Let Me Rephrase That
We like change here in these walls, and consequently have written a lot about that very topic on our blog. Yes, we’ve written about the philosophy of change, and given great info on how to deal with change or even instigate it, but we haven’t necessarily painted a picture of how change takes shape in real life. Spend the next 5 minutes here, and you will get a solid understanding of the clever and mysterious ways change has instantiated itself in our society, and especially useful is how to “rephrase” your business.
Change in society:
In September 2011, the Oxford English Dictionary added the word “kewl” to its impressive collection of the English language. In August 2011, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary recently added 150 new words that are effectively a ‘sign of the times,’ including “crowdsourcing” and “helicopter parents.”
Dictionaries do this all of the time – they MUST, after all – they’re in the business of keeping records of our words. Since words are the symbols and signs of linguistic evolution; and linguistic evolution embodies the changes occurring over time in our cultural, technological, environmental world; it follows logically that words are the symbols and signs of our (very speedy) human evolution. Evolution is a big, fancy word for change, and change makes us “rephrase” and rework our old ways of wording experiences.
Change in your business:
Change happens in your business – sometimes it leads to more improved circumstances, and sometimes not so. How you handle change has a great effect upon your success as a company, as a person. (Read “Change is Not Inevitable!” for a fabulous perspective on this.) Most businesses that have made it through the Great Recession have also proved they are masters of change, of remaining flexible in troubled times.
ODT happens to be in business in a very rapidly-changing segment: the digital print industry. While digital print is merely one thing we do (and we do it very well with the finest equipment!), we have talents in other areas that are on the cutting edge, too. We like to work with data, and work to utilize variable data in unique and new ways. We have an innate knack for troubleshooting and problem-solving. We also have an extreme passion for efficiency, and from that passion was born the efficiency engine, Praxis TM.
Praxis is a robust and scalable efficiency engine that will make magic of your business processes. The reason I’m typing about Praxis in this blog (I admit to the shameless plug here) is that the Praxis story is a successful response to change. Originally, Praxis was created on the fly to solve some of our own workflow issues on the print side of things. Because it was such a great help to us in running our digital print jobs, we adopted it for client use, and that was when we realized the true power Praxis possessed. Beccause someone else saw its value, too, and is still using it today. Since we’ve used and grown Praxis over time, we have gone beyond the limits of hard copy digital print and can now deliver documents in any medium a client wants (email, iPad app, mobile app, PDF, for instance). And Praxis itself is the perfect story of rephrasing on a continual basis because we are constantly dreaming up new and successful ways of using it!
Conclusion:
Once we changed (removed) the limitations of our own business capabilities, we “rephrased” our entire internal discourse about what our business does. The rephrasing process has evolved ODT’s linguistics and story to reflect our new point-of-view on what we offer as a business. We discovered that we’ve gone from a digital print shop to “digital document delivery.” We have grown and have much more to offer than we did in the 1990s, and the rephrasing has captured our new POV.
Think about your own “rephrasing” efforts. Has your company had a dialog recently about what it is you do or deliver – your value proposition? If not, you should open that door to beneficial change and rephrase your point of view of your own company. The old words you are using for your products and services may not be accurately describing your current talents and products!
