Derrick Mains, The Process Fixer, just released a book called The System_.
It begins with 10 myths in the business world. This is a condensed version. I cannot praise this book and his teachings enough. Buy the book. It is worth every penny.
The myths:
- The right people in the right seats:
- The right people cannot save a broken system. You do not need better people, you need a better system. Fix the system and average people with thrive. Good systems are eagerly learned.
- Worship of Management by Objectives (MBO).
- Mother Drucker: It is time to stop. MBO is not a system, it is a leash. Turning employees into task chasers, not problem solvers. It rewards individual performance over systematic improvement. This is one of the biggest reasons businesses are running on quicksand while their people are quiet quitting.
- Roadmap to ruin (The Jack Wech Playbook)
- He was a corporate demolition crew disguised as a CEO. His obsession with cutting costs, gutting workforces and manipulating the definition of long-term make GE look great – until it didn’t. First gradually, then suddenly, GE crashed. His playbook killed innovation, destroyed culture and left GE to buckle under its own weight. His “profit-at-any-cost” mindset still infects boardrooms today.
- KPI delusion
- Methods, not strategy. KPI & OKR’s are the corporate equivalent of treating a fever without diagnosing the disease. Using them encourages people to game the system rather than improve it. Metrics are not the enemy – measuring the wrong thing is. Try driving your car home from work using just your dashboard. When metrics become the target, they cease to be useful.
- Shareholder Value
- Maximizing shareholder value is not the purpose of business. It is cancer. This forces executives to chase short skirts of short-term gains while starving the system of long-term health. Drives decisions that prioritize immediate wins over sustainable progress (aka poll numbers). Real purpose of a corporation is maximizing customer value.
- Modern Worker as a Zombie
- Do you have workforce problem or a system problem? Employees do not disengage because they are lazy or entitled, but because they feel trapped in meaningless work, suffocated by bureaucracy, and stripped of autonomy. The only way out is to codesign a system that removes friction, not one that creates it.
- All-Hands Meeting is a Joke
- Separating heads from hands. Leaders think and workers do. This is why businesses fail. The smartest insights do not come from the boardroom, they come from the frontline. If your employees do not have a voice, your business is flying bling
- SOPs as Band-aids for Broken Processes
- A bad system is still a bad system. SOPs create the illusion of control, but most are documentation of dysfunction. Instead of writing about how to do things poorly, start fixing the system
- Short-Term Thinking as a Death Sentence
- Quarterly earnings. Investor expectations. Year-end bonuses. We run on 90 day cycles but nothing great is built in 90 days. Toyota thinks in 50-year horizons. Amazon took a decade to turn a profit. Your business should not be a sprint. Build a machine that outlasts you; one that produces certainty.
- Consultants as Snake Oil Salesmen
- The same people that sold “maximize shareholder value” are now selling you a new approach called “culture fixes” specifically designed to combat all the damage their last idea caused. Most consultants do not fix businesses – they send invoices. They are directly incentivized not to fix anything. “We just did what the consultant said.”