Last week, we celebrated the birth of Martin Luther King, Jr. MLK was a brilliant man with an amazing talent for delivering the spoken and written word. As I pondered several quotes from MLK, there was one that struck me as having a strong relevance within the business world.

“We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”

Now don’t get me wrong. The words of MLK go much deeper than business relationships. Still, I can’t help but think that the teachings of MLK can offer us some helpful insights into how we manage our businesses. Effective S&OP requires individuals from varied backgrounds, functional responsibilities and positions within the organization work together for the benefit of the overall organization.

All too often, companies struggle with functional silos, poor communication and a misalignment of effort.  If you are a leader in your organization, collaboration and consensus building should be your goal. Be engaged in the S&OP process and encourage all participants to contribute their insights. A dictatorship is not S&OP. Likewise, a free-for-all democracy where each participant has an equal vote is not S&OP either. An effective process leverages bottom-up inputs from distributed resources as well as top-down market and business insights from company leaders.

MLK on leadership:
“A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.”

As Tiger Woods slowly recedes from visibility in today’s fast paced, polyphonic, multi-media environment, I am driven to identify some sort of meaning in it all.   And, in a world in which bits, bytes and terabytes of data stream before us daily this is no easy task.  Living in an age when global conflict shares a table with global social networking, creating personal connections has become the Holy Grail.  On occasion connections do occur.  When this happens the information that fog my life temporarily lifts.  So, ending a long day immersed in Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP),  I ponder — do S&OP, Tiger Woods and Elephants share something in common?

At its best, a highly collaborative, data-driven Sales and Operations Planning process creates visibility.  The consequences of bad choice become clear.  And, elephants sitting in the room – or perhaps obsolescent inventory lying in a warehouse – cannot be avoided.  In good S&OP scenarios are created, alternatives examined, and the path forward is understood.  Often, the process of S&OP itself surfaces important issues that might otherwise have been missed.  Were there early indications of bad choice in Tiger Wood’s behavior?  Was his life story of discipline and perfection to good to be true?  Was there an elephant in the room all along that we were all ignoring?

We all love a hero.  And of course, we seek to avoid unpleasant experience.  While the world worshipped Tiger, Tiger was spending his energy struggling to contain a boiling maelstrom of problems. There indeed was an elephant in Tiger’s room and neither he nor the rest of the world was willing to confront this painful fact until the elephant crashed through the house.  The good news is that life will go on for the rest of us and Tiger will survive the storm.…