Like my friend's mother, this book posits that no matter how successful you or your organization performs, you are probably functioning below your potential. We become creatures of habits. We approach daily challenges in predictable ways. In the authors' word, we are "stalled." We have developed habits that prevent us from achieving our full potential.
The authors prescribe a simple, well-written eight-step process to overcome these personal and organizational obstacles. The goal is to institute new habits built around asking and answering new and better questions. Like an athlete, if the prescription is followed daily, you and your organization will learn to bypass the stalls that tap potential.
Follow this inspired, yet commonsense approach, you may, indeed, "make it over the back fence."
The authors provide an eight-step process for breaking up stalled thinking and allowing creative, productive thinking to occur. These steps include measuring performance, deciding what to measure, identification of the future and the best practice to measure it, implementing for beyond the near-term future, pursuing the theoretical best practice, identifying the right people and right motivation, then repeat the process.
One of the most important points is that things change and you need to be able to change with them. Creating a best practice scenario based on wrong information, sticking to it when things change, failing to see the change, and similar items all lead us to stalled thinking. The problem with many companies is that they don't even realize they are stalled until it is too late and they have been leap-frogged by their competition. This text does an excellent job of teaching how to spot stalled thinking and do something about it. On the other hand, following the process moves past stalled thinking whether you recognize it or not. "The 2,000 Percent Solution" is a recommended read for any businessperson.
"The purpose of this book," the authors state, "is to shock you out of your complacency, to get you to think, and to get you to act." Why? Because "no matter how successful your organization is, it is performing way below its easily achievable potential. If your organization is like most, it is probably functioning below average in many important activities."
The "2,000 percent solution" proposes that we can become twenty times more productive and efficient, whether we are operating a large corporation or an entrepreneurial venture with limited staffing. That's mind-boggling. . .not just doubling or tripling our results, but multiplying them twenty times over.
During my twenty-three years in management, I encountered every "stall" the authors describe. Even worse, I created some of them myself. Too bad I didn't know about their "stall busters" then.
In every chapter, the book reminds me of Socrates' teaching method. Like him, the authors ask probing questions, challenging readers to abandon comfort, lethargy, outworn traditions, and harmful habits.
I consider The 2,000 Percent Solution an ideal book for a company's training session. The next time I direct one of my seminars, I will open with this quotation from chapter nine: "If your productivity rose by 15 percent this year, but you had the potential for 50 percent gains, you may have actually lost ground against current and future competititors."
Mitchell, Coles, and West made me reexamine my goals. As a result, my "future best practice" has changed. Yours will too, after you read this provocative book.