Let’s highlight an essential element of Business Literacy—Agility. This is such an integral success factor that The Malcolm Baldrige Quality Principles score points for this quality.

The following relate to rigid mindsets that defy Business Literacy

Use these as a checklist for your situation—

Three reasons small businesses fail hard:
1. Lack of planning, not funding. If they have a formal business plan, they don’t bring it out.
Usually there is a lack of a written marketing plan, which represents up to 70% of the business plan.

2. Owners/Leaders don’t listen to advisory input. They make unilateral decisions and they are stubborn. This symptom often relates to the experience and fear of having to learn a new way and the leader may lose control. Can you feel the catastrophizing build! That’s not leadership, that’s being bossy. Ever wondered how those two words relate?
When they want to do everything alone, one must question what the underlying insecurity it. These types don’t know when to hire expertise because they won’t ask—the circumstance is like the joke about men asking for directions! (So, they invented the GPS!)

3. These leaders focus on widgets rather seeing over the horizon then working back. They confuse production with productivity. Counting units is fine however, when we don’t factor in the cost of driving our personnel into the ground, we’re not seeing the reality of the outcome.

What do you think? What’s your experience with agility?