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Let’s start with Business Improvements – or doing the work vs. ticking the box!

So, hand to heart, how are you doing with your improvement strategy?

Are you improving much?

What baseline did you set to measure the success of your improvement initiatives?

What did you agree upon when setting out to improve your strategy?

Are you willing to do what it takes to actually improve aka investing time, money and energy for lasting, repeatable and scalable capabilities?

Or are you simply ticking the box on L&D by scratching the surface with 3-day team workshops, 1-day leadership seminars and 90-minute motivational keynotes?

And how tired are you of growing operating costs that are not showing up in your results and in turn create even more friction in your business workflow?

When you look at your market and your competition – are they doing it differently and are they more successful?

“The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers.
The true dangerous thing is asking the wrong question.” - Peter Drucker

Yes, it does take a lot of questions to understand what the challenge is and even more questions to identify the root cause(s) of an issues.

And yes, an analysis must be hard and unemotional to get to the bottom of it all when you are serious about improvements, no matter small or audacious ones.

Let’s set some boundaries right from the beginning, looking for the silver bullet, the magic wand, the next big management book to instantly alleviate all business sorrows and pains is out of the question.

Otherwise please join the search for the holy grail - it is apocryphal, it is the stuff of fairy tales and urban myths and the birthplace of way too many management fads already plaguing small to medium to large companies around the globe.

"It's not that they can't see the solution. They can't see the problem." - G.K. Chesterton

Guilty of reading an overwhelming amount of management improvement books (probably making up only 5% of what is out there in the world), I came up with the following analogy of what the actual outcome and impact of these books are: you buy the latest and greatest book about how to train your dog to follow your every command…and you cannot for the life of you figure out why your cat isn’t changing her behavior…you are puzzled because a pet is a pet, right, and at least something should dramatically change just by absorbing the written words by osmosis.

Well, not so much! And 9 months later, the invested budget is gone, probably some key employees as well (that is if they haven’t been drained off all their energy turning into the working dead) and still no improvements in sight with the next performance review around the corner.

Please don’t get me wrong, there are brilliant books out there that when implementing the essence of their messages can truly make a difference.

However, jumping on these and hastily implementing, almost force feeding, them to employees, actually shows that a company has not taken the time to identify problems and their causes, to listen and understand their current environment, resources and people in their business and to align the current state of the business to future aspirations.

Let me ask you this, would you buy a house without having an inspection done first to make an informed decision on what your next actions are?

What we see happening in businesses though is