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Business Growth 3
IS CORPORATE KRYPTONITE™ KILLING YOUR COMPANY?
By Dan Wallace
Launchpad Partners
(630) 355-4516
Dan@launchpadpartners.net
www.launchpadpartners.net
Underperforming
companies have two things in common:
·
Terrific assets –
people, products, brands, IP, etc. – that should provide the
foundation for a healthy, growing, profitable business;
·
A small number
(usually 2-3) of deeply embedded practices or behaviors that sap the
power of the company’s strengths and keep it from achieving high
levels of success.
We call these
practices and behaviors Corporate Kryptonite because they have
remarkable power to sap even tremendous corporate strength.
Finding
Corporate Kryptonite and getting rid of it unleashes a flood of
healthy, productive behavior that often leads to the kind of
astronomical valuation creation that marks the company as a
superhero.
Hiding in
plain sight
Corporate Kryptonite
grows out of beliefs that are so deeply held within the business
that they are beyond question. It feels familiar and safe. When the
search is on for ways to improve the business, Corporate Kryptonite
doesn’t even hit the radar screen. It’s not that it is consciously
taken off the table. Instead, it is so deeply embedded and taken for
granted that it never occurs to anyone to put it on the table in the
first place. In fact, we’ve encountered many companies in which
behaviors that we recognized as Corporate Kryptonite were considered
core strengths of the business.
Even when the
Corporate Kryptonite and the beliefs that spawned it are completely
wrong, they often are supported by tons of data. Why? Since the
company “knows” that they are true, it designs metrics and data
collection systems around them. The result is a self-fulfilling
prophecy and the perpetuation of a success-limiting activity.
The Challenge
As the saying goes, when you
want to get out of a hole, step one is to stop digging. That doesn’t
sound very hard. And in fact, fixing Corporate Kryptonite often is
pretty easy. (How easy? One company’s Corporate Kryptonite involved
making ‘knowably’ bad investments. The fix: Stop making them.)
The real
challenges of Corporate Kryptonite are finding it and getting people
inside the company to recognize it for what it is. Here’s what makes
this challenging:
·
The effects of
Corporate Kryptonite always occur cross-functionally and/or in the
company’s interactions with the outside world. Traditional
consulting approaches and business improvement efforts, especially
cost-cutting, simply miss it. Think of it this way: If the root
cause of poor sales productivity is a sacrosanct process in
Purchasing, putting the Sales Department under a microscope won’t do
you much good. Finding Corporate Kryptonite requires that you be
able to see through functional boundaries, and to see your business
through the eyes of your customers.
·
It’s hard to let go of
deeply held beliefs. And the longer and more deeply those beliefs
have been held (i.e., the higher up you go on the org chart), the
harder it gets. So the single biggest obstacle to finding Corporate
Kryptonite is the mindset of the very people whom the company needs
to initiate and champion the search for it. Overcoming that mindset
is always harder than finding the Corporate Kryptonite and figuring
out how to fix it.
The reward
The next time you’re
sitting in traffic, imagine what would happen if you could instantly
make every freeway in town two lanes wider. That’s what getting rid
of Corporate Kryptonite feels like. Things start to move. Speed
increases (a lot). Productive behavior and decisions happen. Sales
and profit grow, often at dramatic rates. The very pervasiveness
that makes Corporate Kryptonite hard to find is the same thing that
creates such a big impact when you make it go way. Performance gets
better everywhere at once. The rewards can be stunning.
Virtually every
business has at least some Corporate Kryptonite. What’s holding you
back from finding and fixing yours?
Zuk-Lloyd Associates, Inc. – Creative writing and art solutions.
We help
clients increase sales by turning ordinary business information into
extraordinary stories.
Contact:
Paul R. Lloyd
630-393-6516
info@zuklloyd.com
www.zuklloyd.com
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