Business Improvement

Every business can improve. Einstein once said “Only an idiot would continue to do the same thing and expect different results.” How true this is and even how glaringly obvious (to paraphrase Basil Fawlty) yet so many businesses can persevere with the same business model, seemingly unaware or uncaring of the business opportunities passing them by. Sound commercial awareness and understanding; strong financial knowledge; excellent interpersonal skills and even market beating products, confined in a wrapper that never changes, delivers just that.

Wrappers wrap and sometimes need to be torn off to get to the heart of the matter.

Business improvement is all about this and nothing to do with re-inventing the wheel. Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) was all the rage in the 90’s and continues today in many ways, and in the 00’s Six Sigma has taken over as the method du jour. However whatever the method, the reality remains the same - doing something the way we have always done it eventually becomes redundant. As Einstein makes clear regarding expectation, similarly you cannot maintain forward momentum merely by continuing to do the same thing, you need to change and progress, to do things differently, in order to stay the same. Inflation does not only affect pecuniary assets - it affects everything and to prevent inflationary reductions in your business performance, it needs to be reviewed on a regular basis. This is where Cornerstone can help, by providing the friendly challenge to your business activities, all the way through to creating an entirely new process base on which to build the business; we can help you formulate, create and implement new procedures that position your business to be a better and more successful player in your market.

The whole activity of reviewing what you have, breaking it down into its core elements and of rebuilding it into a better whole, is what any method of business improvement is all about. As Edward de Bono once said “Lateral thinking is concerned not with playing with the existing pieces but with seeking to change those very pieces. It is concerned with the perception part of thinking. This is where we organise the external world into the pieces we can then ‘process’.” So the method is in itself irrelevant - the act of reviewing what and how you do what you do is the core. Proper review that does not throw the baby out with the bath water, nor change for changes sake but embraces real, thought through and sensible change, encompassing new ideas and processes, to deliver the optimal way to do your business to give your business as much advantage as is possible.

So in relation to change as a whole, perhaps it is best summed up by the words of the late John F Kennedy: “Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.”