Doctor, Doctor...

The patient says, “It hurts when I do this.”
“Well don’t do it.” the doctor replies.

Or better yet.
The Doctor says “In order to heal this injury correctly, you need to do these very painful exercises 6 times a day, or else lose the ability to use that limb properly again. No questions, no excuses. period.”

Philosophically these are two very different examples. The first one is a typical response from management when an employee complains. The second is a prescription to a problem, which you want to take a wager on what happens there?

What is common, is that both are the polar opposite ends of the same problem. Something needing to change to improve the situation. Yet the results seemingly are always the same. Nothing changes. It gets lost somewhere in the middle between the two sides.

Either the doctor just ignores the patient’s problem. Or the patient ignores the doctor’s solution (intentionally or unintentionally). What we have here is a series of broken processes. Because when you distill everything down, it is a process.

In our experience, a company either has issues with process to identify and fix problems. Or they are really good at figure out the problem and answer, but struggle to implement change. In either case, there seems like there is always a valid excuse to support the reason why it is working.

In this day and age, it seems the vast majority have problems implementing change, the rest have simply given up. It is not worth the fight.

To an executive, a business owner, or a manager...something needs to change and it needs to change right now. The company has been hanging on by a thread for an unbearable amount of time, either sink, swim or fly. Thankfully, there are a whole lot of smart people that have figure out that there is a science called, change management.

It is what you need to learn in 2010. Or you might as well fold now and save yourself a lot of grief.