If you want to get better results today and be able to meet the challenges of tomorrow, then you can’t depend on a business that was designed for yesterday. Yet that’s the way many businesses operate.
I started driving a tractor when I was 6 years old. Although it seemed really big to me, the “Super H” from International Harvester was insufficient to meet the growing challenges of keeping the family farm afloat. Even if you rebuilt the engine to get a few more horsepower (which we did) and put the most skilled operator on it (which my dad was), it was never going to produce the results we needed.
Leaders need to think about what they’re “driving” in their business. Is it the same old product development process, the same continuous improvement program, or yesterday’s marketing approach? Are your strategies really any different from your competition or just reworded versions of what you’ve always done? Will putting a better operator on your business version of a Super H get you any better results?
It’s time we business leaders admit it. It doesn’t matter how good a driver we think
we are or how good a driver we hire, we can’t put them behind the wheel of yesterday’s business design and expect anything other than marginally different results. The Super H of business won’t cut it. Time for leaders to rethink their business design.
