By Apra Sharma
The world is changing and consumers are becoming more powerful each passing day. They have the ability to throw a business in garbage or to sky rocket another.
Chobani founder Hamdi Ulukaya advocates a new way of doing business, unlike traditional breakdown of spreadsheet analysis or corporates hunting for profit or businesses trying to find a way to earn more money or as the CEO playbook says ‘shareholders’, the Anti – CEO Playbook, is as per him what we need today and in future.
As per CEO playbook communities, factories and jobs can be sacrificed but not the CEO. Their pay only goes up. “It’s time to admit that the playbook that guided businesses & CEOs for 40 years is broken”, says Hamdi.
There are people in movies who take a different path to do right things called anti – heroes, Anti – CEO playbook is what business need to do right and be right.
Hamdi was in need of a factory space for his yogurt business. In the upstate New York, he found a plant worthless being sold for minimum price, the people who were working there silently and gracefully surrendering their jobs and the CEO sitting in a tower on some goddamn floor with spreadsheets in his hand and making decisions purely in pursuit of profit.
Hamdi, by August 2005 had the keys of the factory and he decided to hire 4 of the 55 people working there before. Gradually, over the years, he hired all 55 back and they together created a business much better than they were employed for before and each had a financial stake in it too. He believed that as the number of his hires will grow from initial 55 to 100 more to 1000 more and another 1000 and so on, for every 1 job created in his factory, there were 10 new jobs in local businesses. In one year, he build a baseball field for children and 5 years later, they became the number one Greek yogurt brand in the country.
Today 30 percent of Chobani workforce are immigrants and refugees. In Idaho, their world’s largest yogurt plant, they were told by locals that they would find no trained workers there. Hamdi still built a factory space, partnered with local community college and trained people in advanced manufacturing.
He says, “Today’s playbook tells you all about business except how to be a noble leader. We need a new playbook. One that see people above and beyond profits.”
Anti – CEO playbook is about gratitude, asking communities ‘how can I help you?’, responsibility and accountability.
“Business exists to maximise profits for shareholders”, says today’s business books. Instead its time we take a reality check, businesses should take care of their employees first.
New way of business should be to search for communities you can be a part of and ask for their permission.
Businesses as citizens must pick a side because its them and not government in a position to change today’s world.
In businesses, CEO should report to consumers instead of corporate boards because that’s the reason they exist.
This new playbook would clearly highlight the difference between profit and true wealth. Anti CEO playbook is about “If you are right with your people, if you’re right with your community, if you’re right with your product, you’ll be more profitable, innovative and you would have more passionate people working for you with a community that supports you!”