Konstantin Y. Smolentsev
Ph.D., the Academician of IIA, СМС
Chairman of Board of directors
IC “SMOLENTSEV & Partners”
http://www.smolentsev.com/

When talking to owners and heads of companies about business perfection and development, I always tell them – dismiss patterns, go beyond traditional business management! If you want to achieve something meaningful. If not – consider your business as non-existent by tomorrow. Then don’t spend time and money. Branding, marketing, strategic planning, …- these are details. The main value is Your approach to business. Personalities create business! If it is personally YOUR approach to business – there is a chance for success, if it is the way it should be – long but strong loop in the end. Call it being “creative”? However you want. The main thing is to differ. To be like many others – is not to be anyone. And most importantly, being unnoticeable for the Customer. A category of people, who, when communicating with You or Your product, have to develop a desire to open their wallets, pull out hard earned money and give them to you with PLEASURE. That is a standard. That’s how it is supposed to be. Everything else – practical fantasy, creativeness.

If real success wanted – it is necessary to aim for super profit, “getting the cream”, which means to give a customer something which no one else can, at a certain time when others aren’t able, in a way, that no one else presents it. “Our” goods have to be wanted, wanted terribly, desperately. Traditional way of business organization will not help to achieve this goal. It doesn’t matter what is being sold – ability to survive, make ends meet with the means of a “Regular” product, or prestige in a form of a magnificent restyled sedan, or simply calmness and confidence in a form of consulting support. Bright example – Google’s approach to its email system – registration for an email address can be made only through personal invitations. It is one of the local expressions of a creative organization in general and one of the most successful corporations in the world.

Receiving such result, not only one time, not accidentally, but steady, can happen, in my opinion, with only one condition – the entire organization from general manager to technicians, from work organization of the secretary and financial department to departments of development and marketing, through IT, manufacture and sales have to be filled with the spirit and style to achieve such result. It has to become a cult of organization development, daily standard of its living. The standard of a non-standard. The standard of creativeness.

Question, how to practically create such business? Not easy. But interesting and grateful. There are no patterns and there can be none. Meaning that “a wheel must be invented”. Every day. By every employee. For every part, block, process. It includes brand, and advertisement, and marketing, and development programs, and system of personnel selection, its motivation and everything, everything, everything! And it is impossible to define where creativeness is more needed – in design, structure, strategy or somewhere else. Either is it there and it’s totally working, or it’s not there at all. It is the fundament and carcass, which are built around the idea and philosophy. Philosophy of innovation and creativeness.

Value of creative approach towards business has subject expression.

First. Business, which reflects personal approach of leaders, brings greater satisfaction in work, which accordingly raises its chances of survival and greater feedback of investments.

Second. You can be more confident in employees. Creative atmosphere brings people together, forms a team and they would be hardly enticed with some material temptations.

Third. It is impossible to copy such business, because it is impossible to copy the main value – individuality and creativeness.

Fourth. The structure of business management becomes very flexible, reacting sensitively to the markets “breath”.

Fifth. Competitors, thinking academically, can’t predict your plans for development, hence, they cannot develop counter strategy for counteractions and restraint.

Consulting Russian, European and North American companies, and accordingly, having the opportunity to compare, I can say that creativeness is more noticeable in foreign business. Having that it is a realized approach for foreign companies, but for Russian it is more like episodic splashes mainly in spheres of branding or advertisement, moreover compensating absence of experience and knowledge.

Is it possible to reconstruct existing business or the new creative approach can be realized only “starting from zero”? Of course, it is less difficult to “start from zero”. But, as my work experience with one of the largest Russian industrial-trading companies shows – with an owner’s desire, his active participation and persistence, support of teams’ kernel, during one and a half year we managed to successfully realize the project of radical reconstruction of organizational, “soft” component of business from traditional type to personal-project-creative.

Readers' Comments

Hello Konstantin Yurievich.

If your first article was more informative, then the second, Yours, – a PHILOSOPHY OF BUSINESS, moreover, it was accurate especially for Russian variant. Very short and very precise. Like a shot J It is simply a MASTERPIECE. If you want – postulate, in any case, it is actual for Russia-motherland where there are no traditions of managing business on a large scale, and hungry market gobbles pretty much everything, as a result an illusion is created of simplicity of management. As a consequence – bad orientation of companies on market and obviously with clients, thus for competition “battle” (in my opinion 8 out of 10 times) managers are leaving to work for their company’s competitor along with price battles, and that I think is an agony for business, attempt to solve radical questions and problems with auxiliary tools. And that is a clear ending, like Divine Day. It is much more complex to inhale philosophy of business, infect the entire company because that thing is infectious, it spreads on market, if you want to on clients. It is hardly stoppable. Hard from one side and very easy from another, if business is not your work, not money, but it is your life and you take care of it and love it like a child (sometimes grown up child but nevertheless).

Those are my thoughts. My article came out longer :))) this topic is infinite…

With respect, A.Chalkov
Majority shareholder and General Director of GC “AgroIntel”
Zavodoukovsk, April 27^th 2007