The 20 Excuses That Stifle New Business Transformation

In their book, How Excellent Companies Avoid Dumb Things, co-authors Neil Smith and Patricia O'Connell list 20 excuses commonly heard in companies for reasons why new business transformation ideas are not considered.

The authors recommend eliminating these 20 excuses from your company's vocabulary:

1. Our company is well run; there are no opportunities.
2. We're inefficient, but my department is not the problem.
3. The issue is support function and allocations, not my costs.
4. Our problem is revenues, not how we do things.
5. We have tried that before.
6. We are already doing that.
7. My boss/theCEO/legal will never agree to that.
8. That won't save money or increase revenues.
9. That would cost too much to implement.
10. No one in the industry is doing that.
11. We will lose customers if we do that.
12. Anything that takes time away from serving my customers will hurt us.
13. But we are unique.
14. No one really understands what we do.
15. I don't have time to think about that.
16. We don't have the right technology to do that.
17. I can't risk my job raising that.
18. I can only impact my own department.
19. I don't have the right people to do that.
20. Now is not a good time for us to make changes.