Cruise Control

Written by Gary Mitchell, www.businessvaluemanagement.blogspot.com.

I am not a fan of chain letters and refuse to pass them on, but occasionally one arrives that contains some interesting information that inspires a thought. This morning I received such a letter. It contained a story about a woman who learned the hard way that drivers should NEVER DRIVE IN THE RAIN WITH THE CRUISE CONTROL ON. In fact, NEVER USE THE CRUISE CONTROL WHEN THE PAVEMENT IS WET OR ICY. The highway patrolman at the scene of the accident explained that if the cruise control is on when your car begins to hydro-plane and your tires lose contact with the pavement, your car will accelerate to a higher rate of speed, making the car take off like an airplane. The driver loses control.

How does this apply to business? Is there a lesson here? How many businesses operate on cruise control? Each of them starts out with a vision of where they want to go and a mission to drive them there. Yet, somewhere along the road to success, leadership gets the bright idea that the business can operate on cruise control. They set the mechanics in motion, relax, and sit back to enjoy the ride, mistakenly thinking that they are still driving because they are holding a steering wheel. However, a steering wheel does not a driver make.

Now, I am not saying that cruise control is necessarily a bad thing. In fact, cruise control can be a wonderful feature to use when driving efficiency, but there are conditions. NEVER OPERATE YOUR BUSINESS WITH THE CRUISE CONTROL ON UNLESS THE CONDITIONS ARE RIGHT. If control is being turned over to other people, other functional areas, other processes, how do you know that the vision is just as clear to them as it was to you when you started? How do you know that their mission is in line with yours? How certain can you be about the course of your business? How certain can you be about reaching your desired destination if key values are out of place, out of sync, out of control? What if the business loses contact with the road, with the guiding principles that formed the foundation of your business in the first place? What if the vision has become distorted and the mission out of alignment?

What has been done to make sure conditions are right for optimizing the operation of a cruise control system, or any system for that matter? There will always be risks that are out of our control and may catch us by surprise. But, especially in business, the business drivers need to be aligned for top performance. Managing for top performance requires serious attention all the time.

Bottom Line: Heed the warnings. Assess the situation. Assess it again. Identify the present conditions. Check the alignment. Are all the drivers in line with the vision and mission ahead? Are all the activities, functions, and processes working efficiently together? Proceed with caution when setting any cruise control options. The well-being of your business is at stake.