HOW TO
RUIN A PERFECTLY GOOD ENTERPRISE
When a business owner sits down to ponder the future
performance of his or her enterprise, an internal assessment process gradually
unfolds and eventually leads to this question: “What do I want?” Most business
people will respond to this question with some version of “more money, fewer
worries, and less work.” After all, what business owner does not want more
productivity, more profitability, and more simplicity, not just for themselves
but for everyone connected with their enterprise? Prosperity, in all its forms,
is very desirable.
After clarifying what’s desirable, then the next things
for the business owner to consider is, “How do I make what I already have
better? How can I propel my business to the next level of effectiveness, efficiency,
and wonderfulness? What Business-Prosperity-Generating actions, activities, and
behaviors will significantly improve my business?”
If the business owner can figure this out, then he or she
can apply specific actions, activities, and behaviors (interventions) to his or
her business, and in due time, expect positive results, measurable progress in
reasonable time.
Now I don’t claim to know everything about creating
business prosperity, but I do know how to screw up a perfectly good business. I’ve
meet with hundreds of business owners, have seen with my own eyes, or heard directly
from them, about a boat load of tragedies. Based upon this observational
history, I consider myself something of an authority on how things can go
wrong, terribly wrong. I know how to put most any viable business on a course
that, if left unchecked for just a few weeks, will absolutely run it into the
ground. All that has to happen is for the business owner to apply strategies
from two management paradigms: insidious neglect and/or over zealous,
hands on control. Applications of strategies from either or both of these
paradigms can ruin any perfectly good business, happens everyday in every
community. By the way, insidious means working or spreading harmfully in
a subtle, sneaky, or stealthy manner.
So, for your edification dear reader, I thought I’d
outline several miss-management strategies that will make a business stagnate,
falter, and ultimately fail. And I won’t be talking about taking such draconian
measures as tripling the costs of things for sale, painting the building black
with red swastikas on it, limiting the hours of operation to four per day, or
never taking out the garbage, and not cleaning the toilets. The things I’ll
describe that can cause ruin are common mistakes business operators make everyday.
Nothing more.
To screw up normal business operations here are some
options:
Let’s begin by ignoring the mission (purpose) and destroying
the vision (future direction and plans for the business) by never talking about
these things with anyone with whom these conversations ought to regularly
occur. We’ll stop all meaningful conversations and all talk about the future.
We’ll never discuss our values and be sure that all forms of positive
communication come to a screeching halt. No more meetings, no more memos and,
except for gossip, no more office chitchat. In fact, we won’t talk to anyone
except to criticize. We’ll also have lots of secrets and never provide anyone
with feedback or knowledge of results. That would be a good start down the path
of ruin.
Then let’s cause a significant loss of focus by not
paying attention to money making activities or anything connected to business
goals. We won’t even have business goals. And we’ll get seriously and
hopelessly bogged down in all things decidedly unimportant.
To damage motivation, let’s be sure rewards and
recognition are virtually impossible to get. We won’t acknowledge outstanding
contributions and constantly complain about what we don’t like.
By tossing all control systems out the window we’ll
create turmoil and chaos. We’ll encourage the people with the quirkiest, most
off the wall personalities to take over and do things when and as they please. We’ll be sure to interrupt people in the
middle of things so they forget what they we’re doing. And we’ll have an
environment filled with interesting things to do that have no relation to the
aims of the business, but that sap the energy of everyone.
Then we’ll micromanage by putting ourselves in the middle
of everything. People won’t get to do anything on their own initiative. All
decisions will have to come through us. And any form of independence we see,
we’ll discourage immediately and mightily.
We’ll make sure that no one takes enough time off to
recharge and rejuvenate. We’ll resist any opportunity for business
revitalization, reengineering, and reeducation so we’re sure not to replace any
old ways of thinking and doing business with more appropriate and potentially
better ones. Naturally we won’t be open to good ideas and we’ll make “Business
As Usual” our motto.
To screw up personnel, we’ll have vague job descriptions
and never update them, have people doing the wrong things, and consistently
reassign our best people to menial tasks. We’ll insist that people never
suggest any better ways to do things. And when we’re recruiting, we’ll foster
the belief that somehow, we can’t get the “right” people.
We’ll follow our people around and hound them to work
harder and smarter. We’ll overload and overwork everyone causing great stress,
which we’ll ignore, so many people burn out. And when they finally do reach
their limits, we’ll fire them. And we’ll have no personal policies, no employee
manual, and never conduct employee performance reviews.
To screw up the finances we’ll be sure income is
insufficient by not focusing on sales, not closing sales, not trying to be
innovative, and by not looking for new and better markets. We’ll spoil
marketing by trying to sell the wrong things, not keeping up with our buying
audience, pricing things to high or too low, and by not stressing value and
benefit appropriately. We’ll mess up investment by not setting aside
appropriate funds, by investing in the wrong things, and not creating and
nourishing relationships with existing and potential funding agents.
We’ll design inadequate cash-flow management systems, or
not have any at all. We’ll ignore the people who owe us money, and to ruin our
credit rating, we won’t pay our bills on time, or at all. We’ll allow costs to
run amuck by not negotiating for better deals when purchasing, not streamlining
operations, by hiring people we don’t need, spending money without planning,
and by not having a budget or any cost control mechanisms.
To screw up our technology we’ll insure that it’s
inadequate. We won’t invest in technology that would lower costs and increase
profits, and we’ll allow the old and the broken down stuff to get older and
more broken down without repair.
To loose our competitive edge, we’ll offer products and
services that are obsolete, or that no one wants to buy in sufficient quality. And
we’ll ignore the competition and never think about the big picture or the
future.
And of course, should anyone get wind of our devious
interventions, we’ll do all we can to ignore and discourage their input, so any
appropriate rescue interventions are delayed until it’s too late.
Obviously these miss-management strategies would poison
the environment of any business. Implement just a few and the result would be a
lack of employee motivation, high employee turn over rates, and unimaginable
difficulties recruiting new employees. Sales would flat-line and falter. Cash-flow
would suffer measurably. Loans would be called. Management would be a slave to
the business, never able to take worry and guilt free time off.
These horribly negative consequences would occur simply
because management applied strategies from either the insidious neglect paradigm, or the over zealous hands on control paradigm, or both. And in so doing,
they ruined a perfectly good business, simply by not thinking about tomorrow,
while focusing intelligently on today, and by not taking care of what they
already had. And all the resulting ruin would be a tragedy that’s completely
preventable.
This is all silly, silly, and stupid huh. Yes it is. But
well intentioned business owners make these kinds of mistakes every day. The
trick is to know about them, hence the exaggeration in this article, and then
to immediately stop doing then when you catch yourself going in the wrong
direction.
More, Less, Start, Stop: This means asking yourself the
following questions. For the betterment of my productivity, profitability, and
simplicity, what do I need to do MORE of? What do I need to do LESS of? What do
I need to START doing? What do I need to STOP doing? Along with, “What do I
want, and why do I want whatever that is.” These are important questions when
you get to where the rubber meets the road, down to brass tacks, and all the
other appropriate clichés about doing things right.
Hope you found something here to chuckle about, I know I
did.