Several years ago at a national conference, the speaker, David Herdlinger, applied his experience using the frequently quoted words, knowledge, skills and attitudes and constructed KSA into a quadrant. The upper boxes contained the letters K for knowledge and A for attitudes. In the lower left hand box was the letter S for Skills. To complete the quadrant, he added the letter H for Habits in the lower right hand corner. Now the letters K.A.S.H. fitted neatly into a box and Whoa La the K.A.S.H. Box was born. The purpose of this K.A.S.H. Box was to show that more often than not performance failure whether organizationally or individually is not just an issue of knowledge and skills, but also poor attitudes and habits. Yet, individuals and organizations spend most of their resources developing knowledge and skills and fail to develop the necessary attitudes and habits for performance success. Being an individual who is always looking to help others make more connections, I expanded David's K.A.S.H. Box into the K.A.S.H. Box for Sustainable Change. Since the purpose of cash boxes is to accumulate daily change or profits within a change drawer, I placed a large rectangular box under the quadrant. When cash is spent on the left side of the K.A.S.H. Box without investing cash on the right side, the money is not reinvested into the business or individual, but is drained away. Hence, a negative return on investment happens. When focusing on both sides of the K.A.S.H. Box, the efforts are reinvested into the change drawer and sustainable change happens. How many times have you witnessed the resources of energy, time and money being spent on a specific change initiative such as training or the implementation of a quality program? And within a short time, the training must be redone or the quality program languishes and may even fail. Is the issue of one only of a lack of knowledge or skills or rather one of the desire, the want to? Within this box, the left side (Knowledge and Skills) is all about learning - the acquisition of knowledge. While the right side (Attitudes and Habits) is all about performing - the application of knowledge. The KASH Box also helps to explain the Knowing-Doing Gap(the Gap between the Actual Results and the Desired Results). So if you are truly interested in building your business from the small business to the Fortune 1000 by building your cash (profits), you may wish to embrace this model. And, remember to ask yourself this simple, but oh so telling question: Is the inability to achieve the goals whether business, professional or personal due to the lack of knowledge or skills or because of some poor attitudes and habits? |
