Compartmentalization

How much do you separate Marketing from Teaching?

Two totally different things right?

Wrong.

You are doing what Carlos Ghosn found in Nissan…

"Fourth was the incredible compartmentalization of the company. … When you're in a company that doesn't work cross-functionally, everyone feels satisfied with his own performance, and assumes that bad results are someone else's fault. … Everyone can tell himself that the company wouldn't be in this fix if the other departments only did a better job."

Although it is not quite the same thing, I hear this when I am coaching individuals:

"I can teach, I am just not good at marketing."

I often wonder how people can know they are not good at marketing, when they clearly have no idea what marketing is? It is not one thing, it is mult-faceted.

This is how "compartmentalization" works. Separating out different functions, and not understanding how they cross-functionally integrate with each other to make a whole.

A short BodyChance story on that…

By 2003, I was getting into serious trouble. The students who started with me in 1999 were starting to qualify, and new students were not replacing them. Through compartmental-thinking, I was still roughly following STAT'S rigid plan of training. (Finally got over that one.)

However, in an atmosphere of crisis, I decided to change the structure of my school. I instituted a flexible learning system: the Kenkyusei system it was called.

It worked like this:

You paid ¥100,000 in advance. Then you could attend any classes you wished. Each time you attended, we deducted the cost of the class. When you got down to ¥25,000, we reminded you to top up again.

It was wildly popular. It saved my school.

It was also my epiphany: I realized the cross-functionality of learning and marketing. People can love what you do, and hate your product (time, cost, duration, location etc).

For example, the rigidity and inflexibility of the STAT-affiliated teacher training guidelines do not serve students. People can learn in lots of different ways, and FM changed his methods along the way.

STAT's training rigidity drives students away. How does that help their learning?

What Carlos saw was holding back Nissan, is also holding back our own profession.

How a person learns is functionally dependant on many factors. When you compartmentalize, you dumbify your own perceptions of how to help your students.

Better than that, take a leaf out of Nissan's Revival playbook and practise cross-functionality in your thinking…

Expect to flourish.

P.S. This ends my series on the Nissan Revival Plan, and how that applies to small scale practitioners. If you enjoy reading how to improve your practise, make sure you sign up for my free 12 Step seminar - join at this link.

Picture credit: Pixabay