Popcorn Worth Sharing / YoStella! Newsletter
Groundhog Day Might Be the Best Management Movie Ever Made.
Some companies don’t need reinvention. They need to stop reliving the same bad Tuesday.
There are businesses where February 2 happens roughly 240 times a year.
The phone rings. The same customer has the same problem. Somebody from sales blames operations. Operations blames the CRM. The CRM, having achieved sentience, quietly considers changing industries.
The following morning, everybody does it again.
This is what makes Groundhog Day such a sneaky management movie. Bill Murray's Phil Connors is trapped in the same day, waking to the same song, making the same mistakes, getting increasingly annoyed that the universe has apparently misplaced the exit.
Early on, he treats repetition like a personal insult. He tries shortcuts. He throws tantrums. He looks for a loophole.
I have sat through planning meetings with exactly the same emotional range.
Then Phil starts paying attention. He notices people. Learns things. Practices things. Gets better at the small stuff, partly because he's run out of dramatic solutions and partly because, at last, he understands the day he's living in.
A lot of businesses are waiting for a dramatic solution, too. A new strategy. A new platform. New leadership. A consultant with a particularly confident slide deck.
Sometimes they need one of those things. More often than anybody likes to admit, they need to fix what happened yesterday.
The missed handoff. The customer who never got called back. The proposal that sits waiting for someone to press Send. The weekly report nobody reads but everybody updates because it's always been there.
None of this photographs particularly well for an annual report. “We made our follow-up process less stupid” lacks the glamour of “enterprise transformation.” Yet customers tend to prefer the former.
The film doesn't reward Phil for escaping the routine. It rewards him for learning how to live differently inside it.
So when the same complaint shows up at your company for the sixth time, don't automatically call it a fresh problem.
It's probably Tuesday again.
#Leadership #ContinuousImprovement