Business Repair, Not As Pragmatic As First Thought!

Sometimes It Becomes All About Me!

How is your family doing?  Communicating well?  Is everyone respectful with each others dreams, work, lifestyle and choices?  Families can be a bit funny.  They can subvertly demolish one of their members dreams and never notice it.  It can happen in a silent process.  It can become unnoticed to the one who delivers the crushing blows and as a result, the structure begins to deteriorate on the corners and around the edges of the family bond.  How is your family doing?  Are the dreams being supported and nourished?  Or are those dreams swept under the rug and walked on?

That line of questioning seems to be a bit personal.  Most of us are offended by stuff like that.  We would prefer to keep our private stuff, private.  We especially do not want to talk about this kind of tough stuff.  This is not the kind of business talk we prefer to support.  That stuff is private.  Family junk is private stuff.  Business junk is private stuff.  Only the troubled people of the world wear this kind of stuff on their sleeves.  The wise ones suppress it well.  Right?  Or at least we think this is how it is done.  Wisdom tends to work in peculiar ways.

Junkie stuff comes with all relationships.  We know and accept this truth.  Even families wear uncomfortable personality stuff.  We all get that.  We all deal with junkie stuff in our personal lives.  We have brothers and sisters who do not understand us, respect us or communicate well with us.  Some of our parents ignore who we have become.  They do not want us to be who we have become.  In some quirky sense, some of our best days with our families are days we spent apart.  Many families live in this kind of reality.  They conjure up images about how the other members live that are untrue, inaccurate and disrespectful.  This is how many families coexist in their growing up worlds.  They spin out incorrect images about the relationships they have and do not have with the other members in the family and in the end, those images become misaligned to the point that they hold very little accuracy about how this family is actually structured.  The family unit grows up surrounding incorrect images about who they really are.  Many families live in a world with this kind of breakdown.  They begin to live in a world of illusions.

Guess what?  This is exactly how a business leader develops a leadership role that produces terrible long term results.  The leader becomes inoculated with the process of supporting wrong images about what should be done.  Bad habits occur.  Bad habits become the rule of operations.  Eventually that business leader functions their business lives completely immersed into a series of patterns that are completely incorrect and ineffective, but yet, are very complicated to identify.  They operate their business style in such a complicated set of emotional surges that even the best counsellor can become terribly confused about where to begin.  This is exactly how many families live out their related lives.  Mixed up and mixed out.

Business repair is not as pragmatic as one might first suspect.  In fact, it is very complicated stuff.  What needs to be done is usually one of the most obvious things to see.  Getting to doing that obvious stuff is where the business gets lost.  Between the obvious stuff that needs to be done and the work that supports seeing it gets done is a bunch of wrong images about how to accomplish that stuff.  Those wrong images are deeply real.  They are dominating the decisions that must be altered.  They are surrounding the wrongs with so much protection that even the Indians can no longer be mentioned when they are attacking the cowboys in the wagon because the cowboys ought not to be there in the first place.  It all becomes so intertwined within the political messes we produce that thwarts us away from doing better work.  This is how a business goes astray and why it remains steadfastly determined to fail day after day.  It has nothing to do with not knowing what must be done.  It has all to do with protecting our egos.  Business acts a lot like families sometimes act.  Incorrectly.

Page two.

Sometimes It Becomes All About Me!

Business repair is not as pragmatic and as easily performed as one might first expect.  We truly know the stuff that is being done incorrectly.  Unfortunately, we have too much on our plates of ego that get in the way of making the right moves happen on a reliable and trusted continuum.  Our needed repairs get shoved quietly under the rug.  This is exactly how our families function incorrectly.  It is also the same pattern a lost business model accepts to perform.  Pragmatic repairs are not easily accepted.  They are not easily adopted nor easily performed.  I once had a business mentor tell me, "Systems are king.  When you insert the people they become messed up".  How true.

One of the truisms about the business world is that no business operates in a world that does not need improvement.  Every business model can use a little improvement here and there.  That is the truth.  Unfortunately, most business leaders do not go to work every day to find where they can improve.  In fact, most business leaders go to their business world each day with the idea that the activities for that day will unfold as they should.  Furthermore, if anything pops up wrongly they will just fix what went wrong or throw it out and ignore it completely.  Most business leaders operate in this kind of mode.  They learn how to deal with the daily stuff as it opens each door of its daily ways.

It becomes a life long pattern of daily discoveries.  Today brings on today's stuff.  Tomorrow brings on tomorrow's stuff.  This is a normal pattern that most business leaders perform in their daily leadership lives.  The art of operations becomes the art of learning how to survive the day.  No pragmatic planning is necessary when this kind of approach becomes the boss.  The day will become the day it decides to become and we will deal with it as it comes.  This kind of leadership pattern rules how that business leader does what they do.  Developing a pragmatic set of keen support and functionality to the business model sounds more like listening to Dr. Phil and Ann Landers on TV.  It does not sound like doing anything really constructive to the daily work patterns that unfold each day.  In fact, it sounds to these business leaders like fast talking mumble jumble that carries no significance to impact the production that is normally expected.  They believe they do not need to repair anything.  They believe their business is going to do what it does, regardless.

Business repair is not as pragmatic as one might first expect.  It carries a ton of weight that has nothing to do with wanting to repair.  It certainly does not reflect how much desire is running alive to improve the model from where it is currently functioning.  Most business leaders prefer to struggle day after day protecting their challenging lives with the kinds of habits they have already embedded.  Their business models remain chained to the nearby post that flirts with disaster on a routine basis.  Short cash flows, late payments, employment turnover, lost customers, unhappy results, frustrating issues that cannot be controlled, lost revenues, short margins of profit, increasing expenses and out of control feelings...these are the truths that are tethered to that nearby pole.  All of them repairable.  Very few of them properly addressed.  Sounds a lot like errant family pictures, does it not?

Maybe that business mentor had it right.  Just insert the people and there you have it...a messy picture.

Business repair, not as pragmatic as first thought.

Until next time...