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The law of entropy
I was mystified with the word entropy. The dictionary says it is a measure of the disorder that exists in a system. And the law has something to do with thermodynamics. With a lot of scratching my head, my understanding of the law to me, means, what does not grow, decays. In Newtonian words, what doesn't go up, comes down.
What has the law to do with business? Lots! A business is organic, it grows and if not nurtured can decay and die. Therefore to sustain growth, we need 'energy' in the form of money, brains and brawn. How efficiently we use this energy to maintain and grow the business is what the law is about. If we do not put enough energy in, the law says, we will see dissipation, disorder and decay. Sim pie and makes sense,
doesn't it. And it is scary.
As you walk down the corridor of your office, do you see a carelessly tossed piece of paper on the floor? If you don't pick up this piece of rubbish, there will two tomorrow. This is the law at work. Decay has set in. And this decay is just not physical it can be mental. Put your guard down, decay will set in. This is the law. What does this mean for your business?
Everything we do needs energy. We do not realize this, as it seems so obvious and superfluous. Within any business we have processes for instance, order to cash, purchase to pay, accounts to reports. Each of these processes have a flow input, process, output. We need energy to process the input to the output. Therefore, the process will determine the kind of
energy we need to convert the input into output.
The more sophisticated and complex the process, the more 'energy' we will need people, equipment etc. and the inherent risk of the law of entropy you will need constant energy to maintain the system otherwise it will decay. This means we need to ensure our processes are as simple as possible and that they need as little 'erergy' as possible to maintain.
For further clarity, let us look at the order to cash cycle. Our salesman collects the order, sends it to our office. We process the order by picking the basket of goods and completing the paperwork. This is dispatched to the customer who pays the bill. The cash is received, put in the bank, and the accounting paperwork is
stamped and stacked away.
How is this done? There are large turnover companies even today who go through this process in a simple way without sophisticated equipment it's the same old paper forms and registers. At the other end of the spectrum, we have companies touting the latest technology IT enabled, tight controls etc.
Both do the same job but with different level of sophistication, response time and 'energy' consumption. For the latter, you need to be on your toes 24 x 7, to fire fight anything that may impede the system. One would need a lot of 'brain' energy too to maintain the system. As such, based on the Law of Entropy, any slack in 'energy' levels will be detrimental to business!
I have only talked about
maintenance - what about business growth? As you can see, we will need a lot more energy infusion to grow our business. This energy will be in the form of investments - in people, production, equipment, materials. We need to remember that growth is essential for sustainability of our business otherwise decay will set in. As such, businesses will need to focus on growth as an overarching priority.
We are quite familiar with our financial statements -income statement, balance sheet, cash flow. These arc in fact the quantified translation of our available 'energy '. You can even shop around and make available the 'energy' you want. However our financial statements do not show the aspect of human energy -in terms of knowledge, experi-
ence and wisdom in running the business. Do we have the human energy to grow our business? 1 can assure you from the experience I have, it takes enormous efforts to build up your human capacities to a point where you will feel comfortable in running your business.
And how does the law impact you, personally? Are you nourishing your brain everyday with fresh knowledge? Are you using your creativity? Or are you whittling away your knowledge and skills learnt in the yesteryears? Be careful - the law of entropy will catch up fast and drown you in senility if you do not spend energy' to constantly renew yourself.
Sarwar Ahmed, managing director of Syngenta Bangladesh Ltd