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This is how the Clan functions“The members of the Masai Clan which is alleged (James George Frazer: The Golden Twig, The Secret of Popular Beliefs and Customs, Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2000) Welcome to the Clan: Now I’ve got you where I want you: right in the middle. You’ve taken a first step (thank you). You have opened the large gate and discovered the entrance hall behind. There you have read about the rough and ready customs of the Scottish clans and the single-minded gentleness of a Swiss clan chief. And now you have opened the first door. At this point, I must just warn you: in one of the rooms you are now entering, you will find a brief “digression about sex in the clan”. At least all those of you who have seen Jean Gabin in the grandiose French Mafia film “Le Can des Siciliens” will know what an immensely dangerous subject this is. Of course, I know that you have not come here for this reason. Sensationalism is not your thing. Nor is filth. The headline “The Kennedy clan: Sex, Drugs, Pickled Cucumbers” would never move you to buy a glossy magazine. Even Kitty Kelley’s juicily incorrect kiss-and-tell book about the Bush clan (“Sex, Drugs and Brutal Politics”) has also been given a wide berth. You are ultimately a serious person because you are reading books like this one. Despite all this: I cannot spare you (and myself) the subject. Those who want to know how the clan functions and grows and prospers need to know the rules. And the limits. Those who want to talk about values and feelings in the clan will recall with horror those Christmases when the attorney kept edging closing to us after a few glasses of champagne and orange juice... now that’s enough of that, more later: on page 105 I advise you why you should see the film about the “Sicilian Clan” at all costs. Firstly, I want to illustrate the matter with a small vignette. In 1668, as a nine-year old, Tsunemoto was appointed to the service of the second Prince of the Nabeshima clan. In old age he then arranged the teachings of this Samurai clan for that set of rules which is now known as Hagakure. This little book is recommended for those whose appreciate timeless wisdom: “A follower of the Nabeshima clan does not need excessive vital force nor particular talent. He must merely be prepared to bear the whole clan on his shoulders. No man is inferior to another from birth. No exercise can bear fruit before a man is not ready to see himself as the only one in the clan who can preserve the peace in the province of the Prince.” Despite the fact that today we naturally would not think and formulate this in such a gender-specific way, the Hagakure provides plenty of stimulus for our purposes: “Be friendly to visitors even when you are busy”, it states there quite simply. Or: “speak works of encouragement.” Or “Always maintaining your integrity increases your loneliness.”” Each clan is sworn to its own code. Mine: “Have no fear” is one of the most important rules in the Heller clan. “Turnover at any price is not a goal for us” is another. “Young people are important to us, in the best case the old ones are even more important” is a third. So if you want to know how you can implement the Clan Value in your business, in your family, in your association, then you should now look behind the following doors, or in the following chapters. From my own experience but also drawing on that of other entrepreneurs, I shall tell you how the clan functions in the rooms behind these four doors. If you want to read how to deal with one another free from anxiety, then you are right here, behind the first door. Equally well, you could anticipate: the second door opens a room where the talk is of the power in the clan, the power of women and feelings. Behind the third door you will discover why the common reward is important, what parties and presents, praise and reproach mean in the clan. But I will also show you there how the clan functions to bridge the generations. How the future can grow from the past and what the older ones should do so that the younger ones gain something from it. Those who finally open the fourth door will be confronted with the other side of the coin: because everything in the garden cannot always be rosy, I shall also prepare your for the major and minor crises in the clan. What should you do when group dynamics becomes group coercion? What should you do when envy rears its head? What should you do when the pressure of expectation grows into the intolerable? What should you do to avoid anger and emerge from crises all the stronger? If you prefer to stay here first – all well and good. Then I will reveal to you one of the most important rules of the Heller clan: The Code of Behavior of the Clan: Rushing around, stress, mistrust everywhere you go. Rudeness abounds. Colleagues are played off against one another, subordinates are treated like doormats, superiors bow to their own bosses. The motto is: let the strongest win. A good friend regularly tells me about the in-fighting in their business – sometimes I can hardly believe my ears. A female friend is continually telling me about the methods the lords of creation use to make it impossible for her and those like her to progress in the company today – faced with such tales, I sometimes imagine that I have been transported back in to the dark ages. The fact that such a poisoned working climate prevails on an everyday basis in many businesses is an accepted fact to many people. I am continually astonished how, in some companies of course, creative potential is annihilated by management by fear. The message should have been going around for a long time that this is a costly mistake: anxiety paralyses. Anxiety makes you look stupid. Anxiety costs creativity, costs productivity. Anxiety costs money. No anxiety is much better. This simple tenet applies to all relationships in my clan – naturally including thosewith our clients. We have agreed in the Heller clan that we will treat one another honestly. That we will deal with one another carefully. That we will be polite to one another. That we laugh when we feel like it. That we have no anxiety. We have been living together by this rule for a year and a day. The result: my partner and my colleagues are successful because they know that they can develop free from anxiety. Sometimes, however, we are confronted with people who cannot get to grips with this rule. New clients, for example, who scream at a colleague. Bankers who put a colleague down. Suppliers who treat an assistant badly. First gently and later emphatically if necessary, we attempt to make it clear to these people that we expect to deal with one another differently. That such behavior is not desirable as far as we are concerned. What seems plausible in theory, is
not The theory is: we treat one another well and we want to be treated well by others. Because we know that not everybody can be a Prince Charming, we are immune from being too sensitive. However, since it is also clear to us where our limits lie, we respond when these are exceeded. Those who repeatedly behave badly, those who are permanently rude to our colleagues (and do not know the value of an apology), have no place in the Heller clan. In practice: some time ago, an experienced managerial colleague came into my room, clearly deeply affected, suitably disgusted but above all severely humiliated. She told me that she had been repeatedly pestered by a client; he regaled her with saucy jokes on the telephone, and with suggestive comments during meetings. Besides this he was not maintaining the correct relationship. There were no doubts about the trustworthiness of my colleague – a women of the world, not a sensitive soul. Especially as the client did not seem very reticent to me. I had no choice: I had to set an example and show my clan that I belonged to my team. I asked the client for a meeting in private, confronted him with the reproach and explained our rules to him. And without further ado, I cancelled the collaboration after he trivialized everything and refused to see reason. Result: The Heller clan lost a potentially interested client but gained in solidarity and credibility. Now some will object that some business may well be passed up as a result. That may be correct when viewed in the short term. Experience shows however that consistent behavior quite clearly pays dividends in the longer term: because we don’t waste time on people who do not fit in with us, there is more time for the clan. The fewer casual customers we have, the stronger qualitatively valuable customer relationships develop. The better the customer relationship, the less pointless effort there is: in the clan we know fairly accurately what our opposite expects from us – we can therefore be of service to him with less effort and in a shorter time and to his satisfaction. Customer loyalty is significantly stronger in a company organized as a clan than in other companies. Salesmen have a simple rule that says that about seven times more effort, time and cost must be expended in gaining a new customer than in selling new products to an existing customer. For our company, a well cared-for relationship with a long-standing client is therefore incomparably more profitable than the search for new clients can be. Precisely the same applies to our colleagues: the longer they have been with us, the more valuable they are. Even if there were no other argument, there would still be the economic one: in the long run, it is more cost-effective to treat colleagues well. To treat them with respect. To wait on them hand and foot. Which – to close the circle – leads into the following simple rule: Don’t worry. About anyone. And one more thing: laugh. Don’t forget to laugh. Laura Bush, the wife of the American President recounts: “People are always asking me what life is like with the Bush clan. Now let me put it like this: first prize – three days holiday with the clan. Second prize – ten days.” (Laura Bush at the “White House Correspondents Association Dinner” 30.4.2005) There is plenty of laughter at our home. In the kitchen one way or the other. Mostly, simply during work. In any case, laughing helps. It helps us to express things together which otherwise would not have been expressed. It helps us to understand others. It helps us to create a climate in our clan which is so important to use: we stick together, we have fun, we are respectful, we cooperate, we don’t humiliate anybody, we help to pull each other up. In other words: we have a common living code of behavior in the clan. And we take that seriously. The Family in the Clan: At this point, I owe you, dear readers, a little disclosure. Here, dear readers, you rightly demand a particular measure of openness. Where there has been so much talk of family, you would probably like to know where you are with me. If the author praises the value of the family so profusely, you as the reader, would surely like to see what sort of family experiences she has gathered herself? In order to prepare the ground, I will first explain what family and Clan Value actually have to do with one another. Why Clan Value is not feasible without the elements of the family. How the clan can benefit from the family. And how it can survive crises that threaten the very existence of the family and this is where my personal history comes into play. […] Giving instead of taking The more one reflects upon what selfness could mean in the modern society, the more one becomes aware that selfness in an endangered globalize world means three things: firstly, self-observation and self-reflection. Secondly self-discipline. And thirdly giving instead of taking. Selfness must be used to resolutely increase the binding force of societies and cultures. Also the binding force in the company. Self-fulfillment, therefore, means self-commitment. The self needs an echo chamber, networks. It is nothing without the other. In this respect, selfness means working on and looking after relationships: with clients, business partners and not least with colleagues. Taking one’s life in one’s own hands means transferring it into the hands of others whom one trusts. Then selfness leads to wellness. I can sympathize with this Gross form of selfness: the clan can strengthen all those who have been carving out an unprotected existence in a “Me corporation”. The clan protects and promotes the individual with all the elements which we have designated with the keyword “familyness”. And now we have again put a bullet to the heart of the family. A the historian Reinhardt has shown us, in family matters we tend to believe in destiny. Instead, as the sociologist Gross says, we should share life with those we trust. We must therefore rely on the clan in every respect, as I recommend in this book. Irrespective of whether we work in an anonymous large organization or in a small business. It does not matter whether we work in a factory or an association, for a commercial enterprise or for a non-profit organization. Here and there we can benefit when we integrate the familylike into our surroundings so that a Clan Value results. I know what I am talking about. When my marriage ended after 16 years, even though this was at my instigation, I was faced with the debris of an ended partnership, a broken family. I was faced with a complete mess for which I was jointly to blame and which I must now clear up. At the beginning this was almost existence-threatening and fairly stressful. However, I was not faced with a void by any means, and this is the reason why I am surviving and talking about the failure of my marriage unashamedly. Quite the contrary: my clan flocked around me. My clan strengthened my resolve. My clan showed me the way to deal with this divorce. My clan helped me to deal with this separation, to clear away the piles of debris. Even more: my clan also helped to give my children the fortress of security. My clan was there for me when I needed it the most. The Circles of the Clan: Actually the situation is simple: the clan builds up around the clan chief in the form of concentric circles. He (or just the clan chief or chiefess) stands at the centre. Like the gravitational force of the Sun on the Earth, this centre attracts the clan members of the first circle – that is all those who have a particularly important function in the clan structure. Another circle of employees, colleagues, friends, relatives then forms around this innermost circle. Then a next one and so on. And the best thing is: the circles are as flexible as you want to make them. They are expandable. And if necessary, they can also be narrowed. Sometimes new people grow into the second ring. Or new people join the clan from outside. The hierarchy of the clan is only relevant in the inner circles: there it corresponds to the organization chart of an organization. But all those who belong to the clan in one of the outer circles, whether as friends of the family, as customers, as business partners, as comrades-in-arms, as allies, should not be included in this hierarchy. The clan members from these inner and outer circles are unified and welded together by the joint values of the clan. Values which are not cast irrevocably in stone. Values which have continually been questioned over the years and re-formulated if need be. Values which despite everything provide a clear framework for all the functioning and striving in the Clan. Values which have the makings of the vision. Values which make sense. I can confirm the functioning of these rules with our experience: because we have systematically taken these values so seriously over the years, today we can decide almost at first glance whether someone fits in with us. And precisely because we have taken these values so seriously over the years, our entire clan has developed this heightened perception. Whoever comes along new to us today, whether it be as client, supplier, as business partner, as an employee, will find themselves faced with this world of values. The word has also been spread around. We attract people who fit in with us, with our vision, with our image of humanity, our business. Others only very rarely join us by mistake. So far. So simple. Because this simple circle model is always bounded by its two dimensions, looking at a cross-section, we soon come upon the boundaries of our structure. In order to show that the clan can do far more than hold the satellites of this circular structure in their orbit, I recommend thinking about a somewhat more complex model; Buckyballs. Named after the legendary domed buildings of the American architect and designer Richard Buckminster Fuller (and therefore also called fullerene), Buckyballs with their “corners” and “edges” resemble a football sewn together from leather patches. Buckyballs (Joachim Dettmann: Fullerene – Buckyballs are taking over Chemistry in: http: //de.wikipedia.org/wiki/fullerene) This buckyball structure is also characteristic of the clan: the clan members are three-dimensionally cross-linked to one another in different forms and binding strengths. Thus, potentials and synergies can be optimally utilized on the one hand; on the other hand, however, hierarchies and organizational forms can be built on this true to detail. The hierarchy in the clan is as important as in any other group. No groups can function permanently without a hierarchy. The clan needs a clear decision structure in order to be capable of functioning. It must be equally clearly regulated who has what responsibilities, who takes on which functions, who is responsible for specific tasks. Finally, this hierarchy must be transparent to everyone, that is even in the outer circles, possibly for the clients: everyone in the clan must know at all times with whom he has to do what. The world of values: How does one identify the clan? What characterizes it? What distinguishes it from our businesses? From other organizations? Right. It is its values, its visions, its mission. Without values there is no clan: if there is one rule in this book from which all the others follow, then it is probably this. The values on which the clan is based must be clear from the outset. In this sense a mission should be formulated straight away. Possibly this:
Such a collection of guiding principles forms the basis of any clan like a foundation. Each sentence of this canon of values must be lived day by day. In the Heller clan we see to this, all together and each one for themselves, if necessary with missionary fervour. |
