Yesterday I told you about the third elephant.
The idea was that if you’re promising The Greatest Show on Earth, you can’t approach everything by asking:
How can we do this cheaper?
How can we do this with fewer people?
Why three elephants when two would do?
But there was another lesson in my little circus book from 1997 that completes the thought.
Keep the wheels greased.
The old traveling circus was an incredible operation.
Think about what had to happen.
They would arrive in a town by railroad.
Unload animals, performers, equipment, tents, seating, costumes, food, everything required to create an entire temporary world.
Set the whole thing up.
Put on The Greatest Show on Earth.
Take it all down.
Load it back onto the train.
And move to the next town.
Then do it again.
And again.
And again.
Here’s the interesting part.
While the audience was watching the show, there were people behind the scenes maintaining everything.
Repairing things.
Preparing things.
Making sure everything was ready for the next performance.
Keeping the wheels greased.
Because the audience shouldn’t see any of that.
They should see magic.
That’s a pretty great model for a business.
I’ve come to think about it this way:
Be extravagant where the customer can feel it.
Be systematic where they can’t.
The front of the circus should feel like magic.
The back of the circus should run like a machine.
A lot of businesses accidentally reverse those.
They optimize the customer experience until there’s nothing remarkable left…
while behind the scenes everything depends on heroic effort, memory, scrambling and putting out fires.
That’s the worst of both worlds.
What if you flipped it?
What if everything behind the scenes became predictable, documented, maintained and reliable…
so all of that operational efficiency could support something extraordinary out front?
That’s what the circus figured out.
The audience doesn’t need to know how the elephants got there.
They just need to be amazed when the curtain opens.
That’s the real purpose of systems.
Not to eliminate the magic. To make the magic reliable.
Dean