What You're Not Doing That You Should Be

At the ripe old age of 24, I’m the oldest person on the executive team at Olympia Media Group.  I’m also one of the few people working for this company that has had any prior post-college work experience.  And, what I’ve realized since joining the team last summer is that it would benefit a lot of companies if they took a page from our playbook.  When I say that, do I mean that they should start a company in the middle of an industry that is “dying,” hire a handful of 22-24 year olds to run separate divisions of that company, set up shop in a bagel factory in the middle of a sweltering Indiana summer with no air conditioning, blast mashups and 80’s music throughout the office on a daily basis, throw all political correctness out the window, and allow starting a weekend pre-game at the office because there’s a lot of work to do but also a lot of playing to do?  Kind of, but not exactly.

The reason that we do all of these things isn’t because there’s some overwhelming reason to do them, it’s because there isn’t an overwhelming reason not to do them.  Call it genius, or call it being “kids” that have decided to jump in and then learn how to swim because we’re too impatient to do it the other way around, but we are constantly asking ourselves why we’re doing what we’re doing, and why we aren’t implementing a new idea that we came up with while sitting around a wobbly card table in an old factory.

We constantly ask ourselves “Why? ” and “Why not?” because we know that there are only 2 outcomes: we either confirm that the way we’re doing something is the best way for us to do it, or we deciding that there is a better way to do it, and quickly make that change.  Knowing what I know now, I would venture to guess that most companies don’t ask themselves these questions often enough because they don’t like the answers that they know they’ll come up with.  Companies grow, and companies develop systems and processes, but if they don’t constantly ask themselves why they’re doing things a certain way, how they can do those things better, and most importantly encourage every employee to subscribe to this philosophy, they might grow, slowly… but in this rapidly changing, innovation-driven economy, it’s more than likely that they’re going nowhere, fast.

Jordan Roraus, Regional Sales Manager