Last week I told you about how I helped my daughter with her studies and how that led me to see Newton’s laws and how they also apply to business development.
I talked about Newton’s first law and how we can learn from all three laws in our improvement work.
Newton’s three laws are:
- The law of inertia
- The law of acceleration
- The law on effect and repercussions
The first law told us that it takes a large amount of force to move a heavy object quickly, and that an object at rest will stay at rest if no one interferes with it.
Translated into business development, this means that it takes a lot of energy for us to impact a large business quickly. And also that if we do nothing, nothing will happen. Pretty logical, right?
The law of acceleration
This leads us further into the law of acceleration. It says that to make an object accelerate, a force is needed that is proportional to the mass of the object and to the acceleration itself.
If you want to move a heavy object quickly, you need a lot of power. A lighter object, on the other hand, can be moved quickly with much less force involved.
For our business development it is the same. If you want to quickly improve your entire business, which is of a slightly larger nature, it also requires a big effort. A lot of energy will be spent. But if instead of taking the whole, you choose a process within the business, it will take less effort to implement the improvement in that area.
You need to have a strategy
The question here is which strategy is best? One is to take the whole operation forward slowly with less energy, or faster but with the need for more energy. The second is to take one part of the business forward quickly which requires less energy than taking the whole.
That is, do you want to work on a broad front or with parts of the business. Both have their strengths and weaknesses. Working broadly will lead to a general slowdown across the spectrum. But at the same time, the improvement work affects everyone at once. Everyone feels involved, and it feels like you’re on the journey of improvement together. This is positive. Long-termism with broad participation.
Whereas if you work in a chosen focused area, you can get further in that area. You can make the improvement right at the bottom for that particular part and then showcase an exemplary result quickly.
What is important to you?
Here it depends a little on what you want to show inside and outside the business. If you want to show that you take development seriously throughout your business, you need to choose the whole picture. It may take more time, but everyone is on board. However, a warning is in order. It must not be too slow, or you will never see the results of the improvement work, but it will only be an imposition on the daily work. And then it’s on its way down.
Working with the whole means you create a powerful business structure that shows all your overall processes and then you work through them all using the cheese slicer principle. Then you go through the process by process and maybe just map them out first. Then, in the next step, to redesign it, and then to develop them and introduce them in its new versions.
Speed in results
Instead, you want to showcase the good example of how far you have come in a particular area. Well, then you should pick an area and then quickly go “all the way”.
If you want to work in this way, you should first create a powerful business structure. I always recommend that you do that. But then you move to zooming in on a process and developing it at a faster pace so that it is mapped, designed, developed with new technology, or whatever it takes, and then quickly introduced into the business.
The advantage is that you can quickly show a good example of successful development. It then energises other process groups to follow suit. Another advantage of this is that it gives you an opportunity to learn along the way and adapt. This will speed up the next process to be developed.
So, you need to think through what is important for your business and yours. What strategy should you have. Don’t forget that it takes resources (money, time and manpower) to make improvements.
Next week we will continue with Newton’s third law and see how it also relates to the improvement work in our businesses.
Until then, have a great week.
Greetings Matts
