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Are You on the Right Business Diet?
Yesterday in New York, Martha Rogers and I had lunch with one of our favorite people, Phillip Riese. Phillip, an ex-American Express senior executive, is a literal fount of entrepreneurial wisdom. We cited him in our first book, The One to One Future, in 1993. Phillip’s insight is that business books come and go sort of like diet books. Everyone’s always trying to find the right diet in their own personal lives, and business executives seem to be on the same treadmill with their business policies.
This analogy is actually very useful, because we know that there are several important criteria for dieting success, right? Consider:
First, you have to have the RIGHT diet – something that really will work for you, when followed carefully. In terms of business books, not all of them are necessarily good for you. So decide carefully whether you’re going to be a cost reducer, a customer service improver, or maybe an innovator – and then pick a business diet appropriate to that.
You also have to FOLLOW the diet. No diet will give you results if you adopt it for a few days or even a few weeks, but then abandon it. Business improvement disciplines are the same. How many times has your business glommed on to some idea-du-jour and trumpeted it all around the enterprise, only to abandon it when a new senior VP comes along?
Third: NO BINGING, and if you’re a dieter you know exactly what I’m talking about. Dieting progress is made one day, one meal at a time, and then weeks or months of progress can be thrown overboard with one midnight raid on the ice cream supply. In business, if you have a good business discipline, you can’t throw it over at the end of the quarter when you just have to make those numbers.
And finally, virtually every serious diet regimen involves some combination of regular EXERCISE or physical activity. It’s a lot easier to lose or maintain your weight when you combine a disciplined diet with a disciplined exercise routine. In business, you can’t just strap on a new business discipline and expect to succeed. You have to exercise that discipline by pushing the boundaries, breaking down silos that inhibit the discipline, changing up your metrics of success, and perhaps even introducing serious organizational changes.
The modern obsession with a thin body is another problem that women face now a days. Women try everything in order to get this extra pounds off, things like pills, patches, diet, hunger, exercises and all kind of weight loss products. Some of them work, but others - not.
Weight loss industry is focusing on the way people should feel while doing it, in order to achieve better results and stay healthy all the time. Being healthy and thin is not a dream, it should be something, that is a reasonable and easy to be done.
I totally agree but would back up and determine what is the end all, the goal one is trying to attain and most of all how will I know when I get there.
Captured activity and measurements are vital and while there may be moments of veering off the course all is not lost back to square one. The destination map should right the ship towards the desired goal.
I like to use the analogy of how most people look at the road to a goal. They picture a point A, a starting point and expect to progress directly to the desired point B of improvement. When they veer off they think they have to go all the way back to point A and start over again.
The realistic analogy is having a point A headed to point B and understanding that there will be veering off or dips if you will, but you do not fall back to point A. You may stall the forward progress but still focus on the forward progress to your desired goal.
So with that said I am going to treat myself to a Krispy Kreme donut.
Don,
This is a great analogy! I'd like to add one more element to your list that ties in closely with both "follow" and "no binging": time, or perhaps more accurately, patience.
Whether launching into a diet or business strategy, expecting results overnight is unrealistic. You need to allow a reasonable amount of time to pass for the changes to take hold and start to make an impact.