I’m sure you’ve heard the saying “Can’t see the forest for the trees”. It means, of course, to miss the big picture because of an obsessive focus on the details.
I see it a lot on our industry…owners and managers who can’t see the business for the processes.
I had a discussion recently with one young manager (one of those process oriented people) who was fond of throwing out quotes, without knowing their origin or detail, (“we’ve got to get the right people on the right seats on the bus”) who told me quite dismissively “it’s good to have a “big picture” view but…”.
Of course, what he really meant was these problems (and his business had quite a few) can be solved with process improvements. He went on to explain how the staff needed “sales training”, incentives such as trips to industry conferences, better scripts, “customer service training”… blah, blah, blah.
It’s par for the course for process guys.
Knowing the history of this business quite well I knew that it had been through this exact same process every 12 to 36 months, for almost a decade, with successive new CEO’s and club managers and with little substantive improvement.
The problem, in my view, is that process improvements can only ever get you so far and more often than not an obsessive focus on process improvements, and not the business itself, can actually hurt rather than help the business.
Not everyone can look beyond the day-to-day to really improve their business… can you see the forest for the trees?
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