Fine-Tuning Your Business: A New Way to Make the Competition Eat Your Dust

Due to the daily rush of deadlines, your business is constantly going in and out of balance. In this way, it's a bit like a piano that's going out of tune, or a car that needs to be tuned up. When your car starts making odd noises, you know it's time for it to be fixed so it runs smoothly again. (Or, alternatively, you can just ignore the noise until your car falls apart and costs you really big bucks.)

Similarly when there's too much "noise" in your workplace, messages can't make it clearly from one person to another without serious distortion - if they can be heard at all. Much like a real car engine, whatever is making all that noise in your workplace can cause unnecessary wear and tear throughout your whole system - and cost you considerable time and money.

The Coreporation provides a simple, but elegant methodology to help you "fine-tune" your workplace system. We call our process The 5 Elements of Success. It is a technique you can use while you're on the run - as we know you usually are. Happily, this process can grow with your workplace as it adapts to market forces and other changes. The 5 Elements of Success provides excellent preparatory ground work - and a larger context - for classic strategic planning. Moreover, in particularly fast-paced organizations, it can substitute for more elaborate planning processes (which tend to be outdated rather quickly).

Here's how it works. A musician strikes a tuning fork to tune a piano so that all the keys are in harmony with each other (and so it sounds like a concert hall piano rather a honky-tonk piano). Similarly, an organization's leaders align all the components of their workplace systems by determining core identity and values. This first Element of Success serves as the originating "tone" - the reference point - that is used to tune your entire workplace. In businesses, this means that all future decisions will reference the organization's core values/identity to make certain they are in alignment.

Then, in a natural evolutionary process: out of the identity and values (Element #1), emerges the organization's vision (Element #2). And out of the vision comes its current mission (Element #3). And out of the mission, the interactions (Element #4) that will be needed to fulfill the business mission. And finally, out of all these, the structure (Element #5 - physical resources) is designed that will support, measure, and ensure attainment of the business's declared goals.

Fine-tuning Your Business is a process, not an event. The 5 Elements of Success can provide you with a light and highly portable template that will serve as a strong and enduring framework for absolutely every business decision you'll ever have to make. It will become a part of your organization's daily life, saving countless missteps (and related dollars). It also will increase the strength of your corporation's culture - and it's attractiveness to top talent. Moreover, it will also help you ensure integrity within your system (including the integration of all its parts) by keeping every vital component of your organization "in tune" with all the others.

The 5 Elements of Success process has its theoretical roots in physics and mathematics. The reason that some music sounds good to the human ear has to do with the length of wave-forms. (This is why some notes sound harmonious together, and others dissonant.) In your day-to-day work life, this is much like the difference you feel when you get the opportunity to work with that bright, cooperative, pleasant colleague down the hall versus when you're forced to work with that bossy, over-paid block-head in the next office.

The 5 Elements of Success are similar to the natural musical overtone series described first by the famous Greek philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, Pythagoras. Much like Pythagoras' predictable mathematical formula for the intervals that create harmonious music, each one of The 5 Elements of Success ripples naturally out of the prior one, resulting in the organizational equivalent of beautiful, rich and full music. Or, if you prefer, resulting in the organizational equivalent of a perfectly-tuned Ferrari that you happily gun before taking off and leaving that bossy block-head - or even better, your competition - far behind you, eating your dust.