Which Disease is your Business Suffering from?

Most businesses die a slow death which means they are dying and don't even know it because they are focussed on fire-fighting without solving for the real reason for the fires that continuously show up all the time. And, the leader at the helm of the organisation is super busy being super busy to solve for the problems of today without realising that if she / he is not actively creating the future, there will be no future to lead the business towards.

Mediocre businesses fight fires; while great businesses experience fun, fulfilment, freedom as they go about their day making a difference to their employees and their customers.

Here are one or more of these diseases that a fire-fighting business may be suffering from:

1. Aimnolesia - Suffering from aimlessness and purposelessness. The business leader has a mistaken belief their purpose is to make money, not realising that humans power businesses and what brings the best out of people is when they are working for a cause.

In the words of Richard Branson (Founder, Virgin Group through which he started and controls more than 400 companies with annual turn-over USD 21 Billion) - Being purpose driven (replace with purpose inspired) provides a company the competitive edge, staff confidence and strong innovation. Recent research at Harvard shows that companies with a ‘higher purpose’ are more than three times as likely to retain their employees. Deloitte found that companies with a strong sense of purpose were almost twice as likely to be confident about business growth in both the short and long term.

Recovery protocol: Discover your own purpose, be lit up with it and make that the rallying point for your team. Purpose, Core Values and BHAG is the foundation, and the magic pill. 3HAG is a good maintenance framework.

2. Chasolesia: Businesses who suffer from this disease chase their customers endlessly in an exhausting run and continually blame the market conditions or the incapability of their own people for their fate of negative downward spiral of dwindling revenue and profits.

Recovery protocol: Surgical procedures like Business Model Canvas, Blue Ocean Strategy and Verne Harnish's 7 strata in combination with each other are known to provide 100% recovery rates.

3. Mistakophonia: Businesses who once had a profitable business model live with the mistaken belief that the same old business model will lead them to their glorious future. Business Models are iterative and designed to evolve with the evolving market conditions and customer needs. Businesses who suffer from this disease can't wrap their heads around why they are not successful anymore and continue to fire-fight waiting for the market to turn-around which never does.

Recovery protocol: Same as Chasolesia. The surgical procedure is like the Enema to be administered at regular intervals.

4. Strugglofia - These businesses have found a profitable business model but struggle to bring in the discipline of relentless repeatability and execution excellence. This is a disease because of lack of growth habits. Businesses fail to recognise that like human beings, businesses need growth habits to be disease-free.

Recovery Protocol: Rockefeller Habits

5. Constopia: The Business is constipated with all organs of the business choking - People, Strategy, Execution, Cash.

Recovery Protocol: Hurry, bring in Scaling-up before it's too late.

Wishing you, your families and your businesses A Very Happy Dusshera and Joyous Well-being 🎉

Love and Light,
j.