BinB News | BinB Events Town Sites | Ascot | Bracknell | Henley | Maidenhead | Marlow | Newbury | Slough | Reading | Windsor | Wokingham
NEGATIVITY the certain way to Business Improvement. |
||||
NEGATIVITY the certain way to Business Improvement.
Want a guaranteed way of being met with silence and blank faces? Place a group of your employees or fellow directors in a room and ask them to think of ways to improve the business. Even with a professional, motivational facilitator the creative juices will probably be no more than a trickle. So what is the answer? Well, why not play to our strength rather than our weakness. We British are regarded as the world leaders in negativity. The Australians even call us the whinging pommes. You could count on one hand the number of positive upbeat headlines that have been printed in national newspapers over the last year. We revel in misfortune and failure. We have an amazing knack of finding fault in and degrading the most fantastic successes. The popular soap EastEnders watched by millions every week has the most depressing, negative focussed storylines imaginable. But we love it. The answer then is this. Place the same group of employees or fellow directors in a room and ask them to think of ways to ruin the business. I guarantee the atmosphere will change and the silence and blank faces will be replaced with an air of fun and banter. The creative juices will be flowing and the ideas will come thick and fast. Here are a few questions to get you started: How could we: really annoy our customers? make it easy for our competitors? produce stunningly bad products? deliver appalling service? What would we need to do to: waste huge amounts of money? lose our customers? make our Sales and Marketing completely ineffective? develop an infuriating and pointless website? Etc You now have flip-charts full of negative, destructive ideas which, unless you really do wish to ruin the business, just need to be converted to positive, constructive ideas. And yes this is as simple as writing down the exact opposite of each statement. Once you have the positive, constructive ideas you can now utilise another great British strength. Turning ideas into reality. Go on give it a go. You never know it might actually work. And if it doesnt you will at least have the pleasure of saying I told you so.
|
||||
