Recall that I recently posted a series of questions to experts in franchising--Richard Solomon, David Azrin, and Craig Slavin--concerning the “current reality” faced in the industry.

 "I have seen myths before in franchising with disastrous consequences"

Most businesses today have their fiscal year-end match with calendar year-end and if you are a franchisor or franchisee leader you’re probably finishing up right now on reviews, assessing your progress on goals, and thinking about starting the planning cycle all over again. I refer to this process as a “business spiral” because one thing is ending, one is starting, and there is a transition between the two. For a lot of business executives—people who have an active working style with hundreds of emails, numerous meetings, and countless conversations on a daily basis—this transition time can be a shock to the system, an uncomfortable period of ambiguous non-activity, and something to “get through” as quickly as possible.

“Everything looks like a nail.” I’m not sure where this quote is from, but it sure applies to a lot of what we see in business and particularly, in franchising. I am referring, of course, to the folks that only have one tool in their toolbox and no matter what the issue, that “tool” is the solution. 

The Problem of Franchisee Profiling. The Nobel Prize Laureate in Economic Science, Herbert Simon, predicted that a lot of problems would be solved with sub-optimal solutions because of the way that decisions get made in organizations. In an influential article he called the “Garbage Can Model” of decision-making, Simon asserted that in any organization there are problems in search of solutions and solutions in search of problems and they get thrown together in the Garbage Can. What comes out is anyone’s guess and often the matching of problems and solutions is not ideal, logical, or profitable.