PMETH

In order to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in your life you are going to have to live your life according to the PMETH Principles and chances are this is going to require significant change on your part.  The only problem with that is that most people hate to change.  But guess what, as Dr. Lair Ribeiro put it, “If you go on doing what you’ve always done, you’ll go on getting what you’ve always got.”  What a powerful message.  “If you go on doing what you’ve always done, you will go on getting what you’ve always got.” 

We all know people who complain daily about their situation but never do anything to try to improve it.  I meet people everyday virtually unwilling to change even when their current efforts aren’t working.  No one wakes up and just says I think I am going to change.  It’s against human nature.  They say the dog will not move off the nail he is sitting on until the nail starts to hurt enough.  It’s against human nature to change.  We just want to kick back find our little niche, our little grove and do what we’ve always done. 

For instance, have you ever been being trained on a new job or a new assignment and you ask the person training you “so, why do we do it that way, just curious, I want to fully understand what we do”.  And they say, “well, I don't know, I guess because we’ve always done it that way”.  Because we’ve always done it that way!  That’s an answer!  If it is, it is the worst possible answer you can give.  Don’t just keep doing things the way they were done before.  Question your convictions.  Not all change is improvement, but there can't be improvement without change. 

I don’t believe in the statement, “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it”.  I mean, why do we get new cars?  New clothes?  New anything?  Because the new one is better not because the old one is broken.  We get new things most times because the new one is better.  The same premise should apply to our processes at work and in life.  We should ALWAYS be looking for ways to improve our current processes. 

We need to make time to enhance the way we do things before the competition does.  Because the top performing companies are always looking for ways to improve.  That’s one of the reasons they are on top.  But the first order of things is to change ourselves, and then we will understand the challenge of trying to change others.  We’ve all tried to change something about ourselves, right?  It’s not easy to change, is it?  For instance, many of us set new years resolutions.  If it were easy to change, we wouldn’t have to RESOLVE to do it, we’d just do it.  But if you want to lead, you must continue to change because when you are through changing, you’re through.

Let’s talk about Bill Gates and his crew of engineers.  I bet they embrace change.  In fact, I know they do.  I mean, they must, because as soon as they put something on the shelf we all know that a better one will be out two months later and most of the time they don’t even give us that long to enjoy the fact that we’ve got the latest technology.  But why do they keep doing that.  Why are there 980.1 versions of everything that hits the shelves?  Why do they keep changing it?  BECAUSE IT’S BETTER!  There is always a better way to do something.  And - only - the - best - realize - that!  Never be completely satisfied with your current processes. 

For instance, why would we implement, say a performance review process for our employees and keep that exact same review process in place for five or ten years?  Let’s apply that same idea to something else.  What if we were still using the same computer that we had five years ago.  We can all laugh at that, right.  I mean that’s a joke.  Like we could really be using the same computer that we had five years ago.  Well, guess what, it is just as absurd, and just as detrimental to your company, to keep the same policies and procedures in place for five and ten years without reevaluating them.  It’s absurd because surely someone has thought of a better way to do it over the past decade! 

We should never stop searching for better ways to do things just because "the current way works and that is the way we’ve always done it".  There is always a better way to do something.

Since most people hate to change, we have to be creative if we are going to successfully effectuate positive change in our organizations.  One way to get around most of the issues regarding change is through communication and allowing people to weigh-in.  Most people don’t want their way, they just want their way heard and truly considered.  And I mean really considered.  You can’t fake this.  People will see right through it.  If you are going to let people weigh in, you really have to consider their position and give them reasons for not following through with their idea.  Fake weigh in is worse than not letting people weigh in at all and it is insulting. 

We need to ask ourselves if we are going to run a place where people are empowered and they can participate in the enterprise or is it a system of entitlement where you have to have been there for 45,000 years and a day in order for you to be able to say something and have people hear you?

We have to be careful not to breed a political environment where people are forced to choose their words and actions based on how they want others to react instead of how they really feel.  I’ve heard many people say, no, no, we don’t have politics here.  But guess what, if you have an environment where people can’t say what they really feel because they are afraid to ruffle someone’s feathers, that is a political environment.

People Make Extraordinary Things Happen! ^™