Skip to main content
book excerpt

This edited article is by Dr. Saad Al Barrak, the author of A Passion for Adventure: Turning Zain into a Telecom Giant Copyright © 2012 (published by Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing). For more, please visit www.saadalbarrak.com

There is a continuum in management between "hard" and "soft." The "hard" is the management that makes plans, sets up structures and monitors performance. The "soft" is the people-friendly management based on emotions. The classic, modern dichotomy was shown by the switch of John Sculley in 1983 from the "hard," corporate world of Pepsi to Apple, which was based on "soft" management, and then, as Apple developed and investment bankers became involved and the company grew bigger, friendship went out of the window, management became tough and aggressive, and everything was about the bottom line.

The "hard" side is based on consistency, and in human resources this often works through demographics, by assessing credentials. Appointing senior managers is the most important aspect of being a CEO, and I have made many appointments that were considered unusual. I would say these "instinctive" appointments worked six or seven times out of 10. When they didn't work, I admitted it and removed the people. The net outcome, though, was leaders who would not otherwise have been brought on board.

In practice today, the majority of managers, perhaps 90 per cent, still focus too much on the task side, a hangover from the industrial age.

My own approach has been based on curiosity. My aim was never to reduce differences, but, rather, to celebrate them. In managing human beings, you manage emotions and passions. Indeed, optimize their passionate state in order that they deliver their best. That is totally non-linear: the mistake that 90 per cent of managers and business leaders make is that they try and linearize the behavioural side by proceduralizing it.

In purely percentage terms, management in recent years has shifted from being overwhelmingly oriented toward task structure to being divided perhaps 50:50 between task structure and consideration. For me, task structure is 20 per cent or less. The consideration part is 80 to 85 per cent, and at Zain I spent far more of my energy on the consideration side, which often surprised people.

When I first arrived at [Zain predecessor Mobile Telecommunications Co., a small wireless company in Kuwait], many joked that I was running a social club. Something similar happened even as Zain took off, because people often thought I was wasting my time: "Why does al Barrak spend 80 per cent of his day talking to people about general issues and 20 per cent on planning and strategy and so on?" The answer is that the best of plans and strategies are the ones extracted from the hearts and minds of your people, or inculcated in the hearts and minds of your people.

An overemphasis on the "hard" side, the linear part, can at best achieve a linear increase in performance. But a focus on the soft, non-linear side can lead to an exponential improvement in performance. Zain's rise through seven years, from 2003 until 2010, was non-linear, and this could never have been achieved by following the precepts of conventional, linear, task-oriented management.

No company can work without a "hard" side, without structures and plans. When we acquired several mobile licences in our early growth years, or were deciding to outsource our supply chain, there were many plans and structure.

There is always a tension in business between being transactional and being transformational. Transactional leaders make the organization more successful in getting things done, whereas transformational leaders take the organization from one stage to a completely new one.

Some leaders are very transformational, revolutionary and creative. Other leaders are transactional: they are good at putting processes, systems and mind-sets in place. But the real challenge is being able to do both at the same time. The constant is the vision, as delineated in a strategy. Once you change your vision, you change your identity and become a new creature. Strategy is the execution of the vision, so even the strategy is temporary.

My philosophy is not based just on tolerating ambiguity and paradox, but sometimes on proactively creating them. Of course I took many decisions on instinct. But the management systems within Zain went all the way from the budget to setting specific objectives down to teams of three or four. The balance was unusual – perhaps 60 per cent on culture and 40 per cent on quantified "business" targets.

Optimal control is no control. If staff align their mission in life with the mission of the organization, and go about their life appreciating the complexities around this mission, that's the highest level of discipline. They wake up and think: "How am I going to conquer the world today?"

From the press to consultants, Zain developed an extensive communications operation, at corporate level and in individual countries. When we made the big move to outsource in Saudi Arabia, you could hear the sound of plans being torn up – music to my ears – for in a fast-changing world, continuums are always moving.

Companies which mistakenly try to make themselves more professional by taking everything linear simply decide they want best practice. They look for best practice in the world and they try to copy it.

I say that best practice equals beast practice, because that's what beasts do: They just copy each other. So that's best practice in the corporate world? What makes you win is uniqueness, not standardization. For me this establishes a dynamic relationship between business transformation and turbulence. It is turbulence, and not stability, that is the steady state in business. Maturity is a journey, not a destination. A mature business is a stagnant, dying business.

Reality, especially in today's world, is dynamic: Even if the structure suits the time it is created, by the time it has been put into practice, that reality has already shifted.

This reflected the approach we adopted at Zain. We changed our architecture all the time, made decisions "on the fly," and from the outset wanted to be superflexible – "chaos by design." I wanted a company that could make a sudden left or right turn without breaking its back.

Dr. Saad al Barrack is the former chief executive officer of Zain, an international wireless communications company with more than 70 million customers in the Middle East and Africa.

Report an editorial error

Report a technical issue

Editorial code of conduct

Tickers mentioned in this story

Study and track financial data on any traded entity: click to open the full quote page. Data updated as of 28/03/24 4:15pm EDT.

SymbolName% changeLast
AAPL-Q
Apple Inc
-1.06%171.48

Interact with The Globe