Finding Your Golden Roller Skate

“Here’s the concept. It’s a place where you drive in with your family and friends, order your food from your car, and they bring it out to you on roller skates.”

Carhops (that’s what they were called) have come and gone as American culture has evolved. They’re still around, just a lot harder to find. They’ve been replaced by drive-throughs where long lines of cars now stream through McDonald’s and Chick-fil-A parking lots. More recently, food is magically appearing on our doorsteps with just a few taps on our phones.

Imagine those first conversations about having food brought out to your car on roller skates. The idea must have sounded bizarre and eccentric at first.

Bizarre and eccentric… just like renting a stranger’s home, riding in a self-driving car, or buying clothes made from recycled pop bottles. Thank you, Airbnb, Tesla, and Patagonia.

Too often, we get caught up in a “this is how we’ve always done things” mentality. We run our businesses and serve our clients in a certain way because it’s the model we developed over the years, and everyone seems to be satisfied with it. We lead our teams, create our cultures, and build our workforces the way we do because it’s what we know.

But what if, just for a moment, we reimagined how we deliver our work and lead our teams on roller skates? Said more directly, what if we reimagined how we do everything we do and disrupt our own business models?

Reimagine. It’s a powerful word. If we put it into practice, there’s a high likelihood that we’ll unlock new solutions we’ve never explored before. The pandemic forced some of you reading this to reimagine your products and services very quickly. Others of you have not had to do that yet – you’ve not disrupted your model.

In either case, we would encourage you all to set some time aside for reimagining what you do, how you do it, and the ways you are engaging your teams and building your culture. You may find that almost everything you’re doing is excellent as is. But, you might also uncover some solid gold disruption that leads you in a new direction – a golden roller skate that serves your business, your clients, and your teams more fully.

Call-to-Action
Your golden roller skate is closer than you think… if you invest some time looking for it.
Set some time aside with your team to challenge the “we’ve always done it this way” thinking and look for those areas where you can transform your model to improve your products, your services, and your teams.

Ready for more?
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