It’s Time to Stop Messing Around

Performance Excellence is poised to become more and more important at your company—or it’s not. Investment in better processes is key to executing your company’s growth strategy, or it’s key to ensuring your company survives a downturn, or it’s key to…something else. Anyway, I’m sure it’s key.

What I’m saying is that the ability to drive growth and reduce cost by simply picking up the low-hanging (or ground) fruit is coming to an end. That’s because there’s just not much fruit left on the ground, anymore than there’s much oil or copper or silver left in the ground. Low hanging fruit as a cheap commodity is running out. So we have to start figuring out how to make our way up the tree to the other fruit that’s up there…somewhere.

Plus, there’s the fact that they’re even starting to clear the ground in places like China and India, and even Africa. They’re picking up their fruit at a remarkable pace. And companies that are just focused on low-hanging fruit today will find themselves with a full belly a couple of years from now—for a short time—only to quickly find that there’s nothing much to eat in their future.

So it’s time to get with the program and acknowledge that we have to deal with the hard stuff. We have to deal with a myriad of data, complex processes, convoluted supply chains and ever more demanding customers. If your company hasn’t already embraced the principles of Lean and Six Sigma, we can only hope you’re not too late. And if you’re planning a three year Lean Six Sigma implementation before turning your attention to concepts like structured innovation—you are too late.

As one of my old coaches once said, if you’re early—that’s on time. On time—that’s late. And late—that’s just plain unacceptable. The question for you and your company is whether it’s too late to be early.