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Thursday, December 23, 2004
Ng: Bad habits
By Wilson Ng
Wired Desktop
HARD TO CHANGE. People do things out of habit. A child brought to church every Sunday will most likely continue the practice on his own. A person who has developed the habit of doing things at the last minute will continue to do the same thing for a long time. There are other habits—bad eating habits, like eating junk food, or smoking will be very hard to change.
Businesses also run by force of habit. The idea that, “It has always been the way things are done here” is a very good excuse, even if the practice has lost its meaningfulness or significance.
Here is one interesting anecdote I read about: “A patient goes to his doctor and complains, ‘I’ve got trouble in my throat.’ The doctor automatically tells him, ‘Go to the other room, and remove your clothes. I’ll be with you in a minute.’
“The patient says: ‘But doctor, it’s just my throat!” The doctor shrugs his shoulders and says, ‘Get in the other room and disrobe, and I’ll examine you.’
“So the patient goes in and removes all his clothes. As he is sitting there in his birthday suit, he looks around. Next to him is another guy, also naked, with a package in his hands.
“He starts to complain to the guy, ‘Hey, can you imagine this doctor. I’ve got trouble with my throat, and he tells me to remove my clothes!’
“The other man says, ‘What are you complaining about? I only came in here to deliver the pizza!’”
Indeed, a process is there to help us, but sometimes it is important to think that what worked for us before may not work for us today.
Here is a one liner from Jay Leno that I heard years ago. This is about McDonald’s well-known strategy to upsell other products to the customer when he enters the store. “Yesterday, I went to McDonald’s and ordered french fries, and the lady in the counter asked me, ‘You want fries with that?’”
When you need to do something different, is the culture of “It has always been the way things are done around here” becoming your enemy?
In this time and age, when change and adaptability have become important, is your business grounded on business processes that were started long ago and have stayed unchanged? Many businesses lose their competitive edge because they are no longer able to change themselves.
(Wilson keeps a log of his articles at www. bizdrivenlife.net.)
(December 23, 2004 issue)
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