This article provides a useful exercise for your business….
Darkness. Then there’s a loud bang and the whole screen is filled with light. The movie has begun. I am looking forward to the excitement and it is a good start. The story quickly captures us sitting together in the lounge. The movie is really good and I am sitting well. I have my food in front of me on the table that swings over the cinema seat.
The wait staff brought it in just before the movie started. If I want more to drink, I order it via the app and they bring it out quickly.
The seat is heated and can be electrically pushed forward and folded back. I sort of slide down into a semi-recumbent position. It feels as good as ever.
– But! Didn’t you say you were at the cinema Matts?
– Yes, exactly. At the cinema, with an electric chair, heating, table and food.
– It’s not a regular cinema, is it?
– No, it depends on what you mean by ‘ordinary’. It is not uncommon either. You don’t have to go to a lounge that serves food, but can make do with fresh chairs and cup holders.
As a result, I have stopped going to the movies at home. There they have the same shabby cinema chairs since the auditorium was opened by Lasse Brandeby in 1986. It’s very crowded between the rows of chairs, so you can feel the people behind kicking the chair when they move a bit, to relieve the wood taste in their butt.
In addition, the seats are so narrow that you sit like in an old Saab V4 with your shoulders rubbing against each other. And not to mention the slope of the small auditorium, if you’re unlucky enough to have a tall person in front of you, you won’t see half the screen.
Yes, I know. There are better cinemas, especially in the big cities, but I haven’t met one that compares to what I have now experienced.
“It wouldn’t work here anyway because…”
If I tell them about my experience at home, as I am doing now, many people smile a little and think “he’s really going for it, like in the old letters that came home from the USA, where they were really going for it”. It’s very difficult to take in. They hear what I say, but think it’s exaggerated and also find it difficult to absorb the information.
And if you look at what I’m telling you, many people think “well, that’s where it is, it wouldn’t work here anyway because…” and then you have a good excuse.
And this is also the case in our businesses, I think, when it comes to absorbing information about how much better it can be. There are alternatives.
If you’ve never heard of or experienced a better cinema, the one you have is the standard. If you think of the cinema, you’ll see the hard and cramped chairs where 150 people have been crammed into a small space, where you can’t see the movie if you’re a bit shorter. This means that the whole thing is a bit like a wrestling club. It becomes the image of anger.
What are your expectations of a workplace?
If you haven’t experienced an efficient business, where you are energized by being at work, where customers are satisfied and happy, and where finances are balanced, then misery soon becomes the norm.
Maybe…
- is that you have to work hard at work?
- is the boss supposed to be an energy thief, or that colleague?
- be constantly nagging that “we don’t have that in the budget”, whenever something needs to be purchased, or “we don’t have the money for that”?
- should it be that customers are constantly unhappy with the service they receive, with many complaints, perhaps even many reports to a regulatory authority?
- is that you have to be really tired every day you come home, so you fall asleep on the sofa in front of the TV?
Maybe this is the standard way of working. Work is hard, because you can tell by the name.
No, no and no again, I say. There are places where a toxic manager or employee is not to be tolerated. But where you are energized by being with your colleagues and your customers. Where customers are satisfied with the service provided. And where the economy is not always a concern.
You know better
You’ve probably heard me talk about these places and even how to create them. Where to start to get there. That there are methods and training courses that allow you to take steps for the better.
I know you do, because that’s what I write about every time, in one form or another.
What I don’t know is whether it goes all the way through. Do you understand what you are reading and listening to and how good it can be? Or is it like the Americans, that it’s probably too good to be true. The doubt of whether you can really have such a much better standard of operation? Maybe a little better, but that much better? Well.
Objections and apologies
Then come all the objections that it works safely…with them…but they will never go here, because here it is…(reason to blame).
I know the places that work so much better exist because I’ve read about them in books and watched videos about them. I also know they exist because I helped create them. Some have come a long way, others have gone further.
Some have failed because it is not easy. There is so much resistance to improvement work. Many people are afraid that the change will not succeed or that they will have to sacrifice the benefits they have managed to get in the existing way of working. As a result, they keep bringing up reasons why it won’t work.
An exercise for more efficient operations
Finally, a small exercise. Ask yourself the questions below and think about your answers.
- Is your business the best it can be?
- Do you care?
- If it’s not as good as it could be and you care, what could be better?
- What would you like it to look like? Close your eyes and think about what you wish would work better. What does it look like?
- Are there others who have the same problems or challenges that you have identified and how have they solved them? Is their solution similar to what you think it would look like?
- If not, what is the difference? Are your thoughts bigger than their achievements or are their results better than your thoughts?
To round off and provide further food for thought, I recommend reading the book Humanocracy by Gary Hamel, where he shows how others have managed to think completely differently from what is usual.
Good luck with this exercise.
Until next time,
Matts
PS. Finally, after doing this exercise and realizing that “you want to talk to someone”, I am here. If you are interested, we can meet online and I will tell you more about the possibilities. I can describe your business’s equivalent of a luxury movie theater and you might get some more inspiration, directly related to your business. Just email me again and we’ll talk online. You are welcome.
