Marketing guru Seth Godin recently wrote an article on Bear Shaving. Bear Shaving is when firms address a symptom rather than a root cause. The term Bear Shaving comes from a commercial where a little girl shaves a bear to protect it from global warming. She had the right intent but ultimately, shaving bears won't solve global warming. An equivalent analogy is buying more buckets as the roof leak worsens.

When working with companies to implement Dynamics GP, I see an awful lot of companies that would prefer to shave the bear. Interestingly, as you go higher in an organization, most executives don't want to shave the bear, they want to fix the root cause but often that message doesn't filter down into the organization. Addressing root problems can be painful, but not addressing them leads to long term decay. What about your firm? At the risk of mixing metaphors, you might be shaving the bear if:

...