If you’re not getting better, you’re getting worse by David
Brandon
Extract from Lessons Learned – Straight talk from the world’s top business
leaders - Making Strategy Work
50 Lessons (Harvard Business Press) £6.49
www.FiftyLessons.com
I was influenced by my experience early in my adult life as a college football
player at a high level. One of the things I observed during that period was
that I was a part of a very successful program. We won virtually every game.
We won the championship every year, and yet we were a bunch of eighteen- to
twenty-one-year-old kids who could easily have developed an attitude that we
were so good and so successful that we didn’t need to work hard or prepare;
all we needed to do was to show up, and we would win.
I observed how great coaches handle a very interesting dynamic like that,
because it happens in business all the time. You have a great quarter or
two, you’re doing very well against your budgets and plans, the media is
writing all kinds of nice things about you, and the easiest thing you can do
is to back off and start to believe that it’s all going to happen
automatically. The way the coaches dealt with it was by drumming into our
heads a fundamental belief system that you either get better or you get
worse; things never stay the same. We heard that over and over and over
again. You cannot stay the same; you’re either going to get better or you’re
going to get worse.
Once we began to believe that as a team, we understood that it didn’t matter
whether next Saturday we were going into the game favoured to win by forty
points. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that we had to get better, we
had to perform at a higher level as benchmarked against how we performed in
the previous games, because we truly believed—the coaches helped us to
believe—that if we weren’t getting better, we were going to get worse. There
wasn’t an opportunity for us to simply stay the same and live in a static
situation.
I took that learning, went into business, and I observed over and over again
situations where organizations become complacent. They become apathetic.
They believe that everything they touch is going to turn to gold, and that
all they have to do is hand out their business card, talk a little bit about
who they are and their track record for success, and good things are going
to happen. Invariably, those are the companies that fail, because they don’t
understand the concept of either getting better or getting worse; they try
to stay the same.
One of the things that I do over and over again at my organization is to
reinforce the concept that we have to get better, that even during times of
tremendous success, if we get complacent and start to read the press
clippings and believe that we’re better than we are, we’re going to fall
back.
One of the concepts that is truly essential if you really want to have a
high-performance organization is the concept of continuous improvement. It’s
almost a cliché, but it really is something that the culture has to embrace,
and it has to manifest itself in everyday behavior. The notion is, “I have
to figure out a way to do something a little bit better today than I did
yesterday.” And if you can foster that in the culture of your organization,
great things happen.
A big part of it is how you benchmark your results. For many years as a
private company, Domino’s really benchmarked against itself, without looking
at the outside world. We were proud of the fact that for many years we had
positive same-store sales, which is a big financial indicator of growth and
success in the retail world. Well, that was the good news.
The bad news was that during those same years our competitors were growing at
a faster rate. We were actually giving up market share. At the same time, we
were hosting internal celebrations of the fact that against our own internal
matrix we were doing well. We not only had to look at what had been our past
results and reconcile how we were performing against that benchmark, but
also we needed to look at the world around us, look at our competitors, and
in many instances, I really wanted us to look at the very best in class. Who
is out there doing the best possible job in this particular area of
business? We need to find out what their results are and start to hold
ourselves accountable for that particular level of performance.
We accept mediocrity because we can choose a lot of people around us who are
just as mediocre as we are. I want to find the very, very best, and I want
to benchmark against them, and I want to get as good or better. I think if I
lead that expectation and I get my team and my organization to embrace it,
that’s how we’re going to become world-class performers.
Takeaways
When an organization is successful, people tend to believe that they can stop
improving. But things never stay the same: either you get better, or you get
worse.
The minute companies become complacent and apathetic is the minute they begin
to fail. To have a high-performance organization, you must foster a culture
of continuous improvement.
Don’t accept mediocrity. Instead, look to your competitors, and benchmark
yourself against them to achieve world-class performance.
