Since the beginning of business, various methods for operating and developing the business have been identified and refined. These have evolved into the conventional methods that we use today. We improve management and effect business change by adding new conventional methods on the existing methods in place. We now have a large business change and management improvement industry. There are thousands of books explaining business and management improvement. Management gurus put on all kinds of seminars. Many companies participate, such as vendors with packaged solutions, websites selling improvement methods and techniques, business change consultants and their methodologies, etc. The whole industry is based on touting different ways to do the same things. Over the past decade, we saw supposed breakthroughs like business process re-engineering, business transformation methods, and enterprise resource planning. But, these were not breakthroughs, since they did not address fundamental problems. They were just new names and methods to do the same old things. Why are there so many different ways to do the same thing? Why isn't there just one right way? It is simply because all of these different ways are the wrong way, because they build on fundamental problems. Since all the different ways we do things are wrong, we can only define the right way by identifying the wrong ways that are generally-accepted. The basis for our methods and standards is not because they are the fundamentally sound and understood right away, but because they are the most widely-accepted wrong way. If anyone ever comes up with the one right way, it would be known and accepted and all of the wrong ways would be obsolete. How many methods do we have and how many books have been written about the symptoms of fundamental problems that arise in corporate governance, organization and change management, investment management, capital development, performance management, cost and value management, solution alignment, business collaboration, etc. Why do we keep coming up with new solutions, if previous solutions were supposed to have solved the problem? Since the beginning of business, no one has ever stopped to think, "Is the way things have always been done the best way". What we do is to accept the way that things have always been done as the basis and try to improve the way that things have always been done. So no one ever studies the possibility that the fundamentals of how we define a business enterprise may be faulty, or that basic definitions employed in our management methods and books may be flawed. New conventional business change methods devise ways to alleviate the symptoms of fundamental problems inherent in the way things have always been done. This we can do ad infinitum without ever solving the problems. Management improvement books are written using the academic approach, where the existing body of knowledge or published record is accepted as the valid basis. Many of the books cut, reorganize, and paste what has already been written. Other books describe innovative ways enterprises are coping with conventional methods. The objective is to produce some incremental improvement. Conventional approaches to business change and management improvement prevent the breakthrough needed to solve problems inherent in the fundamentals of what we are trying to change or improve. We come up with more and more solutions, enterprises spend more and more money on change and improvement, and the fundamental problems remain untouched. This is great for the booming business change and management improvement industry. But is it great for our enterprises and their investors? We need to step back and take a completely new look at the basics of our business enterprise. What are the basic things the enterprise does? Can we define and measure these basic things? What are the commonalties that are basic to all enterprises? Can we construct a strong foundation from the basics of what all business enterprises do? We should also look at what differentiates our enterprises. Can we define a specific areas that enterprises design for themselves to gain advantage? Can we standardize other areas for collaboration and common solutions? If we do this properly, we will have one fundamental right way to describe and organize any enterprise and one right way to solve each of the business problems we all face. |
