It can't be done
One of my favourite chapters in fords book Is chapter 5 which it titled "It Can't Be Done". In it Ford talks about tradition and how it is a hindrance when people cling to it as a rational for how things are done, he says
The only tradition we need bother about in industry is the tradition of good work. All else that is called tradition had better be classed as experiment.
Henry Ford - Today & Tomorrow 1926
Later he carried on with this thought:
we are charged with discovering the best way of doing everything, and that we must regard every process employed in manufacturing as purely experimental
Henry Ford - Today & Tomorrow 1926
One of the challenges that ford has was people, experts, telling him something couldn't be done. These were people with a great deal of experience in things such as making plate glass for example, glass making had be around for centuries and there were more than enough experts around to make it. Ford, however, wanted to make it on a continuous long ribbon and remove as much manual labour as possible (it was slow and dangerous work after all). After being told that it couldn't be done Ford took his own people, who had no previous experience and asked them to find a solution. They tried countless things and hit issues all along the way, however eventually, they figured it out. The result was a process that was, in those days, remarkable, it could product first class plate glass at around 12 million square feet a year – that's a lot for people who didn't know any better, bets of all their safety was dramatically improved.
He did the same again when he decided that perhaps cotton wasn't the best material for their synthetic leather or tops of cars. It required to be shipped in from thousands of miles away. Again, the ford team experimented with the cotton process and eventually came up with a way to use flax instead. It was cheaper and as they discovered could be mechanically handled and best of all could be grown locally to the plants. No more long-distance transport, I'm sure back then they didn't think about this and an environmental improvement, purely just cost and a reduced time in the supply chain but think about the level of the environmental impact here as well.
Ford's point was clear, just because this is how we do it today, shouldn't mean this is how we should do it tomorrow. Each time they started they didn't know if it would work and what the outcome would be. Each time the outcome was better and cheaper than where they started and they had learned the process since they developed it, meaning they had also grown their people at the same time.
Tradition is an anchor
We hear it a lot, this is the "Dougans way" or the "McTavish approach" to it, we have been doing it like this for years and it has always worked. We just need people to come in and follow our methods. Except you can't. You can't afford to keep doing what you are doing and hoping it will still work in a year or two, it won't. One of the problems that companies face is that they feel like their tried and tested methods are still working. They still get everything out at the same rate they did last year, they still have the same low defect rate as they did last year, it's been working, and it will keep working. This isn't improving it's standing still, and the adage is very true, if you are standing still, you are going backwards.
The issue is not just that you know your competitors are innovating and challenging the status quo but you also know your base costs are going up. Materials, transport, people, it all costs more and so by maintaining the 'tradition' the same method that you used last year you are directly choosing to reduce your profits, and eventually to make a loss. By locking in the "traditional method" or the "way we do it" approach you also stifle your people, you deny them the chance to grow and to help you as an organisation grow. This directly leads to another issue, the people who are dissatisfied with the status quo, decide to make a change, since they can't change at your company, they just change company and now their active brain is at your competitors leaving you with those who are content to come in and follow the rules.
Your tradition has become the anchor that holds you in place and will eventually drag you down.
Challenge Everything
The key to success isn't big bang innovation, it's not investing piles and piles of money and it's not buying a result. It starts with only really one thing, it starts with the wiliness to challenge the status quo, to demand that nothing remains static and to challenge your teams to find one thing to improve every day. Experiment, test out an idea, if it works and delivers an improvement keep it, if it doesn't change it. The only tradition you need to keep is the tradition of Challenge Everything.