The Pain of Change

How hard is it to affect change in your organization? On a scale of 1 to 10, with ten being akin to moving a mountain with an ice cream scoop and a wheelbarrow, how hard is it for your company to make a truly different decision and act on it?

Let me give you an example. What if, within your senior staff, someone began authoring a blog. Then someone else began blogging. Soon, a handful of people within your company are posting to their blogs on a regular basis. In fact, you find there is a good bit of social media interaction on these blogs. Your company is in a hot category and people are talking about key industry issues.

Knowing the situation, would your company have the courage to author a corporate blog? Would you put yourself out there in the uncertain world of social media and be willing to take a stand? What is the risk? What's the potential reward?

Here's another one. What about altering your channel marketing strategy? What if you determined you needed to narrow your distribution focus — which means you will no longer be using 20% of the distributors you once used. Would you make the change? Would you risk losing business in order to gain market share?

Rarely do minor adjustments net noticeable changes. Fine tuning may make the existing marketing marginally more effective, but most companies are not looking for marginally better results. They want big improvements.

To achieve marked improvement, significant change must occur. And since there is never enough money to do everything you want to do, you must focus on doing fewer things, better.

Focus requires sacrifice. Perhaps it means attending fewer trade shows in the coming year. Or not launching a product until you have a better idea of the market's interest. Or narrowing your media spend to reach the heavy users only.

When you focus. When you concentrate your resources into a more narrow framework, you will see results. This is when you can truly affect change.

If you believe change is needed for your business to see marked results, then the only option is to focus your resources on those things that will truly have an impact. Failing to do so will give you exactly the result you had before. And that means you're standing still.