Lucy and Ricky still have the power to make me laugh. Remember the “I Love Lucy” episode when Ricky comes into the living room and asks Lucy why she is on her hands and knees searching for something on the floor? She explains that she is looking for the earrings she dropped. He asks if she dropped them in the living room. She replies, “No, I lost them in the bedroom but the light is much better out here.”
We chuckle at the absurdity of Lucy’s futile search, but how many of us are just as impractical in our business strategies? Almost all business leaders pay homage to the dogma that “if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist.” There are many variations on this idea: if you can’t measure it… it won’t get done, it doesn’t matter, you can’t improve it, etc. Marketing, strategy, finance, branding, process improvement, supply chain, logistics: these are all the measurable, clear areas in a business where there is plenty of light and most leaders feel comfortable and at home. And then there’s the darker side…
The people side of business is messy, unpredictable and expensive in a seemingly uncontrollable way. Yet that’s where the competitive advantage lies today.
Specialized information is now commonplace, cheap and ridiculously easy to access (in seconds my 4-year-old, aided by Siri, just told me the distance between Earth and the Moon). Technology is democratized and trends shift so quickly that even the advantage of being first to market is fleeting at best. The only true competitive advantage today is with how healthy your organization is.
If your organization is like most, it is fraught with politics, infighting, silos and turf wars, all steeped in a culture of finger pointing. The ops people blame the sales people, the leadership blames the front liners, the front liners blame the bean counters, and it takes monumental effort just to get the simplest improvements past the army of nay-sayers arrayed against any change.
What if, instead, everyone in the organization could truly be humble, hungry and people smart? What if meetings — instead of being boring, futile time-eaters where nothing real gets accomplished except setting up the next week of doorway gossip sessions and water cooler complaints — could be riveting, healthy exchanges of positive ideological debate over decisions that participants cared deeply about? What if these debates could end with everyone coming together fully committed to a common goal and to communicating clearly what was decided with absolute consistency throughout the whole organization?
What if trust, morale and productivity were high, bureaucracy all but nonexistent, and great people were lined up around the block ready to take hefty pay cuts just to work with an organization with such a legendary reputation? Sound too good to be true?
What if I told you that all the tools necessary to achieve these kinds of results were readily available, mostly free and guaranteed to set you apart from your competition for years to come?
All it takes is a courageous leader’s decision to intentionally start focusing on the part of the business that is less quantifiable, less predictable, and less comfortable. Will you be the leader who chooses to focus on the health of your organization? Will you keep playing it safe or start getting good at working in the dark?
