Knowledge Fulcrum

The story goes something like this…

A couple is at home preparing a dinner of  beef roast together.  As  he starts to prepare the roast for the oven, he takes a knife and proceeds to cut both ends off.  Perplexed by his action his wife asks, “Why in the world are you wasting that meat?”  To which he replies, “This is how my father taught me to cook beef roast.”

Certain that something didn’t seem right, she calls his father to ask why.   The father’s response?  ”That’s how my mother prepared beef roast when I was young.”  They then called his grandmother.  They asked her why she  cut both ends of the roast off before putting it into the oven.   She calmly replied that it was ”…because my pan wasn’t big enough.”

This story illustrates how easy it is to take what happens in your organization as making sense.  At one time it may have, but chances are that it may not now make sense to keep doing it.  In my own experience, I estimated that 20% of what people did no longer made sense - it was just wasteful.  Reports were generated and distributed, which no one ever read, and procedures and processes were still followed diligently but no longer served a need.

The moral of this story?  Everyday – make a part of your daily rhythm an exercise where everyone stops to ask — why are we doing this? And is it adding value to our customers? I guarantee that if this hasn’t been a regular routine in your organization, then you’ll be shocked at how much “waste” just keeps happening.

Over the past 15 years, I’ve been interested in better understanding which business practices are most important to maintain organizational health and which will result in a higher level of success. In late 2007, I conducted a study among US businesses (across all industries) that identified seven key areas of the operation that were most closely tied to success.

Here is what I learned:

1.    Setting and Selling Your Vision
Organizations who have effectively developed a clear core vision or purpose, and, who effectively communicate it to employees, customers and partners, are more likely to experience higher levels of success. These organizations also tie their “vision