How does your
organization perform? How do you perform within your organization? I bet that you and your organization have a huge potential. I also bet that maybe not all of it is evident to the world. All too many people and organizations settle for a mediocre performance. That is why so many are alike. They all seem to be the same.
A company may sell their products and have a fairly good profit margin. Maybe they have a 5 % profit margin. These days in the current financial climate, with all the talk about hard times, that may seem like a good margin. They are not losing money, which everyone thinks is good, but what if the real potential is a 26 % or 53 % or maybe an even higher profit margin? Then “not losing money” is not so good anymore.
If you evaluate the organization and the way that you work, and the contribution that you give to the customer value, and then do some creative thinking about how you could improve, you will almost always find that you have a huge potential for improvement.
When I teach people how to find the potential in an organization I always state that the ideas in that workshop should be new, bold and different.
Is it possible for man to fly? Is it possible to visit the moon? Can we run 10 km in less than 30 minutes? If we step back in time to the moments before we achieved those goals and those events took place, when most people would have said that it was impossible. Then imagine someone stepped up and showed the world that we could. The same goes for your business and for your organization. A thing that may appear impossible according to common sense is not impossible at all, if you allow yourself to think creative thoughts. I recall a saying that “Nothing is impossible – it just takes a different amount of time”, and that is, I believe, true.
We need to think new, bold and different thoughts when we set the vision and goals, and also force ourselves to continue on that train of thought to solve how to get the results that we just said that we wanted. If we do not set high enough goals for the vision, we will automatically limit ourselves in our thoughts when figuring out how to reach this vision. A bold vision requires bold thoughts about how to reach it.
When we allow ourselves to think new, bold and different thoughts, it give us the advantage of also triggering ourselves to have even newer, bolder and more different thoughts in the next iteration of thinking. One bold idea triggers the next bold idea and so on, until we have reached the idea that will take us forward to the vision.
Do not settle for the mediocre, because then you will be the same as everyone else. Think those new, bold and different ideas and then you will discover the excellence within you, because it is there. It is just your task to find it and to make it known to the world. Then you can give the customers more value for less money and if you do it for profit, your business can have a higher percentage of profit margin. To distance yourself from the competitors you need to be different and better. Choose to be different in excellence!
I end with a quote from Muhammad Ali regarding the impossible:
“Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary.
Impossible is nothing.”
– Muhammad Ali
Please share and comment!
To you and your organization’s excellence.
Matts
PS. If you want to have more free material regarding Business Excellence, please sign up for the newsletter on the right hand side.
