Are You Updating Your Business Tools?
Submitted by Rick Baker – Spirited Leaders
About Tools & Business Improvements
It started with rocks and sticks. In our early days, we used them to do work.
We needed them to perform what our bodies could not do. We used tools to make work easier and less risky. We used rocks to injure prey. We used rocks to scrape the meat off bones. We used rocks to open shells. We burned sticks to keep us warm. We burned sticks to protect ourselves from animals.
We used sticks & stones to make spears for hunting.
We used sticks to support us when our legs were injured and we used sticks as spears for fishing.
Later we used rocks and slings to hunt prey from a distance. We used sticks to create bows and arrows for protection and hunting.
Tools have played a major role in our lives…in summary, 5 ways:
- Making them,
- Exchanging them,
- Putting them to good use,
- Maintaining them, &
- Upgrading them [as technologies and our bank accounts allow].
And now, with really-advanced technologies, tools are creating really-advanced problems for us…call them techno-problems.
Techno-Problems: here are a few examples:
- e-mail spam and internet hackers require us to have filters and firewalls and other security controls, which generate an unending series of updates
- information inundation see for example, the Attention Dilemma
- Future Shock and other worries about the future
Yes – our increasing demand for higher-technology and innovative tools has generated techno-problems.
We need to fix that.
The solution is: seeking simple and one important aspect is simplifying our tools.
Some suggestions:
- Less is better…limit the amount of information you are exposed to. Be information-selective. Employ the 80-20 Rule. These reductions will allow you to focus on what’s important.
- Use 1-Page Tools: demystify process and help your people get over work-process hurdles
- Take advantage of proprietary software
- Remove system & process gaps…those work-flow disconnects that cause duplication of work, unnecessary month-end and project-completion overtime and other things that really annoy your people
Related links:
http://www.rickbaker.ca/post/2013/05/09/Are-you-updating-your-business-tools.asp…
