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Milkshake in the boardroom
The first tool in the world was a stone. It was used by cavemen and others for everything. Needed to crush corn? Use a rock. Need to cut vegetables? Use a rock. Need to pound something? Use a really big rock. The rock was the universal tool but then something changed.
“How can we make this better” asked someone back in the day. Then the first real tool was made. It was a knife made by chipping bits off a stone, basically a sharper rock. Then someone made the rock even sharper and someone put a handle in it. Then a bloke forged metal and sharpened one side and replaced the stone. Now we have ceramic knives and so on the story goes.

Imagine we didn’t adapt our tools and today when we needed to hammer a nail into the wall we went outside and found a rock to do it.

How much unnecessary energy would that take? Imagine building a house with a rock as your only tool and nothing else. Way too many kilojoules used and wasted if you try it like that.

Today we have refined tools to do exactly what we’ve set out to achieve. Each task has a tool that matches it. The tools have been refined and refined again to make work easier and simpler.

That is the role of tools really; to make work easier and simpler. What sort of tools are our employees and teammates using when it comes to promoting, managing or operating the company?

So many people have tried to sell, inform, illustrate products, and excite me using a 3 page flyer pushed through my car window; using one tool to try achieving everything. The problem is that it may not be the best tool for the job. Too often the tools we are trying to use are a band-aid approach to a downturn in business. It is the business equivalent to coming home and finding a leak in your pipe and trying to repair it by torchlight with only a wrench and a screwdriver rather than call a decent plumber who has all the correct bits.

How long have we been using the same tools without refining them? Many of us are using sharpened rocks and wondering why our employees are struggling to swing it. Their hands are sore, their arms are tired, and they are fed up. Even if they come up with a better tool you keep taking it away from them and giving them the rock back.

I’ve been trying to open a new bank account recently; I’m all for background check policies and due process but it has taken a month of stupidity because the guy up the food chain won’t empower the very helpful person I am dealing with at branch level.

Guess where I will probably not open an account because it takes too long. The poor branch “financial advisor” has not even been allowed a real tool (those are kept at the central office for “special” people to use), she just collects papers to forward up the bureaucratic ladder and then gets told what new piece of paper to call me to bring in.

Take stock of the tools you have. Check if they are working properly. Refine them, improve them. Get new ones and load the team with the equivalent of miracle knives. If it’s a website that doesn’t interact, refine the tool. If it’s a flyer that’s outdated then re-do it. If it’s a video that was done in the 90’s you need might need a new one. If it’s an internal procedure that can be made simpler change it. We can always make better tools.

Yesterday I got my hair cut by someone who was raving about their new pair of the state of the art technologically designed and amazingly curved scissors and how curved scissors made it so much easier to texture hair. New tool; who knew scissors could get any better.