தானிய கிடங்கு தந்த பாடம்

டக் பர்கம்(Doug Burgum)மின் கன்வர்ஜென்ஸ் நிகழ்ச்சியின் பேச்சு என்னை மிகவும் நெகிழ்வடையச் செய்தது. அவர் தனது தந்தை மற்றும் மூதாதையரின் தானிய கிடங்கு (Grain elevator) வணிகத்திலிருந்து கற்றுக் கொண்ட தொழில் ரகசியத்தை இந்த பேச்சில் குறிப்பிட்ட விதம் மற்றும் இடம் ( listen to the talk starting from 38 minutes till 50 minutes at least , if you can't listen to the whole talk) , மிக அருமை. பரஸ்பர நம்பிக்கை மற்றும் நேர்மை தான் தொழிலின் வெற்றியின் அடித்தளம் என்று தனது சொந்த வாழ்க்கையில் நடந்த நிகழ்ச்சிகளை மேற்கோளிட்டு உணர்ச்சிபூர்வமாகா பேசி , பின் உணர்ச்சி பிரவாகத்தை கட்டுப் படுத்தி கருத்தை வலியுருத்தி பேச்சை முடித்தது அருமையாக இருந்தது.

Some excerpts here.For full Speech Transcript http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/burgum/03-28convergence2006.mspx


So, my great-grandfather got involved in starting the grain elevator. The grain elevator business that buys the crops from farmers, that aggregates those crops, and then works on arranging transportation, and sending them off to some other market. You know, pretty basic little add value, being in the middle type things, very, very super low margins in the grain elevator business. At the grain elevator, this is where your neighbors come to bring their crops. This is where people's income depends on the price you pay for their crops.It was a relationship where I'm sure there could have been someone might have said, hey, they really don't have a choice, because it's too difficult for them, and too costly for them to haul their grain 15 or 20 miles away to another town. Certainly in the early days, when people were hauling grain by horse, and before there was even road infrastructure or trucks, this was the case.

And when people harvest their grain, it's not pristine. If there's weeds in the field, and this is back, again, if I'm that age, this is probably in the early '60s. The ability to have a super clean field isn't the way it is there today with all the advances in seed technology, and technology in farming, etcetera. You've got a truck that's got grain, and it's got stuff that's not grain, call it chaff. Separate the wheat from the chaff. And within that mix, when the grain is coming out into the pit, someone from the elevator comes out, because you're weighing the truck full of grain, and you're going to weigh the truck empty. The farmer, the customer, is going to get paid for what's in that truck. When the grain comes out, you have an opportunity to stand in the back with a little silver, almost like a gold panning type pan, and you get a chance to pull some grain out of this truck. And then you take that grain, and from that sample you go into a little small separating machine, and that becomes analogous, or a metaphor, or a measurement that says, this is what percent of that truck is grain, and this is what percent of that truck is chaff. And the chaff you don't get paid for, it's dockage. So, if you take a sample that's 5 percent chaff, the farmer gets paid 5 percent less. If you take a sample that's 1 percent, they get paid 1 percent less. Everybody understands there's going to be some dockage.

I'm standing there with my dad as a little kid, he's got the pan. You know what he's teaching me? He's teaching me how to take the cleanest possible sample.I didn't get that out very well. He taught me how to take the cleanest possible sample.That was about how to make sure, even if that truck had 5 percent chaff, you'd only come up with 2, and why was that? Part of that was, I think, this deep understanding about the trust relationship. The other part is, my dad, my uncle, my aunt, were smart business people. The understood that if they and part of being smart is thinking about the long-term, not the short-term. There was a phrase that I later, and it wasn't very articulate, but it sort of came to me after my dad passed way that what he was teaching me, because these farm, all your customers, get passed from one generation to the next generation, the next generation, and this relationship between us and the grain elevator, and the farmers that we support.


And so, if I was going to shorten this story up by about 15 minutes, I could just say something like, you screw grandpa, and his grandson will never bring you his grain 50 years later, because families (applause) because families remember that. Families pass on that kind of learning. Here is who you buy from,here is who you don't buy from, here is who you can trust. And so I think about that trust example, and how important trust is in terms of that relationship between those two between the customer and the partner, and it's such an important thing.