One of the ongoing jokes around my house is how to make things easier in life. We joke about crazy stuff, like instead of having to add mayonnaise to tuna to make tuna salad, why not just get the tuna fish to eat mayonnaise so we wouldn’t have to add it in.
In working with businesses and students I often wonder about similar things, things that should be simple – but we make them harder. Things like:
- Why do companies typically rush to hire someone, without first determining what kind of person will best fit into the role? Companies usually hire fast and fire slow (when it doesn’t work out). Why don’t they conduct more ‘due diligence’ on the front end to make better hires, then reap the ongoing benefits of hiring people who have the potential to become top performers – instead of spending huge amounts of time and money trying to change someone that wasn’t a good fit for the role in the first place?
- Why do students and parents spend much more time focused on where the child will go to college, and so little effort planning what they will do when they get out of college? The colleges love this approach, because most students change majors multiple times and take over 5 years to graduate. (Translation: the family ends up paying an ADDITIONAL $10 – $50,000 on the college experience than they would have if they had done some effective planning up front)
“The problem with common sense is that it isn’t too common.”