The easiest thing you’ll ever do in your business life is hire tons of ineffective employees. It’s easier than coming up with blog post titles that have nothing to do with the content of the post! So I’ll keep it short:
Round up all the employees you’ve got on your payroll that resist change and like their job description clearly stated in a clear bullet point list that doesn’t change… and fucking fire them right now. Seriously, don’t even bother reading this blog post: People that don’t work on changing your organization for the better, that don’t tinker/tweak/test better ways of running your business should be templated, documented and outsourced… immediately.
Business that doesn’t innovate doesn’t improve and doesn’t survive. The End.
Only keep the people that are capable of thinking and eager to make things work – better, faster, more efficiently, more effectively. Keep your creative core. Like the reliability of the person that keeps your books – fantastic, outsource it to a CPA agency where they don’t suck the life out of your organization. Like the accountability of the janitor that shows up every day – hire a custodial firm and focus the company culture on improvement, not stagnation.
Unfortunately, you better be really passionate about what you do because having a company full of passionate and creative people is like staffing a grocery store with a bunch of starving zoo animals. They will wreck the joint fast – so you have to keep them motivated, distracted, driven and constantly moving the target. A bored creative person will find a way to entertain themselves at work and that is not going to be fun, just trust me on that one.
That’s it.
This is the brave new world. Everyone is eager for the buck and the lazy, unmotivated, change-resistant people are dime-a-dozen, outsource your mundane tasks to the sweat shops that will hire them and keep them in check with the kinds of HR controls that would make Henry Ford roll over in his grave. In a competitive market dealing with innovation and constant change the only advantage is your ability to quickly adjust and effectively promote your gig. If it’s easy, it will be automated.. if it’s time consuming, it will be outsourced to the third world, if it’s cheaper.. well, it’s only gonna get cheaper:
So if you’re not where you need to be going there is no time like now to start moving.
Happy Monday.
This post has been partially inspired by Dell. Yes, even they realized that nobody can make money on cheap PCs and are trying to take the company private because admitting to their entire shareholder base that they need to cook the golden goose to move to the next level is.. challenging. Odds are, your problems are smaller so if Dell can do it, you can too. Or you can keep on building PCs and refilling printer cartridges for people that work like it’s 1999. I’m sure you’re smarter than Dell and more successful too. Wake the f up. : )
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