Have You Heard These Excuses in Your Company?

Even the best companies, large and small, have room for improvement.  Sometimes, the barrier to improvement isn't a lack of resources or willingness, it's a barrier of HABIT.  The habit -- common to almost all us human beings -- is the resistance to change.  In his book How Excellent Companies Avoid Dumb Things, author Neil Smith offers the top 20 excuses that we use in companies to resist meaningful change or improvment.

Have you ever heard yourself utter these phrases within your company?  Maybe it's time to rethink whether these ideas hold you back!

1. Our company is well run; there are no opportunities.
2. We're inefficient, but my department is not the problem.
3. The issue is support function and allocations, not my costs.
4. Our problem is revenues, not how we do things.
5. We have tried that before.
6. We are already doing that.
7. My boss/theCEO/legal will never agree to that.
8. That won't save money or increase revenues.
9. That would cost too much to implement.
10. No one in the industry is doing that.
11. We will lose customers if we do that.
12. Anything that takes time away from serving my customers will hurt us.
13. But we are unique.
14. No one really understands what we do.
15. I don't have time to think about that.
16. We don't have the right technology to do that.
17. I can't risk my job raising that.
18. I can only impact my own department.
19. I don't have the right people to do that.
20. Now is not a good time for us to make changes.

Thanks to blogger Eric Jacobson for compiling the list from Smith's book.  See Eric Jacobson on Management and Leadership.