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Business and leadership is about removing limits July 20, 2007

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent.
It takes a touch of genius, and a lot of courage, to move in the opposite direction.”
~ Albert Einstein

These limits might be your own, limits of those around you, limits of the industry or even limits of humanity.

A good example of this is the Medicine industry. Working towards removing the limits of illness, sickness and accidents (genetic deformities etc). Think of Cochlear implants as a specific example - removing the limits placed on individuals thanks to genetics or accidents.

It is not the development of some new gizmo that makes one company profit, it’s removing limitations. A superb example for this is the blog you are reading right now. The boom in blogs over the last few years has been because it is so easy - anyone can, within 5 minutes, have a running blog. Five years ago, you needed knowledge and experience to achieve the same result.

Henry Ford made the car. But that’s not what made him wealthy and the car such a common item. It was the Ford company consistently focusing on removing the production limitations. Little by little making it easier and cheaper to produce.

You can hold this idea for yourself every day. Focus on removing limits in what you do and how you do it. Maybe something as simple as having to open a drawer each time you need a pen. Removing that physical limitation can help your day. Maybe it’s something bigger like using a filing cabinet for your documents, or using GTD (Getting Things Done) method of time management or getting into work early to miss the traffic. When you remove or avoid a limit, your productivity increases. Removing these limits for yourself means not only being more effective with work, but also reducing your stress.

Businesses grow and improve through removing limits. Some common examples are automatic printing of invoices, just in time production runs to remove warehousing limits, and mobile phones removing the need to be near a land line. Fedex’s whole premise is to remove the time limits for delivering packages.

And I think the number one job of a leader is to remove limits of the business and their team. That’s not to say the leaders will be able to achieve zero limits, there will be contextual limits, budget limits and more. The limits leadership remove are the limits that constrain the workers within the business and also external situations that limit the business itself. These limits might be cash flow problems, team cohesion, client retention etc. Removing those limits might be a strategy change, responding to customers, or sliming the operations.

What are the limits that are placed on you (or you place on yourself) that can easily be removed? What things limit the people around you that you can remove?

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