Get Back Inside The Box
by Joe Calloway

We can get so carried away with new ideas and thinking "outside the box" that sometimes we miss the greatest potential opportunity for significant improvement. With all of their innovative thinking, top performers are also constantly looking at the most basic elements of their business for opportunities to improve. It may be that while you're creatively brainstorming for exciting new ideas, you're losing customers because you're not meeting their basic expectations.

Sometimes you need to get back inside the box. What's the potential return if you significantly improve your delivery of core customer wants and needs? What if, instead of coming up just with something that's new, you come up with a better way of solving customers' everyday problems? What if, instead of trying to create a new buzzer or bell to for your product, you focused on delivering consistency of performance and absolute reliability?

You might be knocking yourself out to come up with a new menu item for your hamburger stand when what your customers really want is for you to ensure the hamburgers you're already selling are served hot. What are you already doing that you can do better? This is where you may want to invest your time and effort. Retool and upgrade what you're already doing, and you may be surprised at the return on your investment. You have to be both a tortoise and a hare. You have to innovate while continuing to improve on core competencies.

The reason we generally don't look inside the box for potential areas of improvement is our old nemesis, past success. If I know I'm good at something that has worked in the past, the temptation is to settle for my present level of performance. Don't settle. Look at everything you do now, and see where you can do better.