Why middle lane driving isn’t the way to continuous business improvement

I’ve done a lot of driving in the past few weeks, and find I get irritated by what I call middle of the road trundlers.  They are those people who seem to drive at 35mph regardless of what the speed limit actually is.

I presume it’s easy for them. They don’t need to think too much about what they are doing and get where they want to go at some point. They may not even know that they cause irritation in other drivers (or maybe it’s just me!)

So why am I talking about this? Well, I think these drivers are like many businesses – they have a plan, set a constant speed and trundle along. The problem of course is that they are not aware of changes in their surroundings. That means they don’t react or improve – and soon get left behind.

Such businesses may have reasonable profits and an established customer base.  But like the drivers, they don’t see they are annoying some people. And it’s usually potential customers they annoy and lose. Because they don’t see changes, their competitors will soon leave them behind.

And the point to all this? If a business doesn’t listen to its customers, and change, it is dying – they just haven’t realised it yet.

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