When the Recipe gets "Improved."
My great grandmother made the best chocolate cake. It was unlike any other cake I have or will ever taste.
The cake was the perfect concoction of everything you would expect- butter, shortening, sugar, flour, eggs, baking soda, cocoa and then there were the zingers- buttermilk, peanut butter and peanuts. She only made it a few times a year and it was highly anticipated.
Once, while she was still living, one of my great aunts made the cake at Thanksgiving. Well, she kind of made it. She hated the smell of buttermilk, so she used whole milk instead. It was great- but we all knew that something was amiss.
My great grandma has passed, and we pretend that the cake lives on. Her daughters continued to put their own spins on it- replacing the butter and shortening with margarine, cutting back on the sugar. My mom’s generation started with close to the original but continued to interpret what would be healthier like using fat free dairy or substituting almond butter for Jif.
They have all convinced themselves that nothing is lost but those of us that had the pleasure of the real thing know that it won’t ever be the same.
The same thing happens in business. An innovative passionate entrepreneur launches their company and things are going well. They begin to bring talented people on board and growth continues.
The owner’s original formula though, is almost always altered along the way. I’m not saying that agility isn’t a huge key to a company’s success or that there aren’t times when it is best to change. My concern is the small shifts that are made without careful consideration due to one person’s- probably a great and talented person’s- interpretation of how to make things better. Buttermilk in the cake was bad in only my great aunt’s perspective.
We all want a kitchen filled with skilled chefs, but what can business owners do to preserve the recipes that led them to the entrepreneurial journey to begin with?
- Keep the overarching company vision at the forefront. Share it more often than you think you need to and have clear guidelines on what activities do and do not support the vision.
- Stephen Covey, the author of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, coined the phrase “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing”. Keeping your focus and efforts on the most important goals will help you accomplish them.
- Allow space for new ideas to be discussed. When communication is strong, small changes can be addressed early determining whether a specific adjustment will help or hinder progress.
- Document it! Have a central playbook that each team member accesses to understand not only how things are done but why they are done that way.
