by Lionesses of Africa Operations Dept
A new year, a new look, new thoughts, drive and direction…all these plans you had as you sat deep into the evenings during the quiet festive season. You get back into the office with (if you have been lucky enough to see the Ocean) the grains of sand still scratching between your toes and… nothing has changed.
The feeling is the same as you left it, the team is still the same, the customers still the same, the problems are still the same, and in a few days time you will be sure to find the answer from the Bank is still the same.
It’s Monday morning - you still come in with that motivational smile and a “Happy Monday!” greeting to the team… yet all you really want to do is go into your office, close the door and hope the shakes subside fast.
If you had a decent 2022 - how will you replicate the successes of last year? If you struggled through 2022 - how will you last another year like that?
How had life become so complex? There was a time when you came in happy to face another day, another month, year. The world was simple. Now, the pressure never leaves and just seems to just build.
Although it is essential to recognise that ‘it is ok to not be ok’ and that to feel overwhelmed can hit anyone at anytime, in business and certainly in running a business there is absolutely no doubt that direction comes from the top - and that includes motivation. How can you motivate your Team when you yourself are feeling drained - and it’s just the start of the year!
At times like this it is good to take a deep breath and step back from your business to take a look at it from afar. When you are stuck in the forest, stumbling from left to right, it is so difficult to see the wood from the trees. Everything starts to look the same, dark and gloomy. Far too complex with so many moving parts, now so difficult to control. Time to grab back control and simplify!
One of the top global companies for making the complex simple is Apple, driven for many years by the master of them all Steve Jobs. He was quoted as saying: “That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because -
once you get there, you can move mountains.”
He was fascinated by Picasso’s lithographs of a Bull, not just the famous XI at the end of the eleven as we show in the opening picture of this article, but the process by which Picasso got there as he travelled with Fernand Mourlot from detailed realism of a painting of a Bull, to abstract minimalism, between December of 1945, to January of 1946 - perhaps he too was trying to rid himself from the complexities of 1945 to the brave new post-conflict world of 1946?
Jobs would make his designers study these lithographs, to see how the complex could be stripped down to the simple, yet still perform its task - in this case the Bull was reduced to its essence, yet still contains the form, the power, the understanding.
Bring your Employees into this, make it a January project, to look again at all aspects of your business and like Picasso, slowly strip back the complex to reveal the simplicity behind. Do not think that this will be a short process, as Picasso saw, the more the Bull was stripped back, the more simplification required, and yet more and more still, until at last he could stand back, happy that it was finished. This means stripping back your products, where can those be simplified? What about the delivery, the last mile, the customers service? Focusing on your customers, what have they been asking, what problems do they have, have these changed in the past 12 months? Do you still solve these, or have things moved on? Solving means improving your customer’s business and from all of this your continued growth will come.
Keep on asking the questions - can we simplify more - How? Why? Where can we strip more? And so on. As Fernand Mourlot said in his book, Gravés dans ma mémoire: “…in order to achieve his pure and linear rendering of the bull, he [Picasso] had to pass through all of the intermediary stages. And when you stand before his eleventh bull, it's hard to imagine the work that went into it.”
Simplicity means less moving parts, less moving parts means less potential for errors and problems and most importantly a far more efficient, streamlined process for you, for your employees and for your customers. This builds speed and agility into your entire company. In this day and age with instant gratification ruling the roost and (it seems) each new week bringing a new challenge, it is not the large that beats the small, but the fast and nimble that beat the slow.
Interestingly, now you have stripped back your business and have boosted morale and motivation by bringing your Employees into the discussion and process - your company will require less, not more control, giving you far more time to work on yourself…
Now where did we leave our Beach Hat, Bucket and Spade…
Stay Safe.