The Clifton Review 

The Clifton Review is a tri-weekly column that examines the question of the Clifton project along with the evolution of the war between two billionaires. We covered the start of this war with articles describing the battle over easement rights, the mysterious burning of a home, the blocks to rebuilding, and countless questionable court filings.

While the 2018 series salutes fashion mogul Peter Nygård’s Golden Jubilee detailing his rags to riches story, his incredible business success over these past fifty years and an inside look at how he did it, The Clifton Review will also continue to address current affairs as they relate to the good of The Bahamas.

How An Unexpected Situation Helped Business

By P.J. Malone

When working towards business goals, an executive should always be thinking along the lines of answering the question ‘how best can we support the achievement of our goals?’ 

This is especially important when it comes to human resources. Why? Because, as you know, employees can make or break your business and negatively impact sales in ways that may not always be conspicuous. As we’ve said before, it’s essential to continuously review their impact.

If you think and work from the perspective of always seeking to support business goals, even unexpected situations can present solutions that can help your business. Let me illustrate:

There were two employees working for a sales department of an organization who had been fired for not being very good at sales. These young ladies didn’t just walk away. They requested to spend two weeks volunteering in the marketing department.

The marketing director’s first reaction was that she didn’t want two employees who were fired for being incompetent volunteering in her department. However, since it’s rare to get anyone volunteering to work for free, and she did have some tasks that could use some assistance, she decided to allow them to volunteer under supervision.

They were assigned two major tasks to work on together: one involved looking into specific guests’ complaints and finding ways to address them; the other involved compiling data for review. 

At the end of their two weeks, they had a meeting with the marketing director. The director was amazed at what they had accomplished: They had written a report on the guest complaints and how they had resolved them, which even resulted in some of these guests purchasing more activities. 

With respect to the data compilation, they had created an excel spreadsheet that showed all of the data with additional reporting information that wasn’t requested.

The first thing the director wanted to know was who did what. What she discovered was that one individual was responsible for the guest relations aspect, and the other was responsible for the compiling of the data and creating the reports. Not surprisingly, the roles appeared suited to each of them based on their personalities of being extroverted and introverted, respectively.

The director immediately saw the value of both of these individuals. When she considered her business goals, one of which was to increase guest activity sales, and considered how that type of ongoing data compilation allowed her to have essential information for achieving all of their business goals, she knew she needed them both. 

But unfortunately, she had no space in her budget to hire these young ladies. However, she felt they were so essential to have that she looked for items in her budget that she could cut to be able to fit both young ladies in. They were then hired. 

These young ladies continued to perform at a high level and contributed to the achievement of the business goals.

In answering the question, ‘what changes do we need, if any, with our human resources?’, executives have to also recognize the opportunities that may present themselves that can help them achieve their business goals.

As we previously noted, one of the factors that contributes to fashion mogul Peter Nygard’s success is his ability to spot talent and promote individuals based on their ability. 

One of Nygard’s business goals is to be the best in his industry. His ability to identify talent and how best to use them is based on his constant mindset and thinking of ‘how best can we support the achievement of our goals?’

Next time, we’ll discuss one of the keys to stimulate high level performance for achieving business goals and what made these young ladies excel in a new department after getting fired from another.