Think Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Bahrain - and, more recently, a certain late-lamented Frenchman.

Google jumped on the bandwagon when it introduced its rating system, which determines which websites appear high up on search results, and thus get visited. I've used these measures to get my business brokering website (www.ressocius.com) successfully above the fold on the first page. To be honest, I'm more interested in new visitor arrivals than repeat hits, though.

To my mind it's the success of the enterprise - be this profit or some other measure - that makes the difference. Popularity is a fickle thing at the best of times. It's what this translates into that really matters. And that is true of leaders whose names have withstood the tests of time, and are recorded for what they actually achieved.

This has still more to say to us in business. Many firms have gone belly-up at times when they seemed to be doing quite well. Sometimes their managers did not listen. Sometimes they lost touch with what their customers expected. At other times they were just too damn stupid, if you'll excuse the words.

I was reading about the British car firm, MG, the other day. Remember them? They made those cute sports cars with long hoods that real people could afford. One day British Leyland decided to fit shock-absorbing bumpers to them without thinking of the consequences. The results were (a) an ugly car; (b) a car that did not handle well; and (c) imploding sales. Talk about a camel designed by a committee.

Leyland's response was simple. They killed the goose that laid the golden eggs. They closed the factory, and laid off a workforce that had a collective memory of 40 years. History records that the board was surprised at the outcry that reverberated around the world. They had forgotten about consulting customers.

This brings us back to using the right tools for the job. I believe that there are right and wrong tools for business, too. In the end, it's our customers that keep us going. Let's not forget to thank them in our moments of success.

NB: Simon Cooper is a founding partner of Res Socius, a business brokerage firm and businesses for sale directory service. Res Socius is authorised by the Bahamas Investment Authority (BIA) to facilitate the sale and purchase of businesses, and provide consultancy services. Contact 376-1256, visit www.ressocius.com or scan the QR code here.