Now l like to explain you G0AL21 in detail.
Below you find my understanding of each letter with some thinking and memories of mine.
As a member of the Ülker family, I can say that GOYA has always been a part of our life. In 1968, my father took me to a european roundtrip, where we did not visit only famous city capitals, but also factories for packaging machinery and watches. Ever since then, no matter where I go, even for vacation, I always GOYA. I visit grocery stores, take a closer look to shelf order (planogram), observe consumers’ instore purchase process and check competition and so forth. In 2015, I doubled the time spent in GOYA. It equals to %12 of my day time. Of course when you GOYA, you witness interesting moments on the way… Once I remember myself visiting a grocery shop nearby office in Istanbul, dressed as bussinessman with jacket and tie, I was asked curiously who I was and what I was looking for. I replied asking “Are you happy with Ülker products and services?”. The answer was shocking; “Tell the top guy, he must step down from his office on the hill, come to market and GOYA.” He was somehow happy, but wanted to know that we care for him. I told him that I definitely will tell the boss personally.😎
“0 Defect” Perfection. I may not achieve it, but I strive for it, and that’s what makes a big difference. I remember my father being the perfect student always with top scores and my first boss, my cousin a perfectionist. They both explained to me, because of the conditions they were in back then, they had no choice but to do it right the first time and every time. That’s how I grew up, but now we have the luxury of making mistakes and learning from our mistakes. We usually tend to remember and place importance on success stories however the valuable ones are actually the mistakes that teach us our way through. In other words, 0 defect sounds ambitious, but we need to strive for it. We need to get out of our comfort zone and try new things, and if it doesn’t work out, we should learn from the experience and do it better next time. That is how we learn and grow. That is how we will excel. As it is simply said; “Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.”
A is for “Alignment”. What does it mean for me? I will explain with an African proverb. It says “if you want to go fast, you should go alone. If you want to go far, you should go together”. Simply said, to achieve our goals, we need to work together as teams in a collaborative way that brings out the best talent and contribution from each person. We need to leverage the power of “diversity” in backgrounds, experience, and expertise from the people around us. Accomplishing this was not easy for me. I am by nature a do-it-yourself, action-oriented person. and what I had been doing was trying to make others think and act like me. While climbing the ranks in the organization I realized this was not what I want to achieve.. After all, why would I want 50,000 clones of myself!?
So, this is why we highlight “alignment” as an important part of Goal21, and the power of diversity. It starts with respecting the differences in all our people, and trying to find a way to benefit from that rich diversity. It’s important to empathize with each other to find the unique skills and thinking of each person. When we do that, then we can understand them better and help bring out their special talents and expertise. I realized this when I decided to build teams and find executives to work with. I should make sure they are better than me in doing their specific job. That way I can be confident they can bring new ideas and ways of working that will make us collectively better as a company. Now I give my teams freedom to execute and I am checking results only.
So with this approach, I have a family of 50,000 people with different ideas and approaches. And we will travel together far and achieve our G0AL21.
L for “Leader”…”You need to be number 1, or at least number 2, because nobody remembers numbers 3!” That is what my father told me when we decided to buy a basketball club in the Turkish League. That was in 1993, when I was already working as a top executive in our Ülker business. Why did it take so long to realize importance of being leader in the market? The answer is I was born into a market where we as Ülker business were the indisputable leader. So after years I was faced with the challenge of trying to win a basketball championship which brought to life the definition of leader for me. Truth be told, I had no idea how to run a sports club. But, I knew what the goal was (be the champion or at least runner up) and I realized I would need to learn very quickly. So, I decided I needed to create the right system and environment for success. I hired a strong talent as a coach, and subsequently merged our basketball team with the Fenerbahce team. We ended up winning the championship…twice! And of course, no one remembers the seasons we finished third!
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