With a title like that, you may be asking, “Is this going to be an adventure story?” Well, yes - and no. The kind of Avalanche I’m talking about doesn’t involve snow; it’s part of the life cycle of your business, but it can be nearly as overwhelming if you’re not ready for it. You’ve started a company, gone through the growing pains, and you’ve enjoyed a boom as your product or service took off [...]
Thinking in terms of cycles is a way human beings make sense out of life. Cycle Theory can be applied to just about every natural, social and historical concept there is, from world power cycles to international relations cycles to sociological and psychological cycles. What all these cycles have in common is that they form a circle that goes around and around, carried forward by a natural, ceaseless momentum - and they’re not easy to [...]
Habit is a powerful thing. That can be a good thing—but not always. In the house where my family used to live, there was a counter on the left side of a double sink. When my mother washed the dishes, she washed them in the right-hand sink, rinsed them in the left-hand sink, and put them in the drainer on the counter to the left of the sink. If we’d had a dishwasher, it would [...]
So – you dropped a bundle on the newest cutting-edge software that the salesperson assured you was the magic bullet to solve all of your problems – yet costs are still going up, and processes are still bad. How could this be? You’ve got the best possible technology! As a company administrator, you can see there’s a problem, but you don’t understand what’s causing it – because you haven’t considered the other two factors, people [...]