Business Spirals, Revolving Doors

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.

But according to research by Richard Leider, one of the world’s leading business coaches, the transition time between events is critical to organizational and career success. As an avocation, Leider interviews retired people who have had a remarkable career, and not just the usual suspects (Fortune 500 CEO’s) but a wide array of successful authors, musicians, artists, statesmen and women, politicians, teachers, entrepreneurs, and others.

Leider found that, across the entire diverse group of people who had reached the pinnacle of their career, each felt unfulfilled in some respect, felt that they could have done more, achieved more. In particular, Leider notes that three common themes emerge during the interviews. The successful people would: 

1. Take more risks—in what they chose to do, whom they loved, where they lived, and other aspects of their lives.
2. Follow their passion—find what really moves them, creates joy, and is the best use of their talent and pursue it.
3. Take time for reflection because life speeds up as you get older and your days can become filled with the sheer volume of activities in living it.

How can you take advantage of Leider’s research findings to make your company more profitable in 2007?  What tactics can you undertake during the transition period that will reap rewards in the future? 

One tactic that I find useful is what I refer to as the “revolving door” approach to strategic change and comes from Andy Grove and Gordon Moore of Intel. In the early 1980’s Intel was under intense competitive pressure in their flagship product, the chip that defined the company, the DRAM chip. The problem was that Intel would create an innovative improvement in the chip but Asian manufacturers would quickly integrate those innovations into their own processes, undercut Intel on price, and gain market share.

No matter how quickly Intel innovated they were unable to capture the value. Finally, in exasperation, Grove went into Moore’s office and asked, “What would a new management team do if they ran the company?”

Moore replied, “Get the hell out of the DRAM market.”

“Well,” responded Grove, “why don’t we go out the revolving door, come back in and do it ourselves?”

And that’s what they did.

As a leader you know the difficulties in severing long-standing relationships, products, and markets, but in order to move forward sometimes the path forward is as obvious as going through the revolving door and coming back in with a new mindset.

Perhaps you’ll find the “revolving door” tactic useful as you work through your current business spiral and prepare yourself and your company for 2007.

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Peter Birkeland is author of Franchising Dreams, a motivational speaker, and mangement advisor to entrepreneurial start-ups and global companies focused on growth platforms. He can be reached via email at Peter@birkelandinstitute.com.