There are many recommended business practices that everyone knows you are supposed to do, but which often get corrupted in practice. In a series of blog posts upcoming in this space, we will explore them.
College students from the 1960s and early 70s can remember many of those great protest songs that erupted in those years, especially the ones that resisted having to do something just because somebody told you so. With credit to the Canadian group Five Man Electrical Band, one lyric those students would recall was:
Sign, sign, everywhere a sign,
Blocking out the scenery, breaking my mind,
Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign?
While nobody needs a cynic hanging around, it IS worthwhile for a leader to develop a healthy sense of irreverence, to ask “Why?” or “Why not?” and to harbor a touch of the iconoclast. If no leader does this, your organization will be at risk of never being able to see the need to change the familiar. Nobody will ask, figuratively speaking, if it’s time to take down a sign.
Businesses have a lot of these so-called signs, their rules to live by, reinforced in business schools and restated in company guidance. These are the good practices businesses are taught they should follow. You might think of them as “The Great Classics.”
We will not cynically debunk them. But we WILL, with the spirit of a healthy iconoclast, suggest some ways in which they are misunderstood and misapplied, and will suggest what you as a leader might do differently.
Watch this space. Coming next: The Great Classic called Benchmarking.