To stop the chaos in your business you must first acknowledge your business is in it!
It’s true, “DENIAL is not just a river in Egypt!”
Denial is a symptom of pride. Something a leader must control, in order to lead others to the promised land of order. To be blunt, you can’t fix what you refuse to admit is broke.
In light of that, consider a statement by Michael Gerber, author of a top-selling business book, The E-Myth. Now, don’t shoot the messenger, but I’ve found Gerber’s following statement is true:
“YOU are the problem, YOU have always been the problem, and YOU always will be the problem, until YOU CHANGE!”
Yep, he was addressing prideful, hard-headed business owners who desire to grow and improve their company, but have a “blame-others-first” approach.
That in-your-face statement made a huge impact ON and IN my business world.
From that perspective, we set out on a mission to systematically change every phase of our business operations. From front to back, from opening to closing, and all points in between. We left NO stone unturned.
How to Stop Chaos Permanently
The first stop, was to identify our biggest hole; the one where most of our waste occurred.
Identifying this process center as “Enemy No. 1”, we set about implementing a detailed Quality Control Checklist that left nothing to chance, before a press operator hit the print button.
As a result, the FIRST time using our new Quality Control Checklist prevented a major error. Unbelievably, the job was ready to print on the WRONG color paper. In fact, this job was for a major new account.
Everyone in production was stunned, and had to agree: ONE little prompt on ONE little checklist saved our bacon. Yes, they were shocked, and I was shocked!
To illustrate how providential this was, our entire production team was present. Whereby, I was training everyone on how to properly use a QC checklist. Now I was thinking, why didn’t we do this, years ago?
With this proof-positive victory, and everyone in our company now onboard to STOP all chaos, the race was on! We implemented quality control checklists for every process center in our production workflow.
Wow! What a change in culture, and a sense of peace came over our company.
Next STOP was to remove ALL clutter in our business. We designed, tested, and retested a system we called The 100% System of Cleanliness. IT WORKED! Oh my, how it worked!
A Snag, Then Back to Final Victory Over Chaos
To be honest, we hit a snag or two—well, maybe four—while implementing our total quality control system.
PROBLEM WAS, we didn’t have a FOLLOW-UP SYSTEM for ensuring all control checklists and policies were performed consistently and correctly.
In fact, during one discouraging snag, I went to my office disheartened, thinking, “Maybe this SYSTEM STUFF is too difficult!” But, thank God, within ten minutes of gloom, the light came on! I suddenly KNEW what we needed, that would ensure the race to victory.
“We need a SYSTEM TO CHANGE THE SYSTEM,” I shouted to myself. “That’s it, a simple system to update and monitor ALL SYSTEMS!”
After about a week of designing, testing, analyzing, and retesting, to ensure it worked, we implemented what we called, The System Buster Locator.
In short, this system addressed and corrected ALL non-compliance and non-conformance to our new system of control over chaos.
Read all about it! System Busters: How to Stop Them in Your Business.
Did I mention? Great systems WORK!
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