In a previous post I linked to an article by Dan and Chip Heath that cautioned against assuming you’ve made correct decisions just because they resulted in success. Now I’ll encourage you not to assume you’ve made bad decisions just because they don’t result in success. Here’s a little story I’ll call “As in Poker. As in life.” Read the rest of this entry »
Chip and Dan Heath, authors of “Made to Stick” have an article in this month’s Fast Company titled “Success Can Make You Stupid.”
“If there’s a moral in this story, it’s this: Question success. Success propagates backward in our minds and bestows the glow of wisdom on our every decision. The irony of self-fulfilling prophecies is that even bad ideas end up looking right in the end, because we’ve salvaged them with good execution. And when bad ideas get reinforced, there are consequences: The wrong movies get pushed. The wrong deals get funded. The wrong employees get advanced.”
Chip and Dan describe a process whereby bias toward past successful decisions results in more resources being directed to what is comfortable and known, rather than what is more objectively “right.”
and comes away with a business lesson.
“…the people in that building were way too nice and way too smart to not know the many ways they could fix this process. The problem is that this bureaucracy, like most bureaucracies, has an attitude of minimizing, not maximizing. They want to minimize expense, not maximize benefit.”
You may not think your small business has a bureaucracy, but if you have even one employee in addition to yourself the bureaucratic disease gets a toehold. This idea will be the topic of a few future blog posts and maybe a newsletter article. But for now, my takeaways from Seth’s post are:
One, make it easy for your customers to do business with you. Whether you sell online, by call-in or in person be ruthless in eliminating the barriers hassles to your customers spending money with you.
Two, make it easy for your employees to do it for you. Eliminate the “rules” that get in the way and set expectations for employees to facilitate buying simplicity.
Is hosted at Geek Practitioner.
My favorite this week? Dispatches from Blogblivion’s musings on pricing business services.
Be sure to read the first comment too - “If no one’s pushing back on your price, then your price is too low.” I’ll second that motion!
A couple of years ago a came across an article in Fast Company magazine titled “The Strategy of the Fighter Pilot.” The article was part biography of John Boyd and part description of Boyd’s creation: The OODA Loop.
I’ll be doing an article in my May newsletter on applying the OODA Loop to small business, be sure to sign up over on the right, but if you’d like to read more now you can follow the link to the Fast Company article or visit the wiki.
