What lessons can you learn about tradition and innovation?
Every great tradition of the band started out as an innovation — Script Ohio, Hang on Sloopy, Across the Field — everything had its debut moment. The trick is to continually debut new material and strong pieces that have potential of becoming traditions, and let the fans (or in the case of a business, the customers) make the decisions. If the band doesn’t play Sloopy often enough, the fans will start yelling for it.
In business, the analogy is listening to the customers and letting them be the arbiters of which innovations should become traditions. Be quick to abandon the ones that don’t work — like playing the sinking of the Titanic during the 41-14 loss to Florida in the National Championship game. You also need to continue to refine the innovations that are successful. If you look at historic photos of Script Ohio versus what it looks like today, it has the same fundamental design, but the form is very different. Years of refinement of the fundamentals and tweaking the overall design of the performance make it truly incomparable among college and university band performances. Once you’ve got something that’s worthy of becoming a tradition in your business, keep drilling on it and refining it to improve the overall effect.
How do you integrate these lessons into your business?
Start by identifying the fundamentals. These are the high repetition activities that occur over and over again. Identify steps in each function of the business. Employees that do them should be involved to document and understand them, and then work on refining and improving the steps. Determine if you can eliminate any steps in order to make them faster, more effective, increase the quality or improve the effect on your customers.
What benefits will you see by integrating these lessons into your business?
The value of the focus on the fundamentals is the easiest to see. You repeat these things so often that adding a little more to the price or selling a few more each month can really impact the performance of your business and make you grow more profitably.
Jim Lane is the director of GBQ Redbank Advisors, GBQ Partners LLC. Reach him at (614) 947-5257 or [email protected].
