We love catch phrases. It's so much easier (and lazier) to say, "Haste makes waste" than it is to discuss how rushing can cause trouble. I, too, love some of these sayings including the doctor's injunctive, "first do no harm"
Still, catch phrases can cause trouble.
At each of the three hospital systems I have been privileged to run, staff often greeted me with, "Erie, this place is doing fine. And 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it,' right?"
Wrong. Most of the time. Leaders must always seek meaningful improvement.
Recently, I asked the incoming head of a crucial training program at a large hospital about her plans.
"I have none," she said. "The program is doing fine."
Seeking to preserve the status quo is a deceptively dangerous strategy. Status quo leaders frustrate meaningful innovation. Leadership grounded in staying the same in an always-changing world pursues a dicey proposition.
What if Steve Jobs had decided in 2007 "The iPhone is fine. No need for more."?*
This truth holds for us personally. Contemporaries declining to learn new technology risk irrelevance.
God hands us presents. Universal wisdom holds that we die with countless gifts unwrapped.
Those who see no need to work harder to live love are, in important ways, not fixed but broken.
-Erie Chapman
Photo: First iPhone, 2007
*Not to mention the Apple II (1979) computer's world changing transition to the Macintosh - so user-friendly that when I turned on mine in 1984 the first image on the screen was a smiley face! It rapidly became the first mass-marketed computer.
