What most businesses really need is a “lifestyle change” not a “diet”. We all know how diets work, especially the trendy ones. Trendy diets focus on cutting out certain food groups, eat specially prepared munchies, or take revolutionary pills and presto–the weight falls off. Six to nine months later, the weight plus is back. These diets don’t work because they do not advocate or promote the disciplined process of a complete change in lifestyle. People embrace the diet approach because it provides immediate gratification and requires little, or no discipline. It is much easier to lose the weight now than work hard at the deliberate, disciplined model of a sustainable and healthy lifestyle change.
Businesses are guilty of hitting the easy button, too. Their fixation on getting sales up, controlling costs, and immediately improving profits without any regard to the long-term affects on customers, employees and suppliers are reactive behaviors. While it appeared that the financial distress of the firm was caused by the shifting economy, the reality is that these sick businesses had been on unhealthy diets for a long time and now have been exposed as out-of-shape.
Instead of reaction oriented “diets”, today’s businesses need to spend more time focusing on modifying their behaviors and transitioning to activities, processes, and programs that will sustain them for the longer haul. Simply implementing or mandating or cutting or demanding does not fix the core problems is a business. While this may provide immediate gratification, it is not sustainable or healthy.
What is going to turn your business around is the complete assessment of the entire business and discovering where it is unhealthy and what programs, tactics, and processes will best fix it. Simply deeming an instant change that, on the surface, addresses the potentially obvious problem, doesn’t solve it. Diet-like behaviors may fix the immediate problem; but, does not address the root cause or discover the source and the long-term solution.
Get your business off the diet treadmill and start putting some longer-term discovery and discipline into the model.
