The World Needs Unreasonable Men

0
77

Share on LinkedIn

Seth Godin has a great post about Sheepwalking on his blog.

Sheepwalkers are staff who check their brain in at the gate and just do the same old stuff day-in day-out, never challenging anything, never improving anything, never really caring enough to want to make a difference.

By and large I agree. In my 20 years of consulting I have seen this in dozens of companies. I estimate that in most companies about 10% of staff continuously change their world around them. They are the ‘unreasonable men’ that George Bernard Shaw so famously talked about. Of the remainder, 65% are followers, who although not naturally unreasonable, can be in the right circumstances. It is the job of management to create those circumstances. The final 25% are pure sheep. They are hard to motivate to do anything new. They are life’s change survivors.

One company that seems to have a high proportion of unreasonable men in its ranks is Toyota. Fast Company has a great article about how it continuously strives for perfection in its Georgetown plant in the US. The is one of the five tenets of its lean approach to business that has served it so well over the past 50 years.

Working as a consultant with Toyota caused me to reassess everything I had learned about business over the previous 20 years. It really was like stepping into a new and very unreasonable world. I haven’t looked back since.

What do you think?

Add your own comment and let’s get CRMGuru2.0 buzzing.

Graham

Graham Hill (Dr G)
Business Troubleshooter | Questioning | Thoughtful | Industrious | Opinions my own | Connect with me on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/grahamhill/

ADD YOUR COMMENT

Please use comments to add value to the discussion. Maximum one link to an educational blog post or article. We will NOT PUBLISH brief comments like "good post," comments that mainly promote links, or comments with links to companies, products, or services.

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here