Today better than yesterday is the natural pathway for continuous improvement in the business world. It generates no economic cost; its price is the necessary attitude.
But, if it is so simple, why is it so rare? Because to do things better than yesterday a person has to be aware of what s/he was doing. Automatisms at work avoid awareness and hinder improvements.
Automatisms avoid having immediate real experiences. The learning process in fields where automatisms prevail, like habits, only occurs after multiple failures have driven a person to an extreme crisis.
A conscious approach to businesses suffices to do things today better than yesterday. Intuition, as an automatism, doesn’t suffice.
Therefore, businessmen and women, being their companies large or small, need to be aware of what they are doing in order to improve it tomorrow.
Consciousness expands based on the value adding actions of an individual and shrinks when an individual acts to appropriate other’s value. The human mind needs to create a “story” where the individual is the “hero”, building the necessary parallel reality that generates the contraction of consciousness.
If businesses are run to provide products or services for the true benefit of the client, consciousness expands and the process can be improved tomorrow. But if the true purpose is to obtain benefits from the client, consciousness shrinks and tomorrow the process will become worse.
Those who add value will succeed in the short or long run. Those who appropriate value will be condemned to become Sisyphus:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus
Therefore, doing things better than yesterday depends on our attitude. We strongly recommend that the introduction of improvements in businesses has to begin by adding value in order to obtain the counterpart.
This is very simple if you believe in what you are doing; if not, it is just impossible.
NOTE: The Unicist Research Institute was the pioneer in complexity science research and became the major research organization in the world in the field of human adaptive systems. More than 4,000 unicist ontological researches were developed since 1976 until July 2011 in the field of individual, institutional and social evolution. They included the development of the unicist ontogenetic maps (DNA) of institutions.