FILA, the Italian sportswear firm, was not always a giant multinational enterprise. In the mid-1970s it was a fledgling organisation that had pinned its future in tennis apparel on a manufacturing and licensing relationship with our client, Bjorn Borg.
Early in the relationship, the Fila people realised the more of Borg's time they could get for promotional purposes the better their investment. So they came up with a very clever tactic - which internationally became known as ''the Fila trick'' - for gauging Borg's availability.
They would ask the same question, usually concerning what Borg would or would not commit to in terms of time, of a half dozen people in our company.
Since they were dealing with us all over the world, they got quite good at this. They would use what they were told in Australia to their best advantage in Japan; they would use what they were told in Japan to their best advantage in England; and so on in Paris, Stockholm and Milan, until they circled the globe.
We were always amazed at how much the Fila people knew about Borg's schedule until we realised their secret: they had figured out a weakness in our organisation - namely that our various foreign offices didn't always talk in a co-ordinated fashion with one another - and used it against us.
This episode taught us two things. First, our offices needed to communicate more frequently and effectively and second, we learned that every organisation has chinks in its armour - if you can find those flaws, you can cut any organisation down to size, no matter how inscrutable or imposing it may seem to an outsider.
