6 Business Ideas To Challenge Executive Thinking

Ideas challenging the status quo can face roadblocks in just about any company. Yet, it may be that those are ideas that can let in more light so that effective change can take place. Here are six:

1. Business owners can be wrong. Scratch entrepreneurs and it doesn’t take much to discover their immense pride in the business and, ironically, a dogmatic belief in their own ideas that may do it damage. The president of a highly successful industrial business became so enamored with breaking new ground in his industry by selling equipment on the Internet that he made a substantial investment in an e-commerce website without researching whether customers would purchase his company’s type of products online. The venture failed. What we think about our business can distort reality and interfere with meeting today’s challenges and tomorrow’s opportunities.

2. Everything is never on the table. It’s pure posturing and anyone who puts it to the test, gets hurt. Just ask GM’s recently fired marketing chief. He’s the one who came up with the campaigns for Chevrolet, “Love it or return it” and “Chevy runs deep.” He also opted out of Super Bowl XII advertising and cancelled GM’s Facebook ads just prior to the social media giant going public. Most revealing, he also discovered that other things run even deeper at GM; namely, “That ain’t the way we do it around here.” When someone says, “Everything is on the table,” don’t believe it. They may think they mean it, but there are always activities that are untouchable.

3. It’s all about strategy. When Mark B. Kerwin, chief financial officer of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, was asked about the biggest challenge he faces, he said: “Staying strategic as opposed to tactical.” Steve Jobs couldn’t have said it better. First and foremost, Jobs was a brilliant strategist. His commitment was to building a company that built beautiful things that consumers admire and love to use in their daily lives. TechCrunch describes Mountain Lion, Apple’s latest operating system, as “definitely the most polished and robust version of OS X yet.” Tactics are easier to understand and far more fun, but most of the time, they’re temporary and don’t advance us to the goal.

4. “Customers for life” is deception. Why? Because it’s counter-intuitive, naïve — and dangerous. Yet, these three words seem so ingrained in our thinking that Googling them produces 1, 390,000 results. Even against such a mountain of evidence, it’s still an illusion. It should be obvious that customers are never for life: they die, find a better deal, move, change their lifestyles, retire or want something new. In the business world, some merge or sell, go out of business, or become obsolete. In spite of businesses doing everything possible to keep customers happy, they still leave. Yet, bloggers, speakers, and business writers implore us to embrace the notion that we can keep them forever. Businesses are best served by abandoning mythical thinking, such as “customers for life,” and embrace reality with a “nothing is forever” mentality.

5. Downed by the demon of self-deception. Self-deception is the biggest human stumbling block, and just about every business is plagued with this unrelenting problem. Cheating gives students false confidence in their abilities, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. The upshot seems to be that once we lie, it doesn’t take much for us to convince ourselves that we’re not lying. Ask the president of a successful consumer services company to describe his primary business objective and he would undoubtedly say, “Putting our customers first.” In all sincerity, he would mean it. Yet, this same president sent a letter to his customers filled with dozens of references as to why customers should do business with his company, but giving no rationale as to why or how customers would benefit by doing so. It was as if he was writing the letter to himself. To test out just how widespread self-deception is in business, watch employees’ faces when the president or sales manager is holding forth on the company’s newest product launch, announcing next year’s goals or the need to increase productivity. Then you can see the clash of two quite different realities.

6. Forget about “The Great Person.” At Talbot’s, the women’s clothing retailer, there has been a parade of CEOs, each one further lowering its sales and increasing its debt. The story is the same at Yahoo, where hope now hangs on yet another CEO.

It might be helpful if boards of directors stopped believing that the next executive holds the key. The “Great (Man) Person Theory” has had its day, even though its vestiges can be found everywhere, including business. As science writer Matt Ridley says, innovation depends on exchange. Arguably, it’s the same in America: Silicon Valley in technology, Boston in medical care, New York in finance and Las Vegas in casinos.

In business, as elsewhere, ideas, as much as action, make a difference. Companies that put action above ideas may find that they are doing a lot of things backwards.