Part One Introduction to The 2,000 Percent Solution Workbook: What Is a 2,000 Percent Solution?

Part One

What Is a

2,000 Percent Solution?

A 2,000 percent solution is any method of accomplishing what your organization does now in 1/20th the time or less, or accomplishing 20 times as much or more, while employing the same or fewer resources.

Technology often helps us speed results without increasing resources. For example, you can send material halfway around the world now in an e-mail for a tiny fraction of the cost and time of sending an air courier package. The e-mail is a 2,000 percent solution compared to the best method available 20 years ago, sending a facsimile.

Thinking more clearly about the implications of what needs to be done can have a similar effect without waiting for technology to advance. For instance, many electronic products are now designed to have many fewer parts than the products they replace. Consequently, repairing products with fewer parts takes much less time and costs less. For more expensive products, the parts are often monitored electronically to note when they are about to fail. The message that failure is imminent is sent to the repair person before the failure. The part is replaced, and the customer never experiences a problem. Repeat sales and profits improve as a result. For less expensive products, on-line resources allow customers to diagnose their problems, implement their own solutions and receive faster results at a fraction of providing great hands-on repairs.

Sharing information throughout organizations has had similar effects. Many organizations now use business intelligence software that allows everyone to know what performance is in activities that each person influences. As a result, fewer problems occur and the solutions come faster and less expensively.

In this part of the workbook, we will look at why 2,000 percent solutions are available for just about any activity and how to overcome organizational and personal stalls (ineffective, unthinking habits) that keep 2,000 percent solutions at bay.

Copyright 2005 Donald W. Mitchell