When Cost-Cutting Costs You More
So you’ve come through the Business Storm Cycle, bruised but still in business. You know that you need to rebalance and realign your people, processes, and IT. If you recognize yourself in that description and you’re reading this now, you’re probably saying, “Yeah, that sounds great. But how can I do it? What are the steps I would have to go through to make that happen in my company?” You may have considered hiring an [...]
Repetition – Is It Costing You Money?
IT problems affect every phase of the business cycle. The weaker your IT, the faster your Tornado will be over—and the longer your Avalanche will last. It’s vital that you take advantage of the consolidation phase that follows the Avalanche to address your IT issues. If you don’t, you won’t be able to prepare for your next Tornado. You may not even survive. IT is one of your most powerful tools for making your business [...]
Habits – They’re Easier To Make Than To Break
Habits are funny things; good or bad, they can be the making or breaking of a person, or even of a business. What’s learned isn’t always easy to unlearn. My mother, for instance, couldn’t get used to the new arrangement of her kitchen when we moved after years in the same home. Because of that, she wasted a lot of steps and effort trying to do things in the same way that she had in [...]
Seasons And Cycles: They Just Keep Turning
One of the first cycles you learned about when you were a kid was probably the life cycle of a butterfly. You found an egg on a leaf, took it home with you, and put it in a jar. After a while, a caterpillar hatched out of the egg. It crawled around the leaf, nibbling on it, so you gave it more leaves to eat. Eventually, the caterpillar made a chrysalis. The chrysalis didn’t look [...]
Diagnosing an Avalanche
In business, how can you tell when you've hit the Avalanche transition point? You'll have huge revenue, while margins are lower than expected and falling. This is the number-one indicator a company has hit the deceleration transition. In the back office, you've got too many people doing too many things manually, over and over again. Cleaned-up, scalable automation processes have not been applied. Productivity is a big problem. High growth pushes operations very hard. When [...]
Inside The Process: How We Work
I’m often asked how we do what we do. How do we consult with a company, battered by its trip through the Business Storm Cycle, to help put its people, processes, and technology back together? First, we sit down with all the departments – R&D, operations, production, and the back office – in one big room, to go through every single process they are using in each and every department. We talk about what works and [...]
When Faster Isn’t Better
Have you ever created a personal fitness program that backfired? Maybe you decided to lose those love handles and whip yourself into shape. So, you went on a juice diet that left you feeling dazed and starved, and you bought yourself some “magic bullet” piece of exercise equipment guaranteed to work out every muscle in your body at the same time. Sure, it had been years since you’d really exercised, but you pitched yourself into [...]
Spring and the Tornado
As the long, gray winter throws in the towel, at last, we’re treated to one of Nature’s finest shows – the arrival of spring – as the cycle of the seasons turns in its predictable and expected way. It’s always a thrill to see the flowers bursting up out of the ground along with the reappearance of butterflies as they come out of their chrysalises – even though we know that winter will inevitably be [...]
Business Cycles? They’re All Around Us
Cycle Theory is an idea that’s been around for a very long time. It’s a pretty straightforward concept that applies to many aspects of life, and a way that humans have made sense of the universe for millennia. In fact, we’ve been talking about cycles for thousands of years. The pre-Columbian Mayan calendar was based on cycles, the Hindu belief in reincarnation is a cycle that extends beyond this world, and the ancient Chinese believed [...]
Getting Back On Track
If you have a company that’s had two massive transition points—first a Tornado and then an Avalanche—you have two options. First, you may have to sell. Even worse, of course, you could simply go under, with nothing to show for all of your hard work. Your best alternative, though, is to follow the path of Devon Energy. In a previous blog, I told the story of Devon Energy: Having survived their Avalanche, merged with a [...]