From the book Management by Proverbs
CASE STUDY
In 1946, Truett Cathy, a young and ambitious entrepreneur, took out a small loan to open a restaurant in Hapeville, Georgia. The Dwarf Grill consisted of a mere ten counter seats and four tables, but the tireless Cathy steadily grew the business by serving up quality food and friendly service twenty-four hours a day, six days a week.
In this modest setting, Cathy experimented with faster ways to prepare chicken and creative ways to season it. By 1963, his persistence paid huge dividends as he developed the winning taste combination that would come to be known as the Chick-fil-A sandwich. Business took off and within a few short years, Cathy was pioneering inmall fast food, peddling his novel sandwich to the rave views of hungry shoppers.
As a devout Christian, Cathy had refused to operate on Sundays ever since he opened the Dwarf Grill. Although the policy occasionally created difficulty securing mall contracts, his recipe was in such demand that the malls simply could not say no. Fifteen years later, Chick-fil-A annual sales would top US$100 milion.
And then came the economic threat that would test Cathy's faith. During the deep recession of 1982, demand for Chick-fil-A sales begins to decline for the first time. To add-on, other competitive chains of fast food restaurants became the direct competitors with Chick-fil-A. Chicken prices were soaring and the company was beset with heavy debt with interest rates hovering around 21 percent for building a five-story office complex. Financial crisis, it seemed was imminent.
Here at the crossroads lay the specter of what had been non-negotiable for decades: opening on the Sabbath. Adding one day of operation - especially a day where mall traffic was so high would add at least 16 percent to current revenues. A policy change might therefore mean a difference between the mall's center court and the government's bankruptcy court.
Profitable solutions ... God's will. Often they intersect, sometimes they do not. And it is in the latter tension that the Christian manager's faith is ultimately tested in the divine crucible. Cathy's dilemma revolved around maintaining a profit while honoring God by doing what he believed was God's will. Both those in senior management and in supervisory roles often must choose whether what they learned in business school must always come first or take second when it clashes with God's guidelines.
In effect, one must weigh the promises of the corporate culture against the promises of Scripture. And it is here that top management must decide whether the organisation's direction will be charted using God's compass of a gauge of their own creation.
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