I had a chance to spend a few days with my oldest grandson this past week. He is 2.5 years old and, in my eyes, extremely advanced. I’m not biased in the least…
He has a Lego set of various size blocks. They are a little larger, so they don’t hurt when you step on them, as I did when my son was my grandson’s age. He also has a base that he builds on, so it’s more stable than building on the wood flooring or the rug. He is set for success.
He and my wife were building towers. He would stack the blocks on top of each other, and stack multiple “towers”, but never attached them for overall stability. That was fine, because then he could push them over and the blocks would fly everywhere. He loved it and it got me thinking about business.
How many times do we do the same thing in business? How many times do we build a tower in a sales team, and another in operations, and another in finance or manufacturing or legal? How many times, when we have built those stand-alone towers do we see them get knocked over and scatter?
Later in the weekend my son was playing with my grandson, and they were building towers again. But this time, they were interlocking the blocks. They built a very tall tower and because they were interlocked, my grandson couldn’t push them over. He didn’t enjoy it as much because he couldn’t destroy them, but he learned how to build stability.
If your sales team is strong but not interlocked with your manufacturing team or your purchasing team, you will have an inventory issue. If your sales team is strong and selling without being interlocked with legal or finance, you will have completely different issues.
Building strong, interlocked teams that all focused on the strategy you have built puts you in a strong position to win.
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