Wednesday Weblog for December 22, 2021 |
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"My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style." --Maya Angelou
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Leading Off: In the Beginning... |
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83 weeks ago, I sent out the first Wednesday Weblog. I was originally going to send it out on Sunday but didn't finish on time and thought the alliteration (always wanted to use that word in a sentence) of 'Wednesday' and 'Weblog' was cool.
Since then, readership has about doubled, thank you, so I thought I'd send out a reprise of that first edition from June 10, 2020, updated, because for some it will be brand new, and for others getting ready to start fresh in 2022, there is some value in reading a refreshed version.
I rarely see a trash barrel without thinking of this story, and I have a feeling you won't be able to forget it either.
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Inspiration from a Trash Barrel |
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As you try to figure out what to do next, and what things will look like moving forward, consider taking some of your inspiration from a trash barrel.
We are all evaluating everything associated with our business and life during these 'different' times, and one of the things that has new rules is our ‘capacity.’
The work from home thing has changed many perceptions about what needs to get done, what is essential and what we can stop doing. Most organizations were impacted by furloughs or layoffs or reorganizations or staff shortages, followed by severe staff shortages. That means if you are still working you have been, or are, or will be doing more, or the same, with fewer resources.
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There are only two ways to do more with less: grow superpowers of some type is the first way, and probably the most difficult method.
The almost-as-hard-to-implement solution is to stop doing something that takes up a lot of time and/or expense but doesn’t quite provide the returns it used to, or we expected.
Sometimes ‘needs’ change and we don’t change with them.
Consider the inspirational trash barrel at your local gas station, convenience store, drug store or fast-food restaurant, if it is still open.
Why is it there? It may seem like an easy question for you, but what would happen if there weren’t any trash barrels at gas stations or fast-food restaurants, or post offices, or Walmart?
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No barrels at the highway rest stop filled with paper cups from a hundred miles away. No barrels at McDonald’s, filled with Dunkin Donut’s trash. None in front of the Shell station filled with plastic bags from a supermarket. What would you do, what would we all do, if there were no trash barrels at these places?
First of all, you might not even notice, and you would just empty the trash from your car in…a trash barrel at home, right? Would any of you throw it on the floor of the post office, or between the gas pumps or on the front lawn of a school? Unlikely. Today.
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Yet many years ago, before ‘littering’ wasn’t cool, that is exactly what some people did. I know it must sound as strange as describing a pay phone to a teenager, but people actually threw stuff out of their car. In an immensely innovative moment businesses came up with the brilliant idea of placing trash barrels at the sites of the crimes, and it worked.
Brilliant! Brilliant? Think about it: there are actually businesses, millions of them, who will gladly accept your trash when you visit because…?
- Are they afraid you will litter? Not really.
- Are they interested in the intrinsic value of trash? Not likely.
They do it because, they have always done it- it solved a problem years ago, it is built into the system ("hey, where's the trash barrel, we can't open yet") and they still do it because they’ve always done it. What do you or your business do every day because you’ve always done it?
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My personal fascination with trash barrels is decades old and I was fortunate to have the ability and authority to validate the assumptions above in the real world.
True story: in 1996 I removed all the outside trash barrels from the 22 restaurant locations of the company I was managing. Just took them all away from the front doors and parking lots and threw them in the dumpsters.
The local employees were afraid of what would happen because all of the newly departed barrels were filled every day, requiring time to empty them, new bags to insert, and dumpster space.
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Within the first week of this radical new plan, do you know what happened?
Not a thing.
Within the first month? Not a thing.
Within the first year? Again, not a thing.
Decades later, there are still no trash barrels outside most of those restaurants. (I'm sure someone not quite as 'trash-woke' as me replaced some of them).
No one complained, no one noticed, and no trash was strewn about the front entry of the stores. Nothing happened because all the people with trash in their cars, threw it away somewhere else. (Well actually the company saved about 5000 cubic yards of trash removal costs and tens of thousands of dollars in labor cost for the barrels we didn’t empty and the dumpsters we didn’t need picked up as often.)
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What is your trash barrel?
What are you doing this week because you did it last week? What can you eliminate, and no one will notice? Want more time to work on the important things?
Start with not doing the things that no one cares about. Eliminate the trash barrels in your world that solve problems that don’t need to be solved. No one will notice if you stop doing those things.
Throw the trash barrel away, it won't be classified as littering.
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Surprise Photo at the End |
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Who knew that learning the Greek alphabet would be important some day? |
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Joe's Positive Post of the Week |
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The Roll Call of states and countries where readers reside: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Washington DC, Wisconsin plus Canada, Spain, Conch Republic, Australia and the United Kingdom |
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Ed Doherty
774-479-8831
www.ambroselanden.com
ed-doherty@outlook.com
Forgive any typos please.
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