How Can You Improve on Bad Habits Concerning Irresistible Forces?

After identifying your organization's existing bad habits about orienting yourself optimally relative to trends, you'll need to work at eliminating the bad habits so that they can be replaced with the desired habits. Communication and learning are good ways to begin.

Rather than starting by sharing the conclusions you arrive at about what your organization's bad habits are, you'll get better results if you take other people in your enterprise through the process of answering these questions:

1. What irresistible forces are already affecting your enterprise?

2. What has your enterprise done well in responding to, adapting to, anticipating, and creating these forces?

3. Why did your organization do well with regard to these forces?

4. What habits would have helped your enterprise to be more successful in these past situations?

5. What existing habits are in conflict with the habits that would help you be more successful?

You'll learn something, too, because you'll often find that the perceptions of others will differ from yours. With more perceptions to work with, you're likely to get better ideas for how to improve.

One way to do this is to measure performance and share the results. For instance, most companies would never acquire oil producing companies if they realized that the inflation-adjusted dollar price of petroleum products has always declined over the long term. Seagram might never have bought Conoco had they realized this fact, and earlier improved the company's acquisition habits while increasing the resources available for acquisitions.

Start Becoming a Stallbuster Now

Be sure to use the questions in each essay you read on this subject to tie the lessons of each lesson back to your organization. If you have not yet gotten out a pencil and some paper, or turned on your computer, now is a good time to begin making permanent your observations.

This article can be a valuable resource for you. But this will only happen if you follow through by working on the questions as they arise.

In addition to answering the questions, make a list of your own improvement ideas as they occur to you and keep the list with you as you read the rest of the book. You'll find that your ideas are likely to change and improve as you read more material and answer the questions at the end of each essay.

Make notes of how your ideas change. Keeping such a list will also encourage you to work more in this area of replacing bad habits because you'll have written record to show you how much you've learned from when you started reading these essays.

You will have obviously to move from thinking into action before the benefits will become tangible. Having a record of how much your thinking has been stalled will encourage you to take that needed action.

Copyright 2008 Donald W. Mitchell, All Rights Reserved