Grade school lessons you never thought you’d use in real life

Posted on | March 26, 2008 | 1 Comment

Back when I was in the sixth grade, I had a dragon of a teacher named Mrs. Bonner, who seemed to me at the time to be at least 70 years old, was belligerently unfashionable (she appeared to own three dresses and wore the same style of shoes that the nuns wore), and had no patience with newfangled anything.

Some teachers cause students to remember their lessons thanks to innovative methods that get said students interested in and excited about the course material. Not so with Mrs. Bonner; she was a believer in rigid discipline.

Say what you like about innovation in the classroom but it is thanks to her than I can still convert fractions to percentages without the use of a calculator.

And it is thanks to her that I am one of the few Americans still alive who can diagram a sentence.

(Actually, I shouldn’t say that. I assume they don’t teach kids sentence diagramming anymore because my kids certainly didn’t have to learn it. But I don’t really know if that is true nationwide.)

The point of learning to diagram sentences is that it creates a visual structure for language, showing the student how each part of the sentence relates to its foundation of subject and predicate. And when you have that kind of command of the structure of language, you can learn use it much more effectively.

By now, I bet you’re wondering why I’m talking to you about sixth grade grammar from Ancient Times When I Was in School.

Mrs. Bonner came back to me when I read Mary’s March edition of Stuff You Already Know … But Are You Doing It? (And if you don’t get her newsletter, you should. You can sign up from any page on her site.)

From her list of low-tech ways to take a look at your business to see if you have broken processes that need fixing is this: Remember diagramming a sentence? Diagram your business. You may discover that what you thought was bad software is really an employee training issue.

That idea appeals to me. It just seems like it would be the ultra-short and seriously less wordy version of a business plan. And, while it might take a lot less time to write than the traditional business plan, it will probably take as much or maybe more time to think about — and you know how I feel about thinking.

Which part of your business is the main verb, the foundation piece upon which you build everything else? That would be your product, whatever it is, right? But then, what would correspond to the subject? Your customers? Makes sense to me …

And that brings us to the modifiers (assuming for the moment that the object of this particular business sentence would almost certainly be sales, yes?). Maybe we’re thinking that customer service would be a modifier for customers and that product development would be a modifier for that central product-verb.

But what happens to the structure if you use product development as a modifier for customers, too, and even perhaps make it subordinate to customer service? Then you’re designing products around customers instead of in some product-verb vacuum where your favorite geeks live.

I could keep going like this but I think you get my point.

This could be a very cool exercise for you and your business, especially if you find yourself feeling in your heart like you’re just treading water. Business diagramming might not fill your spirit with fire for whatever it is that you’re doing but I suspect it could be a new and different way of looking at what you’re doing that will make you feel a lot less scattered while you do it.

Scattered is unproductive, especially for microbusinesses. So, all this considered, there are worse ways you could spend your time.

[tags]management, microbusiness, operations, business plan[/tags]

Comments