Business can be an immense headache or a joy, but with a little planning some of the headache can disappear.
Deserted not forgotten.
Picture yourself on a desert island, stranded from a shipwreck and you are on your own. To start with you have rations that have floated ashore with your lifeboat, and you don't know where the next square meal is coming from. You investigate the island and find nothing. Sitting down, you ponder the position, and wonder how long it will take to rescue you.
You start to gnaw at your lip as hunger begins to bite. You look at the ration packs which are laid out in individual day by day packages. The hunger bites even deeper, and you now have to make a decision, whether to eat just the ration that has been set out in the pack, to gorge yourself in a short feast that will satisfy your aching belly, or to eek out the rations even more than is laid out on the pack, in the hope that rescue will come.
Rescue is not all good news.
Let's say you were rescued, and that the strategy you took earlier was the right one for you. However, by the time you are rescued you have no rations left, and your body is deprived of food. As soon as you are rescued, you are presented with a huge banquet of every type of cooked and cold food that you can image and told to 'dig in'.
You can feel your belly start to rumble in anticipation; your mouth waters at the thought and sight of all these delicacies, and as directed you tuck right in!
Image how your belly and brain thought before you tucked in. How your belly was aching at the thought of the food that was denied you before you were rescued. How your mind just dreamed of every cut of meat, with crisp vegetables and soft fruity wine to drink. Think of the reaction you would have locked inside this room with acres of food to satisfy your every whim.
Groaning bellies.
Would you be selective when you walked into the room? Would you just pick out the few things that were your favourites and sit delicately nibbling the finer parts of the dish Or would you be more likely to gorge yourself, eating rabidly until your belly groaned 'no more'?
Selective you would not be, at least until you had filled up once. Then you might come back to the table and look again, picking out the specialities that you enjoyed beyond all else.
Is it much the same in your business?
Every organisation cycles between feast and famine. We have just had the feast years were every organisation has gorged itself on technology, products and solutions to boost up their business. Perhaps some of them haven't been too selective when they were feasting, because they just didn't need to!
If they gorged themselves on the wrong things, hey, it didn't matter! There was some more coming along, so the mistakes that were made could be swept under the carpet. As long as profits are good, you can be forgiven.
Trimming the fat.
But what about the lean years? Famine is upon us and rations will need to be managed wisely. As no one is sure how long the famine will go on, the idea of feasting is not good. Will you let your business gorge itself on solutions that you can't be sure of? Will you let yourself burn up resources wantonly in the quest for a new level of profitability? I think not!
How about starving your business by eking out the rations?
Well on your desert island, you could have taken half rations, but you would have become weak more quickly and unable to light the flare that the ship saw when it came to rescue you. You and your business need a steady flow of life sustaining food to keep it in shape for when the rescue comes.
So a steady, measured drip feed is what is needed to make sure that your business progresses and poised to take advantage of the upturn. On starvation rations your business will not be able to build and grow except with a longer term injection of resources.
Inject a measured, moderated, amount of business innovation into your enterprise to keep it really humming.
Rob Wendes
Business
Technology Consulting
8th May 2009
