Opinion: Reinvention avoids familiarity in business

We all have lived long enough to admit the future will happen to us unless we give it direction.

We cannot play catch up somewhere in July; whatever we want our business to be, it must be designed now.

So, let’s get started.

Your first initiative will take place on the left side of your neocortex.

It works this way: Every day you walk into work and see the same furniture in the same indentations in the carpet, the same coffee maker on the same faux-marble counter top, the same forms in the same putty-colored, plastic “in” tray.

You also face the same “You’ve Got Mail” on your computer screen and the same faces popping up like prairie dogs within the putty-colored cubicle maze.

Familiarity … your worst enemy.

How can anyone come up with a new business strategy, product idea or irresistible service that will bloat your bank account over the next 12 months if you choose to be swallowed in sameness?

I am not suggesting you change your décor (although the lava lamp really should go) but that you change the way you see your work.

Look around.

People like Madonna and companies like Apple just keep reinventing themselves.

Can anyone remember when Madonna was labeled a “one-hit wonder” who would obviously fade onto a torn and worn Trivial Pursuit card? Is there anyone reading this who can remember in 1989 when Apple Computer was selling for $12 a share and Silicon Valley was toasting its demise?

Clearing your organizational brain will require:

1. A temporary suspension of judgmental statements (“That will never work, we tried it before and it was a miserable failure.”);

2. That you encourage frontline staff who do the work to “play” with ideas; and

3. That you allot time to sift through all the ideas to identify, as a team, the next iPod in your workplace.

The second initiative will be the death-defying moment when, after you do your homework, you scream, “Ready-or-not here we come!”

It has taken me 20 years of working with corporate America to figure out it is not the really smart people who make all the money; it is the really smart risk-taking people.

Risk greases the skids to greatness.

You took a risk when you stepped into a slippery shower today, drove your car within 24 inches of some unnamed human being aiming his 3,000 pounds of polished metal at you and kissed your child goodbye before he or she entered an educational world beyond your control.

Bryan Bowers, chief underwriting officer of the Centre Group, took the risk to provide insurance to a luxury ocean-liner condo project, a power plant in the Columbian rain forest and a steel-galvanizing plant in Estonia. Last year his company grossed $882 million in revenue on assets of $7.6 billion.

Southwest Airlines in 2004 took a risk on fuel options that have awarded them the lowest per-air-mile cost in the industry.

In 1964, Thomas Watson Jr. took a gamble that his company, IBM, would inherit the future when he introduced System 360.

After $750 million in R&D and $4.5 billion in new factories, System 360 tripled IBM’s revenues to $7 billion plus. Remember IBM’s competitors at that time? Burroughs, RCA and Sperry?

Finally, as you approach the New Year, check your GPS. I am talking about your Growth Profit Strategy.

Jack Stack, the guru of the ownership culture, calls this your “critical number.”

All of your goose bump-laden creativity and bungee-jumping risk-taking will be a waste of your corporate time if you do not have a profit target.

This number is the altar to which you continually lead your entire organization.

Organizations that are not profitable are expendable. This economy is not kind to just kindness. You have to know, at all times, where you are in on the road to profitability.

A year from now, will your organization look and feel exactly the same as it does today?

Only you have the answer.

Cal LeMon of Executive Enrichment Inc. solves organizational problems with customized training and consulting.