I’ve extended the free offer (due to heavy blog promotion this week).

I have an autographed copy of the book by Dan Pink. I’ll give it away for FREE to a randomly chosen reader who emails or comments how they found out about this blog. Send your email or post your comment by midnight, eastern time on Friday 5/5.

A Whole New Mind is about how economic changes make “right brain” qualities more important than they have ever been for success. This is in contrast to recent history when “left brain” stuff has been sufficient.

This is why a $3 toilet brush must be not only sourced and marketed cheaply (left brain accounting skills) but also well designed (right brain creativity) if it’s going to sell. It’s also why spirituality and happiness (right brain qualities) are as important in career decisions as retirement packages and salary (left brain).

And it explains that, in Pink’s words “seeing the big picture is fast becoming the killer app in business.” In other words, entreprenuers who understand the inter-relatedness of the systems in their companies (right brain) do better than ones who don’t get the relationships that make the whole bigger than the sum of the parts.

More than just explanation, the book has exercises and examples. Dan is a prescient writer who frequently sees trends before they’re well known.
Takeaways:

• The world is changing and new skills are needed to succeed.
• Use this book as a way to expand your own skills, reach new markets and build a better team of employees

Dan will also be a keynote speaker at the 11th annual International Coach Federation conference Nov. 1-4, 2006 in St. Louis. If you have any interest in coaching, or just want to see Dan in person, I’ll see you at the Arch.

Last week I wrote about not buying people’s time. If you’re not buying time, you have to know what you are buying. This is harder than buying time, so we buy time as a cop out. It’s hard for two reasons.

One is we often don’t know how to explain what we want but “we know it when we see it”. Assuming for a minute that our knowing it when we see it is consistent (and it often isn’t) it still helps to explain what we want, so the other person knows.

The other reason is we don’t know how much is enough or when the job is done. Most knowledge work is like that. If I’m painting a room it’s obvious to me or anyone watching if I’m done, and before that, how much I have left to go. If I’m doing a marketing report, or researching competitors on the web, how do you know when you’ve done enough? It could go on forever. Generally what happens is you do it till something else becomes more urgent. Sort of like on Thanksgiving when you eat till the game is on. Then you doze in front of the game till you’re hungry. Then you eat till it’s time to take a nap etc.

So try this. Imagine your employees worked the night shift. And you came in every morning and never saw them.
How would you know what they’d done?
How would you know who did a good job?
How would you know how much work was left to do?

Try that for each person’s job. Write down your thoughts. Discuss with them.

You won’t get all your answers doing this exercise, but it will help.

Takeaways. Describing expected results and managing that way does the following:

• …Makes people better able to self-evaluate. This improves employees reviews.
• …Frees up people to work at different times and in different places
• …Makes it possible for you to travel and still monitor what’s going on
• …Makes it easier to replace people as the company grows and train their replacements.

Robert Scobel put up a post about how to reinvent Microsoft. If any company needs it they must be in the top three, along with GM and … maybe your company?

I’ve distilled his ideas into suggestions that will work for any company of any size. Scobel’s post will give you some context and explanation. For that reason I’m listing my ideas in the same order as his. One other note, my use of the word “public” may be interpreted to mean, just internally (or not) depending on your situation.

Takeaways:

• Create a vision that inspires.
• Give every employee top of the line tools to do their jobs.
• Allow for public understanding of who’s moving ahead, who’s not and WHY. Or at least public discussions of which ideas are moving people ahead or holding them back.
• Make the rules and systems serve progress. Incorporate a system that reviews and revises them. Make public input to that system easy.
• Explain marketing decisions publicly and allow for comments. You might want to expand this beyond marketing decisions – at least to employees.

Systems that support, not hinder what people do, and allow them to do it better. Most of us don’t think of systems that way. Instead we feel they hinder the “real” us. But, as Seth Godin says here, “If process makes you nervous, it’s probably because it threatens your reliance on intuition. Get over it. The best processes leverage your intuition and give it room to thrive.”

I’ll take it a step further and say it takes creativity to define good systems. A good system is one that accomplishs what the company needs at the same time supporting each person in doing what she or he is uniquely qualified to do. A good system takes time and testing (as well as intuition) to develop. It needs to be tweaked and adjusted. And when the people change (a good system will make it easy for people to move up and move on and replace them) the system needs to change as well.

Takeaways:

• If you’re a manager, developing systems is your job.

I have an autographed copy of the book by Dan Pink. I’ll give it away for FREE to a randomly chosen reader who emails or comments how they found out about this blog. Send your email or post your comment by noon, eastern time on Friday 4/28.

A Whole New Mind is about how economic changes make “right brain” qualities more important than they have ever been for success. This is in contrast to recent history when “left brain” stuff has been sufficient.

This is why a $3 toilet brush must be not only sourced and marketed cheaply (left brain accounting skills) but also well designed (right brain creativity) if it’s going to sell. It’s also why spirituality and happiness (right brain qualities) are as important in career decisions as retirement packages and salary (left brain).

And it explains that, in Pink’s words “seeing the big picture is fast becoming the killer app in business.” In other words, entreprenuers who understand the interrelatedness of the systems in their companies (right brain) do better than ones who don’t get the relationships that make the whole bigger than the sum of the parts.

More than just explanation, the book has exercises and examples. Dan is a prescient writer who frequently sees trends before they’re well known.

Takeaways:

• The world is changing and new skills are needed to succeed.
• Use this book as a way to expand your own skills, reach new markets and build a better team of employees

Dan will also be a keynote speaker at the 11th annual International Coach Federation conference Nov. 1-4, 2006 in St. Louis. If you have any interest in coaching, or just want to see Dan in person, meet me at the arch.

I’m not a big fan of cutesy sayings. But I was watching a promo video for an educational program designed to revolutionize your company. It’s an old video I found cleaning some junk so the program is probably obsolete.

However one of the testimonials was interesting. They guy said they don’t undertake any program unless it meets the Three S’s (which this one obviously did in his opinion). His 3 S’s along with my explanations are below.

Significant – why bother making major changes if it’s not possible to have a significant impact? Little changes? go ahead and do them all the time. But big ones, better have a big payoff.

Sustainable – We all know the “flavor of the month” style of management. If it won’t be something you can integrate into the company culture, and build on over time, it’s probably not worth the effort.

Safe – What if it doesn’t work? How much time, effort, money have you lost? Is it possible you’ll give up things that produce real results, in exchange for a promise? And if that promise is unfulfilled, what’s the possibility you’ll end up worse than you started and can’t get back?

When you hire a accountant or a lawyer or someone who charges by the hour, do you really want those hours? Does it make sense that if you ask a question they don’t know, and need to research you should pay more than if you ask one they know off the top of their head? Does it make you wonder if they take longer than they have to? More importantly does it keep you from calling them because you wonder if your call will be worth the $150?

There are other ways to structure your relationship – value based billing, a set fee for retainers etc. But that’s not really why I’m writing this.

I’m writing because of your employees.
Are you buying their time? Do you really want to? Wouldn’t you rather have productivity than hours on the clock? But how do you pay for only that? At the extreme, it’s probably impossible. You can’t make every job a piecework job, nor would you want to. But if you think about your rules and policies, you can come a lot closer to your real goal. Here are some things to think about.

Personal calls and other business.
Are employees “stealing” from you when they make personal calls at work? Only if you’re buying their time. After all you make them don’t you? What if the call to arrange child care, or car repair actually puts their mind at ease and makes them more productive. Maybe they’re doing you a favor.

Sick Days
This includes mental health days. Do you really want someone at work when they’re sick – especially if they’re contagious? Which is better – take a day off, get better quicker or “work through it” at half pace for several days in the office?

Coming in late and leaving early
If their work is done, does it really matter? In some cases, yes. The phones have to be answered and customers served at posted business hours. Some meetings and such have to be done on schedule. But if someone is finished, why should they sit around looking busy till closing time? Back in the 80′s when on-site gyms and company barbecues were all the rage at high tech companies, one employee of such a firm told me how it worked at her place. She said people would spend 80 hours a week or more on the premises. But with the work-outs and socializing and stuff, they never really got any more done than folks who worked a normal work week. More is not always better, less is not always worse.

Won’t people take advantage of you?
If that’s the case, something’s wrong. Either you have the wrong people, or the wrong environment or both.

Takeaways:

• How about treating people like adults?
• Have as few rules as you can and if you think someone’s not being fair, talk to them about it.
• Of course you have to be open to them talking to you about fairness from your end.
• But isn’t fairness a good thing? Otherwise you may be buying time.

What’s considered “newsworthy” by the business press is either about trends that have a very broad appeal, or what Hugh McLeod calls business porn. The reason any kind of porn has any appeal at all is that it’s a fantasy. So that kind of business news is obviously irrelevant. As for the trends – they usually don’t apply to a small company. One can make a very successful company flying under the radar, or exploiting niches that have nothing to do with larger trends.

However, there are times when the larger issues do have an impact, but small companies don’t usually take time to consider them. Here is an exercise to solve that problem.

 

Financial Impact Grid
From The Star Bulletin by Ralph Perrine,

SOMETIMES I sit with business decision-makers and draw what I call an Impact Grid. In the middle square we put the company. In the next square we put the company’s clients. In another, the client’s customers.

In adjacent squares we put the company’s partners and vendors. We talk about what impacts these squares. It helps business leaders think about the impact of economic factors: employment, interest rates, and so forth.

It also reveals lines of impact for specific scenarios: If client A’s customers are hit with a shock (hurricane, bird flu, rising energy costs), then client A is going to experience a downturn in sales. That in turn will have other implications. 

Work is defined as moving objects at or near the surface of the earth, or telling others to do so. The first is uncomfortable and ill paid, the second is more enjoyable and better paid. – Old Joke (which isn’t as funny in the new economy).

Management is actually the job of coordinating effort so that an organization can perform better as a group than the individuals can working on their own.

If you think about that sentence, you’ll discover that the point of management is performance, in other words the goal is results. And you’ll see that the tools at management’s disposal are the tools of coordination: prioritization, allocating resources, communication, support. You’ll also see that a lot hinges on your definition of the word “better.”

Briefly, the three levels of management are these:

Foreman
This is the name usually used in factories or construction work – but it applies everywhere. It’s a person in charge of a small crew who is also a worker on that crew. It addition to doing the work, the foreman is responsible for leadership and intra-crew decisions such as scheduling, making sure the crew has enough supplies, etc. But the foreman cannot change the direction or makeup of the crew nor can he/she make major decisions about the crew’s assignments. The foreman is usually given a task for the crew to perform – he helps organize the crew to accomplish the task, but can’t modify the task.

Executive or Middle Management
These managers are responsible for organizing others to accomplish tasks. They are usually given (or help define) goals and they decide / prioritize the tasks needed to accomplish those goals. Then they work to assign ways that the tasks can be accomplished within constraints of budget, staffing levels, equipment etc. Middle management is often responsible for coordination between groups. In practice many managers (especially in technical fields) divide their time between actually doing management work and being workers or foremen (doing other work that needs to be done).

Upper Management
This level is responsible for setting strategic direction, and also is concerned with how to best utilize funds, new product decisions, how to read and address trends in the market place. Profitability goals and long term vs short term trade offs are the purview of this level of management, as are exit strategy decisions.

Foreman or 1st level managers tend to ask When? What? and Where? because they are responsible for getting stuff done. Middle managers ask How? and Who? because they are given a goal and have to muster resources and assign them often within budgetary constraints. Top level mgmt asks WHY? because they are responsible for the strategic purpose of what is being done.

Takeaways:

• In small companies people wear many different hats. The same person may wear hats at each level of management. This can be confusing.
• Too often, the owner is mostly doing foreman level work. Middle or Executive management is only done in response to a problem or crisis and Upper level strategic work done almost never. This is a mistake
• The tools of the executive (middle and upper management) are meetings and reports. Many small business owners don’t know how to use these tools or believe they are not needed because of the small number, or close proximity of employees. They are wrong.

I’m barely a third of the way through this book and already want to recommend it. Don’t wait for me to finish – get reading. Porportedly based on habits that Harnish learned from reading about John D. Rockefeller (say what you will about the man’s morals, he did build a large profitable company) the book builds on a whole lot of stuff I’ve already said (so it must be right).

The main habits are:
Priorities:
Have a long term 15-20 year vision and direction. Then have 90 day goals of what you need to accomplish now. And forget the middle time period. Make sure that your 90 day goals consist of 5 (no more no less) top priorities that everyone is working on and that they all know which of the 5 is the top 1 of 5.

Data:
Track the right data daily and weekly so that each person has at least one metric driving their performance.

Rhythm of the Meetings:
Have the right rhythm of daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual meetings for alignment and accountability. Make sure they are well run and useful. I couldn’t have said it better myself.
The X Factor:
Determine the chokepoint in your business model and industry, then gain control of that chokepoint. Rockefeller’s was transportation costs – why he got so in bed with the railroads. But this was so pervasive to him when he started making his own oak barrels, instead of shipping green wood, he had it split and dried in the forest so his shipping costs were halved.

The book is above all – practical. Gives you a lot to do and ways to do it. Reading it feels like boot camp.