Monday, February 04, 2008
Good to Great
This is the result of me watching PBS and working in the US. I was watching a show the other day about a book that sprung from examining good companies that had become great companies. These were all companies with great stock market performance and good growth and very stable. The show fascinated me because they were talking about the few things that distinguished these companies from their peers, they even covered a police department that used the principals of the great companies to help focus them on increasing performance.
The collision with my everyday life in the trenches was that in my day to day job I work with a lot of groups that are suffering under changing processes and support models. They are paying in pain today for the savings they gained last year (or last quarter) when they decided to get a 'quick win'. This has become a very popular concept in business today, take drastic action quickly to achieve some near term goal that will make a group of people happy. This could be deploying an instant messenger client with cool new features or hammering out some chunks of budget to make the stock holders happy.
Where is the collision you ask? Well one of the things that made the great companies great was the ability to look at the hard facts when they were making decisions. They didn't focus on the short term or the quick win. They looked at the long term goal, determined what they were going to have to do to get there and then accepted the hard work that it was going to take to get there. I hope that we don't loose site of the long term goals for the forest of quick wins.
The collision with my everyday life in the trenches was that in my day to day job I work with a lot of groups that are suffering under changing processes and support models. They are paying in pain today for the savings they gained last year (or last quarter) when they decided to get a 'quick win'. This has become a very popular concept in business today, take drastic action quickly to achieve some near term goal that will make a group of people happy. This could be deploying an instant messenger client with cool new features or hammering out some chunks of budget to make the stock holders happy.
Where is the collision you ask? Well one of the things that made the great companies great was the ability to look at the hard facts when they were making decisions. They didn't focus on the short term or the quick win. They looked at the long term goal, determined what they were going to have to do to get there and then accepted the hard work that it was going to take to get there. I hope that we don't loose site of the long term goals for the forest of quick wins.
