Simplification (Phase 2) What are some potential pitfalls during simplification?

You know, it's interesting. I mean, it's unlimited with the amount of ways that we can make mistakes on it, but candidly, it comes down to just a few areas. So the first is, uh, it's almost— I call it malicious compliance. They said I had to come in, I need to segment my data, and I need to raise prices. So they just go do it. They don't think about it at all. They go, all these are small, let's double the prices. These aren't over here and doing very well, let's get rid of that. It will not work. I assure you, you're going to slow down, pause, Try a few things. Some will work better than others. Those that do work, do more of that. What's not working, let's stop that, right? So it takes that thinking. It takes that ability to take a couple of steps forward, understand what happens, pivot, and then go to the next piece. The other thing that you have to take into consideration as you do it is how's the company doing? If the company's in trouble and we're having a cash flow situation, we may have to move a lot faster And deal with a lot more noise in it than if the company's very stable and has been growing at GDP or typical growth that's coming in year in, year out. So depending on where the organization is at, depending on what demands of the market that are happening, and then depending on what we see is going on out there, it really will determine what steps we can take and what speed we can go at. On the second side of it is things that we call them sacred cows or monuments to us, right? It's things that if for whatever reason, maybe it was founder-led, maybe it was the way we always did it, or maybe they tried it once this way and it didn't work, whatever it is, we get these areas where you go, this cannot be touched, it has to be this way, and there's no rhyme or reason for it. You know, I remember once we, uh, working for a company and the company had been around for over 100 years, and in 100 years you get a lot of processes and a lot of things change during that period of time. We went from no computers to everything's Well, outside of our office was a line of filing cabinets. And every day this lady would come in and she would file the yellow sheets. And for those of you who are a certain age, you may remember when you filled out orders, there would be multiple copies. It'd be a white copy, a pink copy, a yellow copy, and on and on. And each one of those copies had a reason for existing. Maybe one would go to engineering, maybe one would go to accounting and things like that. Well, we had had all those documents. Now think about it. Today, most orders don't even get written down anymore. They're electronic. They may even come in over the internet. You don't even see them. Well, we still wrote out every one of those, and we would take that back copy in yellow, and we would go and it was filed, right? And this line of filing cabinets is stretching out in front of our office. It kind of went all the way down the hall, and it was literally 100 years worth of documents in that piece. And I remember talking to a lady when I go, why do you do that? She goes, well, this is how we do it, right? It took a person full-time filing this thing. So, we wanted to take and make a change. And it was amazing how much the company fought us on it. Right? It was like, what happens if you won't have traceability? What happens if the system goes down? On and on and on and on. But we were spending about $100,000 a year filing a piece of paper that nobody wanted. Well, long story short, we took all those filing cabinets. We took them out of the hallway. We moved them out into a warehouse and we quit filing with it. And guess what? The business never missed it at all. Right. Well, now why is that? Maybe 20 years ago it was important, but today we have things stored on the cloud. We have it backed up. We have it back. It's actually more secure today than it ever was when it was a written document because it's backed up in multiple sites around the world, both in digital form and in a way that you download it and on tape off of it. So it's those kind of changes that you'll find when you go into an organization that we keep doing it this way. Nobody knows why anymore, but it was always done that way. It is actually a little scary as the leader. You're going to walk in here and think, I'm going to ask them not to file that yellow paper. What if I'm wrong? Well, this is what it is, right? You have to make that decision. You have to go on. Try not to make bet-the-company decisions all at once though, right? Maybe you don't file that for a little while. Maybe you just save it on the side, see what happens, see if one's actually using it. Get people together, ask them, does anyone actually use it? When's the last time it was actually looked at, right? Don't make the decisions in a vacuum, but as the leader, if you're going to take your company and your team to the future, you're going to have to give up some of the things you were doing in the past. You just can't afford to keep them. You make those obvious ones. Maybe we don't need documents like that anymore, but be prepared. Sometimes you're going to get it wrong. You're going to have to go back and do it over, but stay strong. You'll absolutely get there. Most of the things are pretty obvious what needs to happen.