Here’s a picture of my desk. It’s got ZERO papers on it. If I’m working on something I’ll put that ONE thing on the desk. Then put it away when I’m done, or when I’m interrupted. This concept is new to me (as anyone who’s seen my desk can attest). We’ll have to see how long it lasts, but I’m liking the way that it feels. I’m more focused and feel I have more choice in what I should be working on. And those nagging projects that I needed to do but didn’t want to get started on? It’s harder to ignore them.
Look below for a view of what it used to look like:
And that blank stare you see? The clutter made it hard to focus. But when there’s nothing on my desk I have to decide what’s the most important thing to work on now. I can’t fool myself into thinking I’m doing something important when I’m working on what’s merely urgent (or worse!). When there’s only one thing on my desk I know what I have to work on. When there’s two things on the desk (or more) I’m distracted.
You may also be able to see I’ve got ZERO emails in my inbox (the monitor on the left). I realized I was using it as a holding tank and doing so was cluttering up my mind. I’m using gmail so I just selected them all and archived them. That way I can find them with search if I need to, but if I don’t ever need them then I don’t need them. As mail comes in I’ll check periodically and empty the box every time. I’ve never been a huge fan of labels (folders) for email but I’m starting to find them useful. I now have one called “later” for stuff I want out of my inbox but don’t want to take the time for now.
A Mind is a Terrible Thing To Clutter
You do realize that multi-tasking is a myth don’t you? You can’t really do two things at once, you just flip from one to the other in very small bits. Like talking to someone on the phone while you’re having a different conversation with someone in the room. You don’t really hear them both at the same time. You just ignore parts of each conversation that (hopefully) you can infer when you switch back.
I’m trying to be more conscious about what I work on – meaning I’m deciding based on what’s important not what’s urgent (or distracting) unless I decide distraction is important for the time. It’s similar to the GTD process of emptying your inbox on a regular basis.
Applying this to a TODO list
I’ve started using Asana for my TODO / Project list. I like it because I can assign tasks to projects and see them that way. But in another view I can see all my tasks in a single list (called your inbox) This needs to be emptied regularly as well. The way Asana prioritizes tasks, you go to your inbox, and decide when you’re going to work on each task. You can assign it to TODAY, Upcoming or Later. I realized that the reason I kept so many things in my in box is I didn’t want to forget about them. The “Later” category is great for that. I can keep my Today list clean and not loose those wonderful ideas that I love (which often turn out to be not so great but that’s a post for another day).
It’s kind of like the concept of a WILL-DO list rather than a TODO list.
It’s devolved into a productivity discussion – which isn’t bad – but that’s not the bigger thought that inspired me to write. The bigger thought is
The difference between zero and one is huge!
Much bigger than the difference between one and two or even one and one hundred. You see this in lots of arenas. When a startup goes from zero sales to one – it becomes a company instead of just a prototype factory. That’s why so many small shops stick the first dollar on the wall. They don’t do that with the 2nd or the tenth or even the millionth dollar.
Zero mistakes is a great place to be. So is zero late shipments. Factories post how many days they’ve gone with zero injuries – not how many days since they’ve had one.
And the difference makes the one important as well. The only one is much more important than the best of two.
Takeaway:
I’m not sure what’s the best takeaway for this post. But it’s a new year. A year I hope will be marked by a one followed by lots of zeros in my bank account. Maybe starting with zero things on my desk and in my inbox will help.
Living in Connecticut with some big trees in the yard, we stocked up on water, food we could eat without cooking, propane and then slept in the finished basement. We spent the entire time with running water (hot AND cold). We had no flooding, and enjoyed uninterrupted power, cable, phone and internet service. No trees or limbs down, though a small branchlette did tear a window screen on its journey down to earth but left the glass unscratched. That’s the extent of it.
We were fortunate. Also grateful for the funding and diligence of pro-active tree trimming around power lines that has been going on for years in this area.
Because of these facts.
Side note about Montreal. My wife went to Montreal on Friday to bring our daughter home after her summer there. They had planned to make the trip back on Sunday but as that was when Irene scheduled her visit they had to choose whether to come home on Saturday or ride it out up north and come back on Monday. They chose to arrive Saturday before Irene did. The right choice as it turned out; because damage to high rises which had been a concern for NYC never panned out there. But several windows were blown out of a high rise in Montreal – a building my family drove right by on their way home.
The point is that large scale trends can be irrelevant to specifics on the ground without being wrong. If your house did fine in Gloria (a REAL hurricane) but got flooded by Irene (JUST a tropical storm) the fact that, by some numbers, Connecticut did better than predicted doesn’t really matter to you.
That means that national or global economic trends of recessions, tight lending by banks, layoffs etc. may not be applicable to your business. Things may be better for you or worse depending on the specifics of your situation.
For example, most of my current clients are doing better than the national averages in recent months and are having trouble hiring. One whose business as always done better than his local competition is having hard times and seeing his numbers dwindle and is having to cut staff. We’re starting to track different data points to learn the causes of these things and how to exploit them.
I posted four years ago that typical pro-business political positions are often actually bad for business because they are short sighted. In my experience working with business owners, lack of strategic planning is something they are almost always “too busy” to do, so it doesn’t surprise me that this problem expends to politics.
Seth Godin writes a post with a similar conclusion, though Seth adds some more profound insights – as he usually does.
One interesting line from Seth is “At some point, a healthy and fairly paid community is essential if you want to sell them something.”
Think about it. How well would your company survive without a market that had the money to buy your products, the time to shop for and enjoy them, and the leisure to pay attention?
flickr.com/photos/ramdac/ Jason Gulledge
I almost called this post the ideal team for RUNNING your company. But that would be wrong. You can run it however you want. Some people want to be in charge of everything. Fine. Some want to just do stuff and not think about process or monitor any results except the bottom line. Fine. Some want to operate on a whim and change direction on impulse. Fine too. You can run a company any of those ways. Just don’t expect it to grow very large or very fast.
If you want a company to grow, you have to have a team that executes. Hence the term “executive.” By executive, I mean someone who can take an idea and run with it: make it happen. I don’t mean they run away with it. Executives need to be monitored and accountable but they don’t need hand holding. They take responsibility and initiative.
There are two reasons you need a team and they both relate to the fact that a growing company is constantly changing. There are new activities and new challenges all the time. (This same is true of a turn around situation so the team concept is applicable there as well even though the company may actually be shrinking not growing).
Reason # One is there are too many moving parts for a single person to do them all. If the same stuff is happening over and over again, maybe one executive can deal with it. But by definition, this won’t be true if you’re growing.
Reason # Two is because of the shower syndrome. You know those ideas you get in the shower? Or maybe as you’re falling asleep, or out walking the dog? I often get them when I’m in the car by myself – another reason not to text and drive.
Those are the result of your non-conscious mind working on a problem after your conscious mind has let it go. They aren’t always right but they can be very very powerful. The reason for a team is you only get these ideas about one thing at a time. If you’re focused on raising a new round of investment, you won’t be focused on opening a new market.
flickr.com/photos/rocketjim54/
You need a team so more people can get these kind of ideas in the shower. Not that I recommend group showers or anything.
So without further ado here’s your team:
NOTE: The ideal team size is not 7 even though I’ve listed 7 categories below. The best team size is either 3, 4, or 5. It makes sense to combine responsibilities based on your industry, company size and individual’s skill sets. But you do need a “buck stops here” person at the top of each of these categories.
Sales & Marketing. I know these are separate skill sets, but they both serve parts of the same process (turning a person into a lead, then a prospect then a customer). So you need a person at the top who can make this happen and do it in a way that supports the strategic goals of the company. At different times that means opening up new markets, shifting the sales mix toward, or away from certain product lines, more profitable sales at the expense of market share – or vice versa.
Operations. This person is charged with developing an organization to deliver what the sales people sell. They must focus on effectiveness, not just efficiency. They should be able to accurately project lead times, quality assessments and costs.
CFO Everything the company does affects cash. Someone needs to be focused on the cash aspects of every decision the company makes. Someone need the time and bandwidth to routinely hit up vendors for better prices, make sure sales are collected early and bills are paid at the optimal time.
This person need not be an accountant. But they need to understand accounting well enough to “speak the language” and relate accounting to management decisions. And she (or he) must understand the differences between short term spending and long term investment.
Legal Almost everything the company does has legal implications. This person should not be in-house council. They should probably not even be a lawyer (like the CFO need not be an accountant). But they have to “speak the language.” This person should know when something needs to be sent to the company’s counsel and when it doesn’t. They should be able to mark up legal documents and negotiate contracts to a point where you’re not paying lawyers to do things that a mere mortal can accomplish. This way the firm can get the most benefit from what it does spend on legal fees.
IT Here I’m talking of IT as a strategic function – not a support function. Increasingly, every company has some informational or knowledge component to what they sell or how they make and sell it. Someone needs to know how to tap into the latest technology to provide a competitive advantage in that aspect of the product or process. This is the person I’m talking about.
For some historical perspective, consider this. Before factories were run by electricity, they were powered by an external source – often water. No matter what they produced, they needed an intricate arrangements of wheels, belts, pulleys etc to get the power from the river or waterfall outside the building to the machines and devices inside. The ability to design and implement the power transmission often became a strategic advantage to the firm – despite that fact that what they sold did not contain water, belts, or pulleys. That is the aspect of IT that I’m referring to here. It is of course, more critical in some companies than in others, but worth considering in all companies.
New Products Every market is moving faster and faster. Just selling the same stuff year after year is a way to consign your company to the commodity market (at best and the graveyard at worst). Someone should be thinking 1,2 or 5 years out about and developing new products for existing customers as well as new markets. This job is very much in the Important but not Urgent category.
CEO The CEO is the keeper of the business model. It’s up to her (or him) to understand how the trends and cultural changes outside the company affect and are exploited by the systems and organizational structure on the inside.
This person is the captain of the ship, or more aptly, the conductor of the orchestra. Did you ever stop to think that the conductor makes none of the sound the audience hears? Their job is in two parts. One faces outside the company where they need to make key relationships and notice trends. One faces inside the company, where they develop the size and scope of the organization to profit from those trends and relationships.
It takes a big cultural shift for many companies – especially ones that were founded by a single individual.
I’m a big fan of the bootstrap – that phase when you do it or make it rather then buy it, when you spend time rather than money, and pay in stock options rather than cash. But a company can only bootstrap so far. If you’re going to build a top notch team, you have to hire the best and pay them market rates. But just as importantly, you have to structure the organization so those expenditures are investments rather than costs.
Another big attitude shift is that of control. When one person’s at the top they are expected to know everything and all the decisions rest on their shoulders. A company like that can’t scale past a certain point. To grow you must be thrilled to give up control, and be happy to find people who are much better than you at certain tasks.
Another cultural shift is that as a company grows it becomes more dependent on process and less on just getting the job done. Not to say that process should be allowed to impede the results – that’s bureaucracy. But the wisdom and experience that people develop can’t be allowed to live in a few people’s heads. It has to spread throughout the organization so that best practices abound. That takes process.
Many of the ideas here were inspired by a discussion I had with Mark Volchek about this topic. Mark is a co-founder and the CFO of Higher One. The company was founded in 2000 by students right out of college, was on the INC 500 in 2009 and went public in 2010.
image source flickr.com/photos/bradgillette/397715338/
If you ever read anything about starting or running a business in the press; or if you go to hear people speak about the topic, in all likelihood you’ll find they’re probably not telling you the unvarnished truth.
Why don’t they tell you the truth? I call it the Close Encounters Syndrome. Some of my readers may be old enough to remember the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” It’s from 1977.
Richard Dreyfus plays a guy who sees a UFO one day and it scars him for life. He can’t get this sound out of his head, and has a vision of a mountain he has to build – right in the middle of his living room. As you can imagine it doesn’t sit well with his wife. In the process of following his bliss obsession, he looses his job then his wife leaves him and takes the kids. And throughout it all he keeps at it, undeterred. Then finally the aliens really exist and they come back to earth to and take him away in a blaze of glory proving that his vision was right all along.
By the way, the ending is where they got the idea for the last 5 seconds of this ad:
Well you see they don’t make movies about people who hear things, have visions, loose their jobs and their families and end up in the loony bin, instead of in outer space. It just isn’t a story people want to pay to see – despite how wonderful and inexpensive the pop corn is at those places.
Likewise you don’t read much about how hard it is to get a business going, or the specific mistakes people made that caused their company to crash and burn. Or the ones who went bust trying to do exactly what Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs, or [fill in the blank] did.
Instead we read about how people got great ideas and never gave up and became rich, famous, beautiful and skinny. We’re left to figure the other stuff out on our own.
Recently Eric Ries pointed out this problem. And quoted Paul Graham saying something similar.
On top of that, Inc Magazine had a series of short articles where they specifically profiled business failures. Check out the October 2010 issue starting on page 67. I can’t find them online but if you search Inc.com for 2010: Learning the Hard Way, you’ll find them.
The funny thing is, there’s more learning in failure than in success. Why? Because when things go right, you don’t really know how much was luck, how much was timing, how much is able to be replicated. But when things go wrong it’s often easier to figure out what not to do next time.
The title of this post is a play on the title of one of the best business books I know: Up The Organization by Robert Townsend. Townsend was president of Avis Car Rental in its prime and has some witty and insightful things about how companies (mostly big ones) should operate. The book has been revised and reprinted, but if you can find an out of print copy of his sequel Further Up the Organization, I recommend that one.
That’s reaction some entrepreneurs have. They don’t need no stinkin’ organization. They just tell people what to do. Then they scream and curse when it doesn’t get done right. But whenever you have two or more people working toward a common goal, you have an actual organization, whether you like it or not.
The trick to developing a growing, thriving organization is to push as much responsibility as possible down the organization.
The more things that are handled as close as possible to where the work is done, the more people at the top have time and resources to do more strategic things. But this is hard to do.
Why? Because the people at the top often have more experience and ability. At least we say that’s the reason. Yes, they often are more competent. But the reason it’s hard to push that competence down the organization is that people who are good at what they do have what’s called “unconscious competence”. Remember when you learned to drive a car? Remember the focus it took? You were developing competence – consciously. At some point you got so good you could drive and talk and listen to the radio, AND think about something else. You became unconscious of the movements needed to maintain speed, steer, put on the blinker etc. That’s unconscious competence.
Probably the person down in your organization, the one who should be given some responsibility, is not unconsciously competent. And if you just told them to do something they wouldn’t do it right. They wouldn’t get what you wanted done. It may not be that they can’t do the job, just that they need training, mentoring, oversight (aka management) to be able to execute that responsibility as well as it needs to be done. And that takes time and effort.
But more than time and effort it takes you being able to explain what you do well, and how you do it. That’s what trips most of us up. When we are so good that we are unconsciously competent, we can’t always explain to another person how it should be done. And so, we can’t figure out how to push some responsibility down to someone else. And we have to keep it ourselves. But that limits the growth of the company.
There are many: Checklists, Work Flows, Management Training, Mentoring, etc. “The Exercise of the Elves” is one of my favorites. They all take a skill set that is often quite different from the skill of actually doing the work. This is one reason many small companies stay small. They aren’t willing to invest in that skill. Big companies are. They hire people to do these things, or they bring in consultants [shameless plug] or both. Companies that aren’t willing to do this are forced to keep responsibility at the top and keep their organizations small.
But if you want to get out of the engine room and into the wheelhouse; if you want to take your company to new places; in short, if you want to function more like the CEO and less like the General Manager, it’s a skill you need to bring on board.
image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/debaird/325700
Then click on Lucky Day for a two and a half minute video of some of the luckiest people on earth – pedestrians, drivers, even bank robbers.
Stay for the last one – I laughed out loud.
On a serious note, don’t disregard luck as a source of your business success. Not the only source. You have to be smart enough to recognize the luck and take advantage of it. But I doubt Bill Gates would be as successful as he is if he’d been born 30 years earlier. Would Sam Walton have done as well in the 1800′s as he did in the 1900′s? Would George W. Bush have been President if he’d been born in Texas to an oil family instead of Connecticut, to a political family? (look it up) Or Obama if he’d really been born in Kenya?
There’s been some interesting research on luck. Turns out people who feel lucky are more open to seeing possibilities that others miss. But those who think their success is all of their own doing, miss a lot of opportunities.
I read of one person who asks everyone she’s interviewing for a job if they are a lucky person.
Are you a luck person?
UPDATE: Turns out that last bit of the video is fake. Thank you SNOPES – but still funny.
My Drug of Choice
Wow. That title ought to get me some hits on the Google - doncha think? But really this post is about …
And about how I got get free drugs from people who are doing it wrong. I have rosacea, a disease that makes my face break out like a teenager with acne. One of the treatments is a low dose of antibiotic. So they make one that’s time released so I only have to take it once a day. (It doesn’t help much but my doctor says we have to give it a year.)
The drug is basically tetracycline. You can buy 300 capsules (250 mg) of tetracycline for $30. Mine is time released (a common process that I can’t believe adds that much cost) but which cost $311 for 30 capsules of 40 mg each. You do the math. Never mind. I did the math. Mine cost 25.9 cents a mg. The other cost 0.04 cents per mg. Mine cost 648 times as much. Six hundred and forty eight times! Just for making it time released.
But that’s not the story of treating your customer’s wrong. That’s the story about the health care in the US and I already wrote about it. I don’t actually pay $311.00 each month for my drugs. Yes I have health insurance, but the deductible is so high ($10,000 per year) because it’s an individual plan that unless something catastrophic happens I’m paying for my health care myself.
No, the reason I don’t pay $311.00 is that the doctor gives me a card which allows me to get 30 pills for $25. So maybe if every one pays that much the real cost is 2.08 cents per mg – only 52 times as much as non-time released. Go figure.
It turns out the pharmacies in my area all want new customers. So it’s easy to find a coupon that gives you $25 in savings, gift cards or whatever if you bring a new prescription to them. And many places in my area do this. So guess what I do? Each time I get a refill, I bring it to a new place and get $25 off of a $25 prescription so I get my drugs for free.
So what are these pharmacies doing wrong?
That’s a very stupid thing to do. Your existing customers are the cheapest ones to market to. Not the ones you should be forgetting about. It’s not as easy to measure your results with existing customers. You don’t know if they would have bought anyway. And this leads me to suspect the reason these pharmacies are doing is wrong.
Somebody at corporate probably figured every new prescription customer was worth $XXX because they would keep their business for a while, they would buy other things while they are in the store etc. So they figured it was worth $25 to get them in.
And you know what? They might be right. I’m not like most shoppers. So maybe the $25 they didn’t make on me is just the cost of doing business. Maybe the whole promotion does pay off. Maybe. I doubt it. But even if it does make money for them it’s probably not the right thing for you. Why?
You can’t take what works at a $500 million dollar company, scale it back 100 fold and expect it to work at a $5 million dollar company. The scale doesn’t work like that. These big pharmacy chains are faceless companies to me and probably most of their customers (and employees). You aren’t – or you shouldn’t be.
This video of Dan Ariely from TEDÂ has several enlightening and surprising ideas you can use. It’s 18 min long but the last 2 minutes are an ad.
Why people cheat and steal and how this can be encouraged or discouraged. The reasons are not at all what you’d expect.
How these conditions were exacerbated by the stock market and financial systems to cause the mess we’re in.
Why our intuitions can lead us wrong and what to do about it. This doesn’t come up till about the 14th minute but it’s the most important takeaway. It broadens the appeal beyond cheating and beyond the financial mess. How many of your intutions do you rely on to run your business and how many have you really tested?
Takeaways:
[tags] CEO skills, entrepreneurs, intuition, small business, management [/tags]
Most of us aren’t in a position to turn the entire economy around. But don’t think you are powerless. Some people look at this situation and see all the negatives. Some people see opportunity. It’s easier to feel the fear and do the cut back thing and blame the economy.
In fact, it’s both the worst of times and the best of times (haven’t I heard that before?) And you’ve got to deal with both. I’m launching a new program to help companies do this called “Tighten Up and Come out Swinging”
Tighten Up to deal with the problems. Come out Swinging to take advantage of the opportunities.
In fact I’ve re-done the opening page of my web site to explain the details. Check it out.
Takeaway:
[tags]CEO Skill, economy, small business, entrepreneur, turn around [/tags]
Here are two followups to two (unrelated) posts.
Update to What Really Happened To The Economy?
Michale Lewis, who wrote Liar’s Poker has an article on Conde Nast Portfolio.com with an inside story about what went wrong and why. You’ll be shocked, SHOCKED, to know that there was greed, short term thinking and stupidity on Wall Street. It’s not nearly as positive as Warren Buffet’s take, but I’m not sure how much difference that makes to the ultimate question of what do you do now.
Update to What to do When the Excrement Hits the Air Velocity Accelerator.
Here’s an article by Ram Charan about the opportunities that arise in bad economic times. It was written about different bad economic times but the lessons till apply.
Ram Charan is a pretty smart guy. Every book of his that I’ve read I’ve found to be useful. However, he works mostly with large companies. They have more reserves than small companies so can do more things in a recession. Still, you can can do more than you think if you try hard. And one lesson is build up reserves in the good times.
Takeaway: (same as last time)
[tags] economy, small business, ceo, entrepreneur [/tags]
1. Talk to people – Don’t assume
Talk to your customers
Talk to your vendors and suppliers (Look at point #2 before you do this so you can combine discussions as you see fit).
Talk to investors
Talk to your bankers
Talk to Employees
Talk to your spouse and family
2. Cut back – conserve cash. Think of cash flow before profit.
Do a line item inventory. Go through your P&L statement and stop spending on anything you don’t absolutely need. For everything else, call up your vendor’s and renegotiate.
Cut back on employees last (unless there are some you should have let go anyway – and this is true for many companies)
Cut back on Marketing second to last. The stronger you market in the down times the better position you are in
Cut back on prices as necessary. Understand where your break even is and what your marginal costs are. It may be smart to take some jobs or sell some product just to keep your staff employed. Be flexible.
3. Look for more ways to get more bang for your time (you thought I was going to say buck didn’t you? – you did that in #2 if you were paying attention).
Takeaway:
[tags] CEO, entrepreneur, recession, small business, economic melt down [/tags]
What a dumb question. If you’re a parent, I doubt you’ve ever gotten an answer that comes anywhere near what you’d call satisfactory. And if you’ve ever had a parent, I doubt you’ve given such an answer.
Because it’s the wrong question.
I was reminded of this watching the Republican political convention. For some reason we had on the PBS channel (we usually watch on C-span so we don’t have to listen to pundits) and one of the “reporters” was asking someone in McCain’s campaign about the choice for VP. In case you’ve been under a rock for a week, you know that the pick and how it was handled is pretty big news.
The question was “Did you vet her well enough?”
Why waste prime time asking a question when I know what they’re going to say? I don’t mean I know the answer – that’s a judgement call. But when you’re a reporter talking to someone in the campaign, it’s the wrong question. She should have asked “When did the campaign first learn about xxxx?” or “How many people were interviewed in the vetting process?” or any number of factual questions which would give more of a hint at the vetting process, especially when you can see if the person avoids the facts.
So what does this have to do with running your business? Simple. Asking the wrong question will make you think you have an answer when you don’t. If your kid says “School was fine” does that mean it was? Maybe, maybe not. It probably means they don’t want to talk about it anymore.
There are lots of questions you want to ask of prospects, of customers, of employees, of suppliers. But if you don’t ask the right ones, you’ll think that school really was fine. And the risk is you’ll be wrong and not know it.
Takeaway:
[tags]business, entrepreneur, parenting, school, CEO skills [/tags]
“Never Give Up” I’m always a big fan of Inc Magazine, but when they had this advice on the cover I had to say something.
It’s not that you should give up – it’s that saying “Never Give Up” makes it sound like success in business is entirely under your control. It’s not. Success is based on what you do plus how people respond to what you do then how you adapt to how people respond and what they do about that and so on. Of course, if you give up too soon you’ll miss all the shots you never take as Gretzky said. But what if you give up too late? They don’t run stories or write books about people like that. Except maybe Seth Godin and The Dip.
Take my favorite business analogy: Courtship. There are people who are in a wonderful relationship today because one of them refused to take no for an answer. But there are also people in jail for stalking (or worse) because they refused to take no for an answer. Persistence has its place but it’s only part of the equation. All too often persistence (like love) is blind.
Best Business Advice?
Understand. Learn what motivates your customers. Learn the ins and outs of your business model. Learn what gems of knowledge are hidden in your finances. Learn what makes your employees tick. Learn the difference between being lucky and being smart – then be both. Now put all that understanding into the right action at the right time. But that’s a bit more subtle and it sounds like a lot of work. Because it is. That’s why business success is worth celebrating. If it were easy, everyone would do it. And no one would be left to work for you.
Takeaways:
[tags] Entrepreneur, small business, CEO Skills, management, Persistence [/tags]
Seth says: If you are willing to satisfy people with good enough, you can make just about everybody happy.
I’d say If you want to make everyone happy you’ll HAVE to be satisfied with good enough. [read the whole story - it's kind of funny in a sad sort of way - and you'll see what the picture is about]
The problem is that good enough usually isn’t. And it virtually NEVER is for a small company. It can work for a big company like General Motors (oops – they’re getting their clock cleaned by Toyota) so I mean good enough is OK for a big company like Microsoft (oops Google’s eating their lunch) how about McDonalds? (then why did they buy Chipotle?) OK I guess it isn’t good enough for the big guys either.
Takeaway:
[tags] small business, entrepreneur, ceo, being remarkable [/tags]
– image credit:
http://www.folsom.ca.us/news/displaynews.asp?NewsID=275&targetid=1
Animal trainers have a saying “It’s never the animal’s fault” Because animals don’t speak, trainers need to find non-English methods to communicate what they want. If the animal doesn’t perform, they try to find a better way to communicate, they don’t blame the animal. It helps to take this approach with employees: if they don’t do what you want, think of how you can change what you’re communicating, how you’re following up, what incentives you’re using to reward results.
Most people react to that last sentence with something like: “But they’re people not animals and they do speak English and what’s more they’re adults. They SHOULD be able to do what I say.” So true. So true, and yet so remarkably ineffective.
Whenever you find yourself using the word SHOULD with another person in a fit of frustration take it as a sign to change your behavior not theirs. Your behavior is the only one you can control anyway unless the other person is small enough that you can pick them up. You can influence others not control them and only by changing your behavior.
I was talking to a client today who runs a small office: himself and four others. He’s so mad a two of them that he’s thinking of making it an even smaller office: himself and two others. And he’s got a right to be mad. They did some really stupid stuff recently. And so he’s upset with what they SHOULD be doing differently.
Taking my own advice about the SHOULD word, we looked at how he was communicating, and realized that he was not being much of a manger. If employees didn’t get it right the first time he said something, he never followed up. When it wasn’t done right, he either did it himself or let it go undone. Of his four people; one of them usually gets it – she’s been with him for decades. The others do most of their jobs right most of the time, but not always. And the company’s in a tough market right now. He’s been asking them to do different things to move the business forward. And for the most part they don’t. They stick with what they’ve always done and even though it’s slow and they don’t have as much work as they can handle, they don’t do the extra stuff.
Of course they SHOULD; but there’s that word again. So we talked about what he could do differently as a manager – what level of detail he needed to explain his request and how often he needed to follow up, and what incentives or consequences he could put in place.
And we talked about if he even wanted to bother. It would be much simpler to cut back and only have two employees. I still don’t know the answer to that one yet – he’s going to think about it.
If I may change analogies, let me tell you that when I was single and I lived alone, I never cooked. As much as I loved to eat, the cooking part was not something I wanted to spend the time doing or learn how to do well. After I got divorced I cooked, because I wanted the kids and me to have dinner time together. But I still didn’t put a lot of time into learning the nuts and bolts of cooking. I got a few meals down, and could follow a recipe or three and it was good enough. Now I’m married to a wonderful cook. She loves to eat as much as I do – maybe more. But she’s willing to actually be a cook. Not only can she follow a recipe, she can augment or even invent one. And her technique is outstanding. Of course she puts a lot of time into it, and she loves it. So why am I telling you this?
The situation with most entrepreneurs is they want to eat really well but they don’t want to learn the nuts and bolts of cooking. By that I mean they want the benefits of a well managed workforce, but don’t want to learn the techniques of managing, or put the time in to actually do the work of being a manager.
Here’s what it takes to manage: Direction, Support and Monitoring.
Here’s what too many entrepreneurs think is management:
For direction, they provide the vaguest set of directions in the fewest words, almost never written. “Hey, somebody just called from the Framus company about our account – handle if for me will ya?”
For support they never figure out what the employee needs and give it to them. Instead they expect people to get it done with stuff that costs less than it did last time. And what they do provide only shows up if the employee asks for it – hounds may be a better word than asks.
As for monitoring? They don’t check back till after the deadline’s passed and they get real mad if it isn’t done right.
A better manager handles it this way:
1. Direction. First you have to know what results you want. You have to describe them in terms of deliverables or behaviors (not attitudes). Think of what would happen if aliens flew their UFO into your facility at night and did the employee’s job perfectly. What would be different when you came to work in the morning? That’s what you need to describe to the employee. Until you can describe these results in detail, don’t try to manage anyone, spend your time describing results.
2. Support. Your next job as manager is to provide the employee with everything they need to do their job. This includes training, facilities, tools and equipment, time, reasonable expectaions and other people to provide the parts that they can’t do. Motivation and recognition is also part of support. Different people need various amounts at different stages in a given job.
3. Monitor. Employees should know how they will be monitored. If you did a good job giving direction they’ll be able to monitor themselves and come to the same conclusions you do about their performance. But you need to do it more frequently than you think – especially when you’ve given someone a new assignment with changes their routine or they’re doing something they’ve never done before. You need to see how they’re doing in time to make changes and corrections and give more support before the stuff hist the fan. That way you can both be successful.
Takeaways:
[Tags] Management, CEO Skills, entrepreneur, small business, manager [/tags]
In response to Seth Godin’s question “Tell me again why you’re a generalist?” I would answer that specialists are what is called for when the questions are known but you need the answers. When the questions are not known, who ya gonna call? The generalist.
In any of those situations, it’s possible to be wrong. When you’re wrong, reality has a habit of correcting you. This can be quite costly, but the costs increase with the tennacity with which you hang on to your wrong answers. Costs can become worse when you hang on to the wrong questions. Specialists (especially experienced and renowned ones) are often guilty of hanging on to the wrong questions. That’s another case when a generalist can help.
In business – especially when past performance is no guarantee of future results it’s easy to get the questions wrong. That means when you’re opening (or creating) a new market, launching a new product or playing at a level you’ve never played before. In cases like that – call a generalist.
Takeaways:
[tags] business, attitudes, learning, CEO Skills [/tags]
Thanks to an email from Will Hill and Paul Graham’s latest essay I’ve shortened my advice (so you get to do less reading)
1. Make something people want.
As obvious as it sounds this advice is often ignored. Well not exactly ignored, but confused. Inventors especially, are apt to confuse the word “people” with the word “me”. They think if they like something, they can make a business out of it. You need enough people to want it bad enough to pay enough for it. In this context enough means the following. A number of people that you can find, market and sell to so cheaply that they’ll pay more for what you make to cover the cost of making it and also finding them, marketing and selling to them. Start-ups particularly underestimate the cost of finding, marketing and selling to people who want to pay for what they make. If you’re making software or a web application you can tweak and change it cheaply to find out what people really want. Provided you do the next 3 things.
2. Keep your costs low.
I mean really low. Many companies get lazy when they have start-up cash and they end up making stuff that people don’t want, or spending marketing money in ways that don’t get them sales. That’s why so many good companies are started out of a garage or on the side. Sure it takes a bit longer but when your costs are low you have many more chances to learn what people want and how to sell to them. And remember, The goal is not to get investors. The goal is to get customers. Getting investors takes time away from building your business. And if you get the money it could give you confidence to keep charging off in the wrong direction (building something not enough people want badly enough) for a long time. Plus if you keep your costs low and do the next 2 tips, you’ll be more valuable if/when you do get investors.
3. Learn what works.
You can’t assume. Hence the number of tips in my long post about measuring stuff. It’s tedious to measure and you’re never sure if you’re measuring the right stuff. Do it anyway. Force yourself to listen to people who don’t agree with you and challenge your beliefs. Learn what customers (and employees and suppliers) really want and also how your marketing and sales efforts affect their behavior (if at all).
4. Be persistent.
It’s currently in vogue to say be passionate. I disagree. Passion can keep you going, and when it does it’s helpful. But it can also blind you so you don’t learn. But you will need something to keep you going through the emotional roller coaster that is a start-up. Find within your gut, whatever it is that keeps you going and keep on truckin.
Takeaways:
[tags] start-up, entrepreneur, small business, ceo [/tags]
Image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/drb62/1189903030/sizes/m/#cc_license
Doing any thing takes time – agreed?
We are limited to 24 hours each day – right?
So, the number of things we can do is limited by time – are you with me so far?
Most entrepreneurs respond to this truth by trying to do as much as they can every day. But what happens is they often mistake activity for accomplishment. Yes they are busy, maybe even efficient. But they aren’t as effective as they could be. I think they’re approaching this from the wrong end.
Choice is more important than activity.
If time (and the number of things you can do) is limited then what’s important is not how much you can cram into the day because by definition you can’t cram everything in. What’s important is what you choose to do and what you choose to leave undone. Choice is more important than activity. What if you could only accomplish one thing each day? Or even one thing each week? I bet it would be simple to decide what that one thing should be. But, I hear you saying, if I only did that one thing, then this wouldn’t get don’t and neither would this and this. Guess what? You’re right. But some things are not going to get done in any case (remember the 24 hours limit?). So shouldn’t the things that get done be the most important and the things that don’t get done be those of lesser importance?
Try it for a week. Pick one thing a day and accomplish, finish, complete, actually DO that one thing. At the expense of all else. A week later – revisit and see if it’s better or worse.
Bonus: This article gives some insight about the work routines of some pretty accomplished folks (from Beethoven to Churchill to Mandela to Al Gore). It’s surprising how little they DO to accomplish a lot.
Takeaway:
[tags]time management, productivity, gtd, management [/tags]
Dan Pink turned me on to this post by a guy named Jason and this one by Mark Cuban (at least I’ve heard of him) with tips for start-ups. I was mildly distressed by the focus on tech and software companies. What about an old school company that makes stuff out of atoms not bits? Not that some of their ideas don’t apply but here’s some that they missed.
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