Is the bottle half full, or half empty? These days I first ask what’s in it. If it’s vinegar it’s half empty, if it’s wine . . . well you get were I am going at. If it’s medicine, it starts to become complex. A patient’s expectations are a lot stronger and more complex. This will cure me! I will be given back the control over my life and be whole again. The doctor providing the medicine suffers from the same delusion of control. The decease has been named, I am its master and here is its cure. Actually most of the time we have no idea about the root cause, but the symptoms have been diagnosed and the medicine has proven that it works to alleviate the symptoms. This is an accurate description of what we do in medicine. Especially when diseases are life threatening. When you are a doctor treating a difficult disease the bottle is half empty and you hope for the best. When you are a patient, you hope for the best and the bottle is half full. At the end of the bottle, fairies will have magically taken care of the disease, we hope.
Whether it is chemo therapy, vitamin supplements, or the new wonder drug of omega 3 fatty acids, we all suffer from this expectation of fairies at the bottom of the bottle. The patients and the doctors both. We should consider ourselves lucky that most doctors have the sense to do some research first to see if there actually are positive effects and try to eliminate the worst side effects.
It is no different in the world of business. When you provide innovation services to companies, generally everybody hopes for magic bullets and wants to do as little as possible against as few costs as possible and without any risk whatsoever. They do like to talk about innovation though. Consultants take advantage of these desires by catering to them and providing the illusion of magic bullets, of systems that have proven their worth in a specific context and have been generalized as a one size fits all solution. I am sorry, but there are no fairies in business either! We are not cute old ladies with wands who tap you on the head, smile friendly, twirl in the air, wink at you twice and take care of all your problems, and then present you with a bill you might not be willing to pay: your soul.
To deal with your challenges we make you face up to what is at the core of these challenges, help you select the right diverse team of people, help you act decisively and work hard, very hard, to innovate and make sure it is not us, but you who takes care of your problems.
No comments:
Post a Comment