Show your true character by means of visible action, said Alfred Josefsen, the boss of the supermarket chain Irma, on 2 December in Børsen Weekend. Using this philosophy he has turned a loss-making business into a success. On the face of it this seems to be a simple and straightforward piece of advice, but this is far from the case. The type of action you take is by no means unimportant, as Josefsen himself expresses indirectly. He says that you have to know what you want. You have to be enthusiastic about it and stick to it – and one could add that you have to know why and how you want something.
The reason for this is illustrated very well in ‘Alice in Wonderland’:
At one point Alice meets a grinning Cheshire Cat, whom she asks: “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where – “ said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“- so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.
To which the Cat replied: “Oh, you’re sure to do that, if you only walk long enough.”
They’re mad
Alice felt that this could not be denied, so she tried another question: “What sort of people live about here?”
“In that direction,” the Cat said, waving its right paw round, “lives a Hatter: and in that direction,” waving the other paw, “lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they’re both mad.”
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
In other words: The route you choose is only of minor significance if your goals are unclear. Alice needed clarity with regard to her goal. She needed to know which way she should go, and how she could decide whether she was going the right way.
By showing his true character, Josefsen is creating clarity with regard to his goal and how it is to be reached. If he shows his true character in the right way, as everything suggests he is doing, this is achieved by stating clearly his vision and strategy to the employees.
Behaviour is driven by means of metrics, and this behaviour drives the results.
It is presumably the lack of coordination between vision, strategy and metrics that causes some employees to describe their workplace as a “funny farm” or a “madhouse”.
So regardless of what the Cheshire Cat said, something can be done about this situation. But you have to know what you want, why you want it, how you are going to achieve it – and then you have to stick to it. That is what the boss of Irma does better than most.
Also published in the Danish business newspaper ‘Børsen’, section 1, page 2, OPINION, on 15 December 2005.
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