In the Operations business, the other shoe drops every day. Those who have been around the Operations block a few times learn (or should learn) to expect the unexpected: Shipment is rejected for quality and delivery is tomorrow, factory is late for a variety of possible reasons or excuses, customer wants to add on to or subtract from their order with ridiculously short notice, lab rejects fabric for miniscule amount over tolerance, etc. The questions for Operations Management are: 1. How do you minimize the occurrence of problems that become obstacles to fulfilling the order on time, with quality, delighting your customer? (and making some money in the process) 2. How do you react when they do happen?
The answer to both questions is found in this publication: a set of principles and practices—a playbook—that guides your approach to the business of Operations, produces the best possible result as much of the time as possible and gives you a comfort level to solve problems when they inevitably occur—The Way of the Unicorn. As the title says, as an Operations Manager, VP, etc. your job is to Get It Done. After it is sold, put up for sale, or designed, the rest of the company depends on you to finish the job. Like a baseball player or golfer, when it is just you and the ball, and it is the bottom of the ninth inning or the eighteenth hole, you have to find the resources within and without to produce an excellent result (which in the Way of the Unicorn is Customer Delight); some of it comes from the Zen within and the rest comes from muscle memory. If you are wrapped up and plugged in too tight, you will not be effective when that moment comes. The effectiveness comes from a combination of 1. Finding the calmness and focus within and 2. Leaving the rest to muscle memory. (The brain is a muscle, right?) As novelist Stephen King said, “The brain is a muscle that can move the world”. IF you are wrapped up too tight and playing fire chief, you will not think about how to approach improving the functionality of your department and finding the Efficient Frontier, but spend your time fighting for control of daily fires. But IF your daily work is guided by the principles and practices laid out in this publication, you will remain unplugged and calm because you trust your ability to build a super organization and to have a winning reaction to shit happening, maybe every day, due to what you learned becoming an Operations Unicorn. Get It Done is YOUR playbook.
Michael Serwetz is a global marketing and retail veteran with a career spanning more than five decades and over 30 countries. He has held leadership roles at iconic organizations including Federated Department Stores, Levi Strauss (where he became the youngest-ever General Merchandise Manager of Womenswear) and Joe Boxer, where he helped grow the brand from $15 million to over $70 million. He spent a decade living and working in Hong Kong and Shanghai, running his own wholly-owned foreign enterprise and building a profitable international sourcing business. Now based in Trenton, NJ, Michael channels that breadth of experience into teaching, consulting, and entrepreneurship, serving as an adjunct professor at NYU and FIT, co-founding the lifestyle brand Lotus & Michael, and authoring both marketing playbooks and two memoirs on global business and culture.