Wolf

Good to Better

Tom Wolf published this article on April 19, 2011 in Build your Business. Total Comments: 4 | Comment

In his 2001 bestseller, Good to Great, Jim Collins suggests that all businesses need to raise their expectations. If they do this, good companies can become great companies. At Wolf, we want to become a great company too. But we believe that we can only become a great company by dedicating ourselves to the never ending task of just getting better. Not that I don’t agree with Jim Collins. I’m just concerned that the greatness Collins talks about could be viewed as a final destination. For Wolf, greatness is a continual journey. We understand that we will never reach the point where we can no longer improve. So my fellow employees and I want to take Wolf from good to better, but we want to do it every hour of every day for the rest of our business lives. That’s how we hope to become a great company.

This of course will be very hard. It will be hard because it involves three things with which most people struggle. First it means that all of us at Wolf will need to connect more frequently, more openly and more effectively with our customers. Second, we will need to recognize that we are a far from perfect company. As good as we think we are we must also believe that we can be better at everything we do. And third, we need to celebrate the effort – warts and all – of trying to actually become a better company.

The first of these – reaching out to our customers – is harder than it seems. It is easy for me, for example, to get so wrapped up in my daily office routines that I forget that the purpose of my company is, as Peter Drucker so famously suggested, “to create a customer.” In order to create customers, we need to be in touch with them so that we understand what they want from us. In fact, we need to invite our customers to help us make Wolf better. This clearly takes time and effort, but if we don’t do it we won’t be pursuing our company’s central goal and we won’t be able to do the things that might just make Wolf better.

Second, all of us at Wolf must recognize that we are far from perfect when it comes to serving our customers. We need to make sure we are not indulging in the kind of psychological denial that might lead us to dismiss the things that could make us better. I do not believe this is a problem at Wolf. While all of us certainly believe we are a very good company, we also know we can be even better. To the extent we can avoid the presumption that we are as good as we can be we will increase the likelihood that we will get better.

Finally, we have to become less afraid of mistakes. In fact we have to embrace them for what they are: opportunities for improvement. In his famous book, Out of Crisis, the quality guru W. Edwards Deming argued that companies intent on getting better have to be equally intent on driving fear out of their continual improvement processes. This is much easier said than done. Fear of failure is a natural human trait, and it produces a resistance to change that can destroy any effort to improve. One of our biggest challenges at Wolf is to enable employees at all levels to embrace any and all change that might allow us to do a better job serving our customers.

We want to be a good company. In fact we want to be a great company. And we know that in order to do this, we have to dedicate ourselves to becoming a better company. We also know that our dedication to this task must a permanent one. Wolf is lucky to have so many employees who are eager to do this. We are also lucky to have so many good customers who are continually challenging us to improve. I hope that we will always be able to count on both to help us make the shift from a good company to a better one.

I would be grateful for your comments or suggestions.