"Why are you theorizing about a dream company. Why don’t you just start one?”
When writing down notes on ideas to write a book, Mary Kay suddenly asked herself the question above. The answer to the problem of course became the very successful Mary Kay Cosmetics.
What I want to mention today is the idea of theory versus action. I think one of the major problems with companies is spending far too much time on theory rather on putting forth practical tries to see if things will work.
All the research and focus groups can't make up for eventually just putting something out there to see how it will work. Sure you take the input and ideas thrown around, and adjust and adapt things in response. But to attempt to put perfection on a product or service is worse than doing nothing at all.
I'm not talking about lowering standards or quality here just to get something out there, but I'm talking about people who are afraid they haven't covered every eventuality and become paralyzed into inaction because of it.
Once you know what it is you want, throw it out to your people and let them take it and run with it. Go through the steps of them giving their input and changing what they believe needs to be changed, and get out of the way and let it go.
When we have great people there should be no reason we can't trust them in this way. We won't survive if we don't.
There's a time when we have to stop theorizing and giving input and get busy bringing a product to the market.
Theorizing is fine in the beginning and in its place, but we must continually battle the tendency to want to linger there by ourselves and our people. In the end we have to ask the same question Mary Kay did: Why not just start one? That goes for any product, service or internal initiative we're thinking about.
Those that are practical about things will be the ones that win.
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