A Zen Garden in A Fast Company
I bought a Zen Garden over the weekend. You know -- the sand tray with a small amount of sand, eight little rocks, and two types of rakes to make patterns in the sand -- thingy. Interesting to play with for awhile. And already, even after doodling with it for just a short while, I have developed a paranoia that someone is going to come along and spoil the great little garden I have toiled over. And there after returning to my desk I see someone has drawn the rake through the whole thing and the rocks are displaced and - - - -
I suppose we can learn, and should learn as a Fast Company, that nothing stays the same. The only constant we have is change: we have new potential customers to work with everyday, the economic climate changes quite rapidly, people leave the business, and others are hired. Smart employees in a Fast Company need not be rattled with change; in fact a smart employee must take change in his/her stride, neither welcoming change nor being frustrated with change. For a Fast Company change just is -- it is the way it is.
That was perhaps one of the earliest frustrations I had with NetSuite when starting to use it -- nothing every seemed to stay the same. I would set up a nice neat way of doing something and then a decision by someone else in the company cause me to have to change the way that I accomplished the same neat thing. What I didn't realise, but now see as an excellent feature of NetSuite is that NetSuite is so flexible that it can change as a business needs to change when experiencing high growth. If a new partnership is negotiated, a new partnership view can be created to allow our new partners to see their part of the new marketing and sales activities within our organization; should a new activity be mooted, we can go into the database and draw reports that may provide us with a clue as to how well that activity might be received by our customers and so on . . .
NetSuite is a little like a Zen Garden in a Fast Company -- it is a constantly changing database of information about the business -- and it can be used by people within the business to record the past and a sandbox to plot out potential new activities. However, in comparing the amount of information carried by my little Zen Garden, NetSuite for one medium sized business is more like a Zen Garden of a few million hectares.
I suppose we can learn, and should learn as a Fast Company, that nothing stays the same. The only constant we have is change: we have new potential customers to work with everyday, the economic climate changes quite rapidly, people leave the business, and others are hired. Smart employees in a Fast Company need not be rattled with change; in fact a smart employee must take change in his/her stride, neither welcoming change nor being frustrated with change. For a Fast Company change just is -- it is the way it is.
That was perhaps one of the earliest frustrations I had with NetSuite when starting to use it -- nothing every seemed to stay the same. I would set up a nice neat way of doing something and then a decision by someone else in the company cause me to have to change the way that I accomplished the same neat thing. What I didn't realise, but now see as an excellent feature of NetSuite is that NetSuite is so flexible that it can change as a business needs to change when experiencing high growth. If a new partnership is negotiated, a new partnership view can be created to allow our new partners to see their part of the new marketing and sales activities within our organization; should a new activity be mooted, we can go into the database and draw reports that may provide us with a clue as to how well that activity might be received by our customers and so on . . .
NetSuite is a little like a Zen Garden in a Fast Company -- it is a constantly changing database of information about the business -- and it can be used by people within the business to record the past and a sandbox to plot out potential new activities. However, in comparing the amount of information carried by my little Zen Garden, NetSuite for one medium sized business is more like a Zen Garden of a few million hectares.
posted by Walter at 11:35 AM
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