Slow and Steady Wins the Race? Not So Fast!
- John Lapeyrouse
- Apr 21, 2017
- 3 min read
For centuries, human beings have advanced their endeavors by doing what works. In fact, evolution is the perfect teacher of the principle that the chances of future success are improved by keeping what works and changing what doesn't. Duh! right? Maybe not!
We can wait and measure improvement over time and determine if we made the right choice, but perhaps not the best choice. How can we know how things would have worked out if we had chosen differently? All we can do is make the best choice we can with the information we have and move forward. This is the way business works. The problem is the current increasing rate of change, for everything, has made this practice impractical. Traditional, proven methods of measuring the success of our business decisions has become akin to watching to see if human evolution will shrink our fingers to make smartphone typing easier. Too Late!
We have, over the past 3 decades relied on "big bets" to advance a new product or service, or deliver that competitive advantage to improve our stock price, our market share, or perhaps keep our jobs. If we couldn't solve the problem quickly and show results in the short term we better come up with a way to lengthen the time between the now and that eventual failure. What we really need is an ERP system, yeah, that's the ticket. It may take 3 years to select and implement this new system but this will move us leaps and bounds ahead of our competition. In reality, however, we find ourselves deep in debt and oblivious to marketplace changes because all of our effort and resources were/are implementing this exciting new system. The fact is, technology is rarely the solution to weak business processes. Yet so few businesses bother to fix bad processes and instead hope that the new system will solve them. Then we customize the system to match the way we already do things, forcing the project team to find workarounds for these poor processes. Yikes.
But that is not why I brought you here, to paragraph four. These are just symptoms of our "Business Nature" which is the result of our training, education, experience, and prevalent business cultures. It is this business nature that holds us captive to our own ideas of how to be successful. The truth in our business nature is still real, it is our application of these truths which is flawed. We are so conditioned to avoid the big mistake that we spend too much time over analyzing everything we can get our hands on before making a decision, and too little time analyzing the real time results of that decision. Instead Businesses still rely on antiquated reporting structures that require many months or even years’ worth of accumulated data to identify “trends” or “impact” from these decisions. By that point how certain can we be that the “trend” or “impact” was really the result of the decision we made long ago. In today's cloud based, highly configurable, agent app based business landscape, we should be trying more things faster and letting the results drive our next action. If your systems don't support a rapid cycle of Do, Measure, Change, REPEAT then you are wasting the greatest business opportunity in history.
Small and medium sized businesses have the advantage over large businesses like never before. In the coming weeks, this blog will bring simple clarity to these ideas and provide you real, practical, effective ways of changing your "Business Nature". You may already have what you need and just don't understand how to easily get the most from your existing business systems. If you would like our free rapid assessment, simply share or like this blog post on Linked In, Facebook and Twitter, and we will let you have it, free.
