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.
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