Beware of The Seven Last Words of an Organization

"We've never done it that way before."

Following is my review of Gordon Morrison's latest book, Breaking the Time Barrier. This book may present the most important breakthrough to enhance the efficient development of software in the history of the industry.



The seven last words of the organization: "We've never done it that way before." Embrace them and you'll stifle innovation, creativity and sustained profitability.

What kind of company would self impose limits, ignoring possibilities simply saying, "We've never done it that way before?" My experience with thousands of companies proves that the practice is so common as to make it a proverb. To add insult to injury, the very companies that maintain the practice would deny they do it.

The result is something I call "Hidden Inefficiency Virus," or Business HIV. This is the practice of embracing inefficiencies as unavoidable conditions within a process or a business, and then building expectations which anticipate and accept them. And counter to logical expectations, the practice is nowhere more evident and profit robbing than in the engineering of software. The industry most outwardly committed to creating efficiencies and innovation is its own worse enemy.

Gordon Morrison should know. He's been developing software and systems for years. Frustrated with the amount of time and programming energy needed to constantly fix hyper-complex programs, Gordon traced the problem back to its origin, the "spaghetti codes," the non-sequential code writing methodology used by software engineers since the beginning. Then, simply including a logical temporal element to that mess, he is able to untangle the gnarled lines of spaghetti code, making software easier to trace, debug, validate and reuse. Then he published his invention in Breaking the Time Barrier.

Not only does his COSA process reduce the time to develop and maintain software by as much as 50%, but it maximizes the value of the very individuals responsible for writing it by enabling them to focus on improved applications rather than on internal operational minutia of existing products.

Breaking the Time Barrier is short, to the point, and loaded with examples and illustrations of all kinds, perfect for the advanced engineers to which it is intended. For the non engineer, such as I, the book offers a unique and original philosophical landscape which can lead to new and necessary solutions for overworked and under productive people in today's hyper-dynamic and accelerating world. We all need that.

There is no logical reason for a software producer to resist the elimination of the "HIV" in their business. There is no logical reason a CEO would resist the elimination of "HIV" by failing to embrace outsourcing, either. Well, no reason except, "We've never done it that way before." And that, my friends, is illogical.


CJ is a popular keynote speaker, and a regular contributor to HRTools.
Fine his book, The Squaredime Letters. The feedback has been phenomenal. If you want to get your head around the real forces behind our current recession, you must read this book. Check out some content on Amazon.

Beware of Business HIV: It's On the Rise

The less you pay, the better the deal. Right? The less time you spend, the more money you save. Right? These precepts are the foundation of a creeping business virus I call the Hidden Inefficiency Virus or Business HIV.

At its most fundamental DNA, Business HIV is the average individual’s response to too much and contradictory information. Needing to make decisions that guard profit and no longer having a grasp on the millions of pieces of data that dart in and out of their field of vision, business people have settled into a way of thinking that makes them wrong often but rarely willing to admit that they’re wrong. Doing so would require more in-depth study of data than they feel they can do. Sticking with saving money as the bottom line seems like the wisest course of action to many decision-makers.

Economic, human and social realities fly in the face of this sort of out-dated logic, however. The more time you spend investigating your own needs and the offerings of different vendors, the more money you can save – not only in the purchase but also in the long-term. The more money you spend on individuals with specific expertise, the more money you are likely to make as your operations improve.

Business HIV removes the real logic and replaces it with a sense of false scarcity and urgency. Business HIV is an emotional and intellectual disease that prevents decision-makers from seeing how off course they really are. It’s ego, comfort, fear. . . and it’s just plain illogical.

The remedy to Business HIV is a restructuring of the big picture. A realization that costs such as energy, taxes and insurance are spiraling and they’re not going to come down. Competition is more rampant than ever in the history of commerce as Third World countries replicate everything better and cheaper. A new strategy based on people creating profit through innovation is the only antidote to Business HIV.

Are you ready to move from a sick mechanical business model to a healthy organic business model? Are you ready for that shot in the arm?

CJ is a regular contributor to HRTools.coms.
You can now get your own copy of his groundbreaking book, The Squaredime Letters.
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Do You Know too Much to Increase Your Profitability?

In 1267, Roger Bacon published his Opus Maius, an 845 page work, said to contain all the knowledge in the world. Imagine that. All the knowledge in the world in a single person, and in a single volume. You'd have to be a teenager to make such a claim today.


In 1961, before the dawn of Moore's Law, and before the proliferation of the silicone chip, Dr. Kenneth McFarland wrote that there was already a veritable information overload, such that a seeker could often find entire sets of developed knowledge in direct contradiction of other entire groups.


The only way that a person could hope to avoid inaction and indecision caused by confusion due to such disparity of truth would be to limit the intake of information, and the type of source for information.


Dr. McFarland said that such a defense strategy would necessarily produce individuals who would be "often wrong, but never unconvinced."


In January, 1999, UNESCO reported that there were some 869,000 books in print. By December, that number had jumped to 1,963,000. The pronouncement that, for the first time in verifiable history, human knowledge had more than doubled in less than a year.


With Moore's Law in full swing, there have been at least 30 doublings since Dr. McFarland's pronouncement in 1961, and 6-8 doublings since 1999, when UNESCO reported its findings.


To whatever degree Dr. McFarland's observation could have been observed to be true in 1961, there can be no doubt that it is certainly true today, true of more people, and true more often.


More than in 1961, today there are multiples of bodies of information in direct contradiction to other bodies of information.


How else could NASA Scientist, James Hansen assert that oil company CEOs should be tried for crimes against humanity for their contribution to "Global Warming" now called, simply, "Climate Change." At the very same time, meteorologist and founder of The Weather Channel, John Coleman, wants to sue AL Gore for financial fraud in order to "expose [his] fraud of "global warming." You can't get any more diverse with these "bodies of information."


There are thousands of other examples.


As to the tendency to limit the types of sources from which we learn: Well, some listen to Rush Limbaugh, others to Al Franken. But nobody listens to both. What about the blogosphere? Some read Townhall.com, others DailyKos.com, but nobody reads them both.

How else could we find our political system so polarized?

Now I'm not advocating that people need to become open-minded. And I'd be the last one to say that every position is valuable, or even worth consideration. What I am saying is that if Dr. McFarland could report way back in 1961 that people are "often wrong but never unconvinced," that the situation is multiplied many times over today, particularly in the entrepreneurial world.

The average entrepreneur, small business owner, is dangerously susceptible to this condition. With ever increasing distractions and decisions, the opportunity for error is increasing by the day. The occurrence of error is increasing every day. But the error is invisible. (The decider is convinced that he is right!) As a result, the inefficiency created, will also be invisible.

I've started calling this condition "Business HIV." It's the "Hidden Inefficiency Virus." It's the situation in which a business builds inefficiency into the very business model. It's what a 2008 Reuters report says about a software business that spends 10x more "fixing" than "producing."

You might have Business HIV if:

• You feel relieved when an employee quits, knowing that your payroll expense will be reduced while the position remained unfilled.
• You reported to your board that you had cut your health insurance plan increase in half; You didn't report or realize that the cost of the use of corporate resources exceeded the value of the reduction.
• You handle harassment training by making your employees watch the inexpensive generic videos. It was "affordable" training, too, so long as you don't recognize that you wasted an hour of time, energy and focus boring them to death, and accomplishing nothing important. Well, you did check a box on some compliance checklist.
• You try to take every offer from a vendor/associate to the simplest form so that you can "shop it" and minimize your expense. You believe that all those "value adds" are just excuses to get you to pay more than you have to.
• You assume that, if Peter Drucker said it, it doesn't apply to you.
• You believe that the less you pay, the better the deal.
• You believe that if anyone could take two weeks off from the job, you really didn't need them anyway.
• You measure and monitor your sales cycle, but not your attrition.
• You believe turnover is a "soft cost."
• You don't believe that your company can afford to hire great people.
• You believe outsourcing is a way to get another company to do the same things you used to do yourself, for less.
• You believe that outsourcing is a stopgap, a temporary way to handle things that, when you get big enough, you can bring them back in house.
• You believe that sometimes it costs too much to do it right.

The pressures of today's business world don't tolerate the same level of inefficiency acceptable in days gone by. "Often wrong" then, happened far less often, and had far less impact than "often wrong" today. And "never unconvinced" just looks stupid.

Half of being smart is knowing what you're dumb at. Then, find somebody smart, and let them handle what they're smart at. It is a lot more efficient.

Visit CJ online at cjcoolidge.com.