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 this summer, 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 are impacted by furloughs or layoffs or reorganizations, and that means if you are still 'essential' you will be doing more, or the same, with fewer resources.
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. 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 a gas station or fast food restaurant, or the post office, or Walmart? 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 post office 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. Yet 50 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, 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?
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. 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 of those restaurants. 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 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.)
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. -ED
