One of the key members of my team, Jared, comes into work with a bag of candy. There are lots of pieces in there, probably several hundred. There are purple pieces, green pieces, yellow pieces, and orange pieces. And through the day, what I notice is, Jared has a system for how he eats his candy. He’ll sequester one color. Maybe it’s orange. And just eat the orange pieces until they’re all gone. Maybe the next day he works on green. The following day, he works on purple.
Now, it doesn’t really matter that Jared has a system for how he eats his candy but what I notice is there is a system. And many times, we create systems in our life and sometimes, the systems we create over things that aren’t really that significant or important.
My question to you is this. If we’ll create systems for those types of items, will we create the systems that we need in our business to be successful? Do we look at the way that we engage our customers? Do we look at our sales process? Do we create a system for managing information inside of our organization? Because the organizations that create the most thorough and well thought out systems are the ones that are going to provide the better service, provide the better experience for their clients and best position themselves for growth.
Here’s my challenge to you. Look at your business. Look at the different areas of your business and charge those people who are in charge of those different areas of your business to come up with systems, to streamline the existing systems, to make sure that their systems are only aimed at delivering value.
I don’t want you to create systems for the purpose of having systems. I don’t want you to clutter what you’re doing but I want you organized. I want you streamlined and I want you to make sure that every step of your system is designed to deliver value, either value to your internal customers, the employees of the organization or your external customers. Because when you’re focused on delivering value, you’re going to be focused on getting a return and that’s where organizational growth comes from.
