Can you change everything?

You might not be as permanently stuck in a rut as you think. The rut you're in isn't permanent, nor is it perfect. There are certainly less perfect ruts, but there may be better ones as well. The certain thing is that you can change everything…

  1. Buy a competitor
  2. Sell to a competitor
  3. Publish your best work for free online
  4. Close your worst-performing locations
  5. Open a new branch in a high-traffic location
  6. Hire the best salesperson away from the competition
  7. Join the competition
  8. Host a conference for your competitors
  9. Connect your best customers and organize a tribe
  10. Fire the 80% of your customers that account for 20% of your sales
  11. Start a blog
  12. Start a digital bootstrap business on the weekends
  13. While looking for a job, spend 40 hours a week volunteering and freelancing for good causes
  14. Go on tour and visit your best customers in person
  15. Answer the customer service line for a day
  16. Learn to be a killer presenter
  17. Let the most junior person in the organization run things for a day
  18. Delete your website and start over with the simplest possible site
  19. Call former employees and ask for advice
  20. Move to Thailand
  21. Listen to audio books in your car instead of the radio
  22. Sell your cash cow division to the competition and invest everything in the new thing
  23. Find more products for your existing customers to buy
  24. Become a gadfly and tell the truth about your industry
  25. Quit your job
  26. Move your operations to another city
  27. Become a vegan
  28. Have all meetings in a room with no chairs, and everyone wears a bathrobe over their clothes
  29. Open your offices only four hours a day
  30. Open your offices 24 hours a day for a week
  31. Find every project that is near the danger zone (in terms of p&l or deadlines) and cancel it, no appeals
  32. Go for a walk during lunch
  33. Get an RSS reader and read a lot more blogs
  34. Go offline for longer than you thought possible
  35. Write five thank you notes every day
  36. Stop sending spam
  37. Do your work somewhere else. Set up your chiropractic table at the mall
  38. Have everyone at work switch offices
  39. Give your most valuable possessions to a stranger
  40. Go see live music
  41. Start a company scrapbook and take daily notes
  42. Hire a firm to make a documentary about your organization
  43. Buy some art
  44. Make some art.
  45. Do the work.

May 4, 2009