Discerning Use of Resources

Just because you can does not mean you should…

Last week I wrote about sweating the small stuff and how we need to look for the small items that reveal future breakdowns and address them proactively. This week I am writing about discernment.

Our ability to decide where to use our resources greatly impacts our performance. We have a limited amount of time, sanity, money, and expertise and we need to figure out how to use them in a way that yields the results we are looking for. Better, faster, cheaper. Its an old adage in business. For us, it is what we want with the “commodity” tasks of our company. We want to get better, faster, and cheaper with these items as well as increase their number.

For the non-commodity items, we need our specialists to focus on developing more coordinated specialty options that are better tested, and have a greater likelihood of success. Though It may seem counter-intuitive, the path to developing our specialties that will unleash our potential is to create more commodity tasks. This applies to all disciplines of our business.

Early on, our leadership team was forced to be “generalists in all departments”. One by one, we have been able to better support our the team with a team of focused specialists with clear goals. There was a lot of learning that went into it and personal struggles people had with addressing their habits, but in the end, to everyone’s benefit, the company is significantly healthier.