I’ve seen a lot of diseases in companies, usually undiagnosed. It’s hard not to have a couple and some are more pernicious than others. Here are some of my favorites. Most are even treatable!
Shiny Object Chasers Syndrome (Your business has ADHD)
Nobody can sit still and finish a task because there are rainbows to chase! A bunch of visionaries in ecstasy about the easy part of a new idea: the beginning part…it’s so novel and exciting during that part! But no one is hot for the hard work after the honeymoon phase — so there’s no follow through — on to the next thing.
Employees here are spores in the wind, changing direction constantly. The overflowing cemetery of half-baked and half-built ideas grows daily. No worries because — Glitter! Squirrel!
Firefighter-itis (Your business has Chronic Anxiety & Panic Attacks)
“We don’t deal with problems around here until they’re on fire. Heavy smoke is a problem for tomorrow!” These people spend their time rushing from one emergency to the next, leaving embers in their wake. So, the fires keep multiplying. The quick-fix band-aid solutions usually employed (because they’re “quick”) don’t do anything to cure the underlying issue - so it’s just kicking the can down the road.
You’re apt to hear things like “hey drop everything you’re doing (you know…that life-or-death emergency from yesterday) and do this instead, all hands on deck!!”
It feels high stakes. Your hair is on fire all the time. But somebody’s gotta keep all those plates spinning. Cortisol pulses through you from the unending fight-or-flight response. It’s kind of exciting, but so is running from wolves.
Asleep-at-the-Wheel Malaise (Your business has Somnambulism)
Everyone is sleepwalking. You all kind of just zone out at work – you find yourself home again later with a blurry memory of how you got there. There’s a startling lack of innovation and initiative around here. Your company still uses windows 95, you don’t accept credit cards, you heard somebody was working on a company website, but it’s been a few years and not totally sure if that ever happened. Why fix something that isn’t broken…yet…somehow? Settling into the sweet slumber of contentedness.
You know when you have that fuzzy dream where you do your whole morning routine and then you wake up half-remembering it and have to get up and do it for real. That’s what you feel like all the time.
Sometimes during a fleeting moment of lucidity you’ll wonder “how the hell does this company even exist?” Nobody really knows. When you think about it, which nobody likes to, you’re not sure how this plane is flying, but here we are. Couldn’t tell you how the engine works, is there one?
It's like that one restaurant, it’s been empty every time you’ve been there but they’re still in business – maybe it’s a drug front? Or like how RadioShack felt in its final years. Sh sh sh, back to sleep it’s better this way.
Pollyanna Complex (Your business has a nasty bout of an Optimism Bias)
Positivity can be toxic too in large doses.
Everything is rose colored. Bright-eyed bushy-tailed smiling psychopaths focusing on the positive, looking on the bright side, and choosing to see the beauty even (especially) where there’s none…so much so that they disregard the negative entirely. I’ve seen companies do this at difficult meetings where they excuse failures, minimize bad things (like negative ROI), while focusing on how good of a job everyone did at trying hard.
You’re too positive!
You sweet inspiring superior fools. Mostly I’m jealous. But also, you’re about to drive off a cliff - or you just did and now you’re in active free-fall, will you just admit it already! Engage the parachute and please stop saying how it’s an opportunity merely disguised as the fast-approaching ground. Yes, and also - splat.
Decapitated Leadership Poisoning (Your business is Delusional)
It’s a dissociative disorder of a company where the head is severed from the body, i.e., the deluded leadership is detached from the reality of the trench workers.
The leaders are inhabitants of fantasy land — out of touch with the product; out of touch with who their client is and what they want; out of touch with their competition. They believe in numbers on spreadsheets (divorced from the world) and tell themselves tales of how great their stuff is. Maybe it used to be. Riding their laurels.
The headless body parts, left leaderless, devolve into a Lord of the Flies free-for-all. Every person for themselves or warring factions fighting to fill the power vacuum.
Magical thinkers at the top prattle on “yeah we can triple Q1 revenue year-over-year…that sounds great out loud.” Led by armchair generals who never went to battle or just don’t remember what it’s like. Sales slipping. Product waning. A private equity firm is probably involved.
The Plague of the Over-Engineers (Your business is Hallucinating)
Locust clouds of experts each capable of spending days working on different ways of “saving time” by automating some one-time 20-minute task. They’d much rather “reimagine” how a task could be done than actually do it. “All I need is a few hours (week tops), a Gantt chart, any spare developers you have lying around, a roll of duct tape and…wait why are we going out of business?”
They overcomplicate everything (I’ve definitely been guilty of this). Also great at getting distracted from the original project and maximizing scope creep.
“Hey Chuck check it out I invented scissor sharpeners, only 4 payments of 19.99, look at ‘em they’re sweet. Took me 2-years.”
“Jerry, I asked you to pick me up a pencil sharpener before Covid started, this is what you did instead? You know, scissors cost like $3. AND don’t they have knife sharpeners already - what’s the difference? AND are you really using your scissors so frequently that you need to sharpen them regularly!? My pencil is very dull.”
Process over results. Activity instead of productivity.
All vision, no traction — in the EOS world we like to say that vision without traction is hallucination.
How long do I got Doc, is there a cure to these business diseases?
Awareness is a good start, but I’ve been told it’s not enough, you have to do something too. I have a habit of reveling in my awareness and leaving it at that, proud of myself for being so enlightened and then not changing…
Good news is that these diseases are often just symptoms of some underlying core issues. If you solve those, the symptoms disappear. The common culprits are:
Lack of Clarity: the vision is cloudy or scattered instead of focused, maybe you’re trying to do be everything to everybody instead of doing what you’re best at.
Lack of Traction: You’re spinning your wheels, not getting anywhere. Maybe you’re trying to go in opposite directions at the same time, no wonder you’re not getting anywhere.
Lack of Health/Harmony: People have questions: who reports to whom, do we even have similar values around here, can I trust anybody but myself, who is accountable, how do we work together as a team, why do we even get out of bed in the morning as a business why are we here?
You want a prescription to be healthier human: eat well, sleep well, exercise.
You want a prescription for a disease-free business: consider EOS, a complete proven system of simple tools to help you get more clarity, more traction, and a healthier business. Consider hiring an EOS implementer (like me) to be your company’s guide.
How can EOS help cure the underlying sickness?
Most of these diseases can’t stand up to the shiny disinfecting sunlight of a crystal-clear vision. A routine (or program of execution) brings your lofty ideas down to the ground and you start building traction. A new healthy atmosphere is just the happy byproduct of your new just-say-it culture of transparency where people say what they actually mean. What would it be like if your business weren’t riddled with business diseases? Sounds nice.
Disclaimer: EOS is not a panacea, it works best for these types of companies.