One thing you have to learn in business, and in life for that matter, is that things don’t just happen. Call it cause and effect or whatever you want but things happen for a reason; they were caused. This is important to know when managing a business and you see, by graphing your metrics as we covered earlier, that you are either improving or getting worse. If you think you are staying the same – you are mistaken, as attrition alone, depreciation and wear and tear are bringing you down.

Your business is either improving or worsening and if you think it’s the same, it’s worsening as, depreciation, inflation and a variety of other factors are causing attrition. You are either going up or down. When things are going better, the tendency is to do nothing. Why would you? Leave well enough alone, right? Wrong. The right thing to do is to find out what’s causing your improvement. Maybe you had an effective piece of promotion, maybe it was a personnel addition (or a firing). Whatever it is, locate it and see how it was improving things and do more of that type of improvement.

If you hired a personnel and things started going better – then, why? What is this personnel doing? How can we do more of that? Oddly, sometimes firing a personnel improves things. What was that personnel doing that was depressing the scene? Let’s say it was a grumpy Receptionist. Ok, well a company policy for all personnel along the line of “Always be friendly, even under difficult circumstances”, might give more increase.

So what do you do if things are going poorly? Look at your metrics graph and see when things started worsening and then look just before that time period and see what changed. The larger the organization the farther back you look. A large organization is like a ship. It takes a while for it to change direction. A small organization is like a dingy – it can change direction on a dime. So when you find what changed that caused the worsening, unchange it.

The main point here is that things get better or worse for a reason and Active Management finds these reasons and addresses them.  Active Management is successful management when you take the right steps. So give it a try.

– Ron Norton

Copyright © 2019 by Ronald C. Norton