The Glass Building Syndrome — The Market is not where you think

You get your fancy degrees from a posh University and are taught the virtues of working in a slick multinational. A corner office becomes your ultimate goal with a blonde secretary guarding your door like a pit bull. You had professors coming in and teaching you the great achievements of the Global Leaders introducing one product after another, strategizing to ensure that the competition is subdued and suddenly you are warped into the imaginary beings of the Celebrity CEO of a Blue Chip Organization.

In your dream you’re now acquiring smaller companies, eating up competition and running full speed on the treadmill of innovation. The competition is terrified of you and the global media is dying to steal a few minutes of your precious time. You get to your interviews and get a nifty job at the downtown office of a large conglomerate; you are numb with pleasure and also the anaesthesia has started to take effect. You feel secured and start climbing the corporate ladder through a combination of hard work, initiatives, innovation, walking over people’s shoulders, using knives to wade through jealous colleagues etc.

We get too busy looking at internal survival and success that we tend to ignore the world outside. In this melee of virtual jingoism, we really get aloof from the realities of the world and how the actual market operates.

I was a victim of the same phenomenon once upon a time until the shock of getting laid off hit me straight on my face; it was all gone at once. From a high flying VP of a Blue Chip company to a person whose phone calls went unanswered to people who would earlier sit in anticipation of his calls. But then I learned something unbelievable, I learned that the real world operates completely contrary to the PowerPoint presentations and market research data. I had a good fortune of being involved in a trading business right after losing my position and the following points dawned down upon me:

1. The real world operates in a totally different way as compared to the glossy offices of multinationals.
2. The real economy and the business resides out there in the market. The real buying and selling also happen in the souk, it’s not the PowerPoint but the power joint that is at play.
3. The end-user for your product is not YOURcustomer, when we sit in the glass building we only sought out the wholesaler or the distributor. The end-user is at 2 to 3 levels down the food chain.
4. The marketing money we spend is based on a market survey of consumer behaviour also carried out by another set of people sitting in another glass building aloof from reality.
5. At times our customers are hardly high school graduates with hundreds of millions of $ of turnover knowing exactly how the market mechanics works. They are street smart utilizing every trick in the bag to ensure that they squeeze the price as well as use the marketing dollars to subsidize the goods. At least 30–40% of marketing money is always used for price subsidy through creative accounting.
6. Meetings with the customers especially for the top management of these multinationals happen either in the funky boardrooms of the company, in 5-star gilded hotels or at times at customer premises. The executives with their Armani suits or even Levis jeans seldom venture into the smelly alleys where the product is actually traded and sold. Cooked and fudged figures often in connivance with the company executives are presented to make the trader look good at the head office.
7. These traders are the lifeline of the market, they can smell the money from its core and like a bloodhound get to the desired target of profitable deals.
8. While the Prince with the glass building syndrome plays golf on the weekend, the trader gets busy finding new ventures and ways of making money. The trader never sleeps and makes sure that he regularly provides the hashish of greatness through flattery to the patient.
9. The executive gets a promotion every few years based on the business he has been able to do at the back of this trader; he is obliged for life and sees the trader as his survivor. The trader ensures that this person is not able to see through the ground realities.
10. The sweating, grind and shove mentality is required to win the marketplace. Unless one leaves the glass building and ventures into the alleys, he’s never going to understand or make it to reality.

This article is not meant to belittle the executive or the trader but rather to bring into account the reality of conducting business in the real world. Managers have to go to the market themselves and ensure that their teams are bringing actual data from the market and not just some numbers from the tier 1 customers. Unless this mentality gets embedded, there would always be the glass building syndrome.

The author can be contacted at: masomo@eim.ae

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.