Old habits can harm your business

this.
The woman had no answer apart from the fact that her mother had always done so.
She decided to ask her grandmother, who replied that she had learnt it from her mother.
She phoned her great-grandmother who revealed the source of the action. The matriarch had done so because her pan was not large enough for a full-sized chicken.
While this is a funny story it illustrates what can happen in our lives and in our businesses as we grow and change.
Obsolete traditions and practices are still being practised in our businesses today because that is the way they were always done and no one ever bothers to change it.
Today I want to introduce you to three concepts that produce this effect in your business.
Traditional thinking tells me that I should probably only cover one but I reckon three is just fine.
The first is the “law of first truth”. This is simply the fact that the first thing you hear about a subject makes it truth for you — even if it is not really truth.
This explains why you use PCs and not Macs, why you support Manchester United and not Chelsea and why you wear your favourite colour.
In each case someone told you about how great and better the computer, team or colour was compared to other computers, teams and colours.
That became the truth to you. Perhaps it is because you used a PC before you ever knew Macintoshes existed, therefore your PC was your reality and truth.
A new member of staff walks into your office and is told by a colleague, “This is a great company to work for but watch out for Farai in accounting, he is a real jerk.”
Bamm! Right there, unless they are aware of it, there is “truth” created about Farai and it will affect the way that person interacts with them.
I remember a group of young men having to dig a foundation for a volleyball court.
Their truth was picks and shovels. After about an hour of sweat and a very small hole in the ground someone came and suggested that they use a mechanical digger to clear the hole and in one swipe the digger’s arm had dug more than they had in an hour.
Be very careful of what you hear. A common phrase in many companies is “this is how it has always been done around here”. This may mean that people have lost the reason for why something has been done. Which brings me to the second concept.
People who know just the “how” will always be at the mercy of people who know the “why”.
One of the shopping experiences that continually amazes me in Zimbabwe is the security guard at the door who grabs your till slip and crosses it through without checking your goods.
Can someone please explain to me why this happens because none of the guards I speak to seem to know why they do it.
It is just go through the motions of doing it and quite bluntly (shop owners listen carefully here) it wastes my time and disturbs my flow as I am leaving the shop.
It is an example of the person who is doing the action simply going through the steps of how without even bothering to question the why.
Now I am not promoting insubordination by questioning everything handed down by the board, but a healthy degree of seeking to understand the reason for why you are doing what you do.
There is the possibility that technology has moved along and made a process redundant.
The final concept is that of dilution. The further information moves away from the source the greater the chance of it becoming distorted or bits left out along the way.
This is where the “why” gets lost — when a supervisor just tells a worker to do a task without bothering to give the bigger picture.
It is not that your staff deliberately leaves information out, it is just human nature, like playing broken telephone.
There are a number of solutions to this, one is that as the boss you make the big announcements yourself — to everyone.
Steve Jobs handled all Apple’s major product launches himself (look them up on YouTube if you want — iPhone, iPod all done by Jobs not some second-in-command).
Another is to step out of your office and go interact on the ground. Mingle with staff serve clients in your store.
This will make you more aware of where loopholes are and just how effective your strategies are being implemented (it also boosts staff morale but that is another column).
Perhaps you have 50 stores and cannot make a presentation at each one, well make technology work for you.
Use a video presentation, get some professional advice on it and send it out. That way you know that what you want to say is being communicated.
So go on, examine what you do, see where it can be refined and tweaked a little.
Check with older members of staff as to why certain procedures exist and promote the “why”. You may just end up with a more streamlined system.