Work the System
A business guide focused on systematizing and streamlining work processes to improve efficiency and productivity.
Your life is a collection of individual systems. Fix those systems, one at a time, and you will fix your life.
The current internal dysfunction in your business is the gold that has been there all along. You just need to get busy excavating.
most of us use up our days coping with too much that doesn’t matter and in repairing bad results, we don’t think about delving downward to make adjustments where those time-wasters and bad results are propagated. We humans just have a penchant for thrashing around on the surface, not paying attention to the simple mechanics down below.
Spend the majority of your work-time in preparation and building, not personally executing the work.
“Everything happens for a reason, and sometimes that reason is because someone did something stupid!”
“There are things I must do right NOW, and there is barely enough time to do them. I will bulldoze my way through these tasks, and as usual they will be completed just in time—but the results will be of average quality and my body and mind will continue to be stretched to the breaking point. I’m tired and stressed and not getting any younger. There is too much chaos in my life and never enough money or personal freedom. My world is far from what I want it to be . . .”
Through the day—and through your life—are you in an endless race around a circular track, or are you climbing slowly and steadily toward a mountaintop? Are you getting what you want?
What is the single major operational difference between the owner of a large successful business and the owner of a small struggling one? The successful business owner insists on intense system management that includes documentation of those systems. The owner of the struggling business does not.)
leadership must focus on improving processes, not on performing the work or on repeatedly snuffing out brushfires.
Statistics show that of one hundred new business startups, only twenty will survive five years. Then, in the next five years, only four of those remaining twenty will still be functioning. In another five years, three of those four will disappear, leaving only one out of the original hundred. That’s a 99 percent small-business fatality rate over a fifteen-year period. This is in accordance with my admittedly anecdotal conclusion that the vast majority of small businesses are mismanaged.
one can compensate for the negative outcome of a recurring problem, but without repairing the errant process that caused it, the problem will undoubtedly occur again.