I usually keep politics out of this blog, but I’m writing this piece not to change your political views as much as challenge how you think about the relationship between business and politics. Many years ago I was a member of a small business lobby group called NFIB. They poll their members on every position they should take. I couldn’t believe how short sighted the majority was and how ultimately harmful to business their positions were. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, If there weren’t a lot of short-sighted business owners there wouldn’t be much need for my coaching services. I didn’t renew my membership in NFIB.
So here are some typically pro-business political positions and my questions about how they miss the point.
Taxes are Bad for Business
Would zero taxes be better? Can you imagine doing business in a country where there were not enough taxes to pay for a working court system? To keep roads and bridges safe? Where most of the population were not educated? Is inflation good for business? Is it possible that a slight tax increase on certain people might eliminate inflation and improve your business prospects? Didn’t the economy do better 10 years ago when taxes were just a tad higher? Maybe it’s about who gets taxed and what the taxes get spent on rather than whether taxes go up or down. Where do you draw the line?
Government Regulation is bad for business
What about regulations that keep your competitors from cheating? What if stronger regulations were placed on cheap imports so that goods sold in your country could compete on a level playing field – one where safety costs and such were the same no matter where something was made? What if you could compete only on quality and execution not on which country lets people pollute more?
Minimum Wage Raises are Bad for Business
If people can’t afford what you sell, isn’t that bad for business? Henry Ford once famously doubled the wages at his factories. As a result, more people could afford his cars. Is the market for what you sell better in third world countries with no minimum wage?
Universal Health Care is bad for Business
What does your business pay in health care costs? Do you compete with companies that pay zero because they are in countries that provide universal health care? How many good employees might work for you but can’t leave their jobs because they have a pre-existing condition? How many customers can’t afford your products because they spend too much on medicine?
Smaller Government is Better
Do you get any government contracts? Do any of your customers work for the government? Did the US government spending to put people on the moon have any spinoffs that benefited American business?
Democrats = Tax and Spend. Republicans = fiscal conservatives
Then why does inflation and unemployment do better under Democrats? Why has something like 2/3 of the entire US national debt been rung up under the last 3 Republican presidents?
Environmental Protection is Bad for Business
Did the Prius hurt Toyota’s prospects of becoming bigger than GM? Haven’t a lot of companies found unexpected profits or cost savings when they cleaned up their acts? If you could get your power from the sun would that be bad for business? If the taxes spent on supsidising the oil companies had gone toward making solar and wind power affordable and plentiful would that be bad for business?
Takeaways:
[tags] politics and business, tax increases, environmental protection, small business, health care [/tags]
It’s a stupid tradition. Most of them get forgotten or broken in a week anyway. So why not just be honest. If something’s worth doing it’s worth doing whether it’s Jan 1, or any other date. So get real.
Takeaways:
What would you pay for a tool that could transmit the wisdom of your smartest people out to everyone in your whole organization? One that is able to reduce errors in the most complex activity and achieve consistent results time after time? I’m sure you’d pay a lot, but this tool costs very little and requires almost no training to use.
By now you’re beginning to suspect the tool does not exist or this is some kind of joke. But this tool has accomplished the following things:
In 1935, a new generation of long-range bomber was all but certain to be adopted by the US Army until, in it’s competition flight, the Army’s chief of flight testing crashed it killing himself and another of the five crew members. There was no mechanical failure – the problem was pilot error due to the complexity of the new machine.
The bomber was scrapped in favor of a simpler plane which had much less range and capacity. But a few of the more complex planes were purchased for testing and this tool was adopted. Using this tool, pilots went on to fly this plane a total of 1.8 million miles without a single accident. The Army eventually ordered close to thirteen thousand of these bombers and because of its increased capacity gained a serious air advantage in World War II. The planes were known as the B-17 and nick named The Flying Fortress.
In more recent times, the tool has been applied to the complexity of hospital intensive care units where over half the ICU’s in the country (USA) rely on a super-specialist to oversee the intricacies of care which involve on average 178 separate, individual actions for each patient every day. In Michigan, starting in 2004 this tool was used where many hospitals are short on staff and funds. It saved over 1,500 lives and an estimated 175 million dollars in a year and a half.
What is this tool? A check list. That’s right. A check list. A simple check list. In this great New Yorker article, Atul Gawande points out that check lists have two benefits. I’ll quote him here and provide my emphasis.
First, they helped with memory recall, especially with mundane matters that are easily overlooked in patients undergoing more drastic events. (When you’re worrying about what treatment to give a woman who won’t stop seizing, it’s hard to remember to make sure that the head of her bed is in the right position.) A second effect was to make explicit the minimum, expected steps in complex processes. Pronovost was surprised to discover how often even experienced personnel failed to grasp the importance of certain precautions. In a survey of I.C.U. staff taken before introducing the ventilator checklists, he found that half hadn’t realized that there was evidence strongly supporting giving ventilated patients antacid medication. Checklists established a higher standard of baseline performance.
If something so simple can achieve such fantastic results why are they not used more often?
I’ll bet the answer lies in your response when you read what the tool is. Didn’t you think “Well that can’t apply to my business. Most of what I do can’t be reduced to something as one-dimensional as a check list – it’s too complex/unique/has special circumstances?” Didn’t you think that?
So did doctors and test pilots. The truth is most company founders don’t go to work thinking their main job is to develop check lists. No. We think our job is to get real stuff done. Solve problems. Sell product. Collect money. We don’t have time to develop check lists.
But that’s only our job if we don’t want to build a very large company. If we want to scale what we do then we should spend half our time developing check lists, the other half making sure people follow them (read the article for some great insight on that) and the third half handling the stuff that truly is special. It’s my experience that the “third half” is actually less than 15% of what goes on. The rest can be documented and replicated with something as simple as a check list. Or, actually, many check lists.
The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t feel so good. We don’t feel like heroes walking around with a clipboard ticking off boxes. We feel much better thinking that what we do is special and unique. We like to be heroes.
But you know what? A friend of mine’s house burned down recently. The picture above is of their house. Here’s the video.
Luckily he was awake at 2AM getting ready for a trip so he heard the smoke alarm go off. He rushed upstairs and got his kids and wife out of the house. With literally seconds to spare. One of their three pets died, another escaped in good shape, and the third was resuscitated by the fire fighters with oxygen and is doing fine. The house was destroyed. All their possessions including video tapes of the kids and all his wife’s art work were ruined. The family was checked out at the hospital, but didn’t need to stay. He described it like being sunburned and having smoke in the lungs like a few cigars. Sunburned skin from being so close to a fire in your house! That’s how near they came to disaster. Instead they only lost all their possessions and a pet.
Somewhere between the smoke detector, him rushing upstairs through smoky rooms, and the fire fighters I’m sure there’s a hero or two or three. I’m just as sure they wish they never needed one.
Sometimes our desire to feel like the hero gets in the way of building a company. Because the majority of what we need to accomplish is not heroic. But making sure the right things happen day after day every time anyone in your company does their job or helps a customer; to do that consistently with great results we need a cheap little tool, not a hero.
Takeaways:
Change the batteries in your smoke detectors.
Don’t be a hero
Build some checklists
[tags]Checklist, CEO Skills, Entrepreneur, Build a company, small business [/tags]
Joel Spolsky recounts his move from a Microsoft to (eventually) Juno Online Services in New York.
Eventually, though, I started to discover that the management philosophy at Juno was old fashioned. The assumption there was that managers exist to tell people what to do. This is quite upside-down from the way management worked in typical west-coast high tech companies. What I was used to from the west coast was an attitude that management is just an annoying, mundane chore someone has to do so that the smart people can get their work done. Think of an academic department at a university, where being the chairperson of the department is actually something of a burden that nobody really wants to do; they’d much rather be doing research. That’s the Silicon Valley style of management. Managers exist to get furniture out of the way so the real talent can do brilliant work.
Guess what. Microsoft is still around and you probably never heard of Juno.
Takeaways:
[tags]small business, manager, management, CEO, entrepreneur [/tags]
The titles comes from a great article in the Wall Street Journal by Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert. It highlights his experience with giving stuff away for free on the web. His results are a mix of plus and minus. Great read.
You may not know that besides being funny, Adams is a very perceptive thinker about a lot of things. Many of them are business related. His book “The Dilbert Principle” is a very funny compilations of some of his early cartoons. Then the last chapter is a very insightful riff on how to run a company the right way. Sure it’s tongue in cheek but you could teach a college course from this chapter if you didn’t tell people who the author is – it’s really good stuff.
Takeaway:
[tags] entrepreneur, Scott Adams, Dilbert, management, small business [/tags]
…is acknowledging what they are worst at. They think they’re good (or good enough) at everything.
But consider that every company needs to get results in four areas. This means the company needs skills such as:
Even a company that’s not growing and changing very much needs most of those skills. How likely is it they all reside in one person?
Why would anyone even want to be good at all of that? And how could a rational person believe he or she is? OK never mind that last question, we’re talking about entrepreneurs, not rational people.
Of course, when you start a company you have to do everything. With no money you don’t have the option of hiring and you don’t have the option of letting stuff go un-done so you do it all. The problem is that you don’t look to see what you’re really good at and off load the other stuff as soon as you can. It’s like a really good wide receiver starting a football team and staying as quarterback as long as possible.
“Has anyone given you the law of the offices? No? It is this: nobody does anything if he can get anybody else to do it. … As soon as you can, get some one whom you can rely on, train him in the work, sit down, cock up your heels and think out some way for the Standard Oil to make some money.â€
Takeaway:
[tags]CEO, Marketing, entrepreneur, small business[/tags]
The key to growing your company is to prevent problems rather than solve them. There are two parts to this: Attitude and Skill.
Attitude – you must not like being the hero
Heroes solve problems. Usually at the last moment in dramatic fashion with a fanfare and a flourish of cape – just before they dash off to a secret place where they can transform into their secret identity. If this turns you on, it will be hard to stop solving problems. You won’t get the same kind of attention or validation. Because when problems are prevented, nobody knows. How many colds didn’t you get last year? How many times did your roof not leak, or the bridge you were driving on not collapse? But all of these things took some not inconsequential degree of effort – the first by your immune system, the second by your builder and the third by a whole slew of people: some who paid taxes, others who allocated them to public works instead of flashier projects, and still others who built and maintained the bridge.
If, in your heart of hearts, a smooth running transportation system is not more satisfying than charging on the scene in a cruiser with lights flashing to set up a detour and save folks from driving over a rotted out bridge, then the best you can hope for is a company that stays small enough that the problems don’t kill it, and you can still be the hero.
Skill – root cause analysis
The skill in problem prevention is to find and cure the root cause of the problem, not the most obvious symptom. Cash flow is a prime example. It’s common wisdom that the reason most companies die because they run out of cash. Well that’s like saying in the 1700′s the two main causes of death were consumption and heart failure. They figured if you didn’t die of consumption, then it’s a sure bet that your heart had stopped. Obviously medical science was in its infancy.
The knee-jerk reaction to cash flow problems (in start-ups anyway) is to raise more cash. This almost always prolongs the agony rather than cures it. If cash is tight because sales are too low the solutions are a whole lot different than if cash is tight because costs are too high, or collections are not efficient. More cash is rarely the ultimate solution to any of these.
Common Sense & Quick Fixes don’t usually work
Two quotes from http://www.isixsigma.com/library/content/c050516a.asp are enlightening. The emphasis is mine.
“Research has repeatedly proven that unwanted situations within organizations are about 95 percent related to process problems and only 5 percent related to personnel problems. Yet, most organizations spend far more time looking for culprits than causes and because of this misdirected effort, seldom really gain the benefit they could gain from understanding the foundation of the unwanted situation,” according to Gene Bellinger, who writes on the web site Systems-Thinking.org
Alexander Dunn, director of Assetivity Properties Ltd., in a paper posted on the Maintenance World web site, quotes a study which showed, “…that, when trying to prevent unacceptable events from happening again, 10 percent of participants immediately sought to place blame, 26 percent immediately expressed an opinion of the causes and offered an opinion without investigating the problem, and only 20 percent of participants examined the problem in sufficient detail to be able to identify an effective solution.” From these statistics, its clear that effective problem-solving is far from common sense.
The 5 Why’s
One technique used to find the root cause is to ask why five times. Suppose your car won’t start because the battery is dead. Calling a tow truck to provide a jump start is solving the problem. But asking why five times might result in prevention.
You can see from the example that the key is asking the right questions. You might also note that five is not a magic number – the point is to keep asking why till you find a root cause and five is often enough for that. According to wikipedia, this technique was developed by Sakichi Toyoda.
Takeaways:
[tags] CEO Skills, Problem solving, Small business, entrepreneur [/tags]
We all know about working smarter not harder. But Seth Godin has an interesting insight that we often confuse working longer with working harder (or smarter).
Here are a couple of choice quotes (but you should really read the whole thing – especially on Labor Day).
None of the people who are racking up amazing success stories and creating cool stuff are doing it just by working more hours than you are. And I hate to say it, but they’re not smarter than you either. They’re succeeding by doing hard work.
Hard work is about risk. It begins when you deal with the things that you’d rather not deal with: fear of failure, fear of standing out, fear of rejection. Hard work is about training yourself to leap over this barrier, tunnel under that barrier, drive through the other barrier. And, after you’ve done that, to do it again the next day.
Entrepreneurs, especially need to hear that working long is attractive because it helps you avoid the hard stuff while feeling like you’re doing what you should. And the hard stuff that really pays off doesn’t have to take long.
Takeaways:
UPDATE: I have a client who loves to work 17 hour days (except for weekends when she only works eight). She also wants to grow her company and sell it for 20 million dollars. She doesn’t realize why her long hours will make it harder for her company to be worth that much. Here’s why.
Anyone in a position to pay $20MM for her company, won’t be in a position to step into her job and work those hours. If they have to figure out how many people it will take to replace her, how those people will fit into the organization and how it will affect the bottom line, then the company will be a lot less valuable to them than if she’s already A) figured it out and B) implemented it for enough time to work out the kinks.
Let’s say her company is worth $5 Million today. She can wait till it’s worth 15 before she does those things, OR she can do them now. The sooner she does them, the more pervasive the systems and culture of scalability will be within the company when it is time to sell. That will make it worth more sooner.
The most value she can add is to replace herself so completely that when she does sell, neither the customers, the staff, or the suppliers notice any hiccup at all.
[tags] entrepreneur, hard work, productivity, small business, CEO Skills [/tags]
This from Jessica Hagy who does all kinds of funny, insightful stuff on index cards.
But the bigger point is, many people think (no, it’s beneath thinking, they just KNOW) that to run (never mind start) a company you have to work a gazillion hours, and it has to take over your life. I don’t believe that.
I do believe there are times when that’s necessary – but they are temporary. And I do believe a business takes over your life in the sense that it’s a constant presence – like being married or being a parent. But if it doesn’t allow you time to live from the get-go something is wrong.
Here are the usual things that are wrong.
The last two are problems that aren’t psychological so I’ll elaborate on them below.
Problem #4 – Let’s say you’re the owner and chief cook and bottle washer (literally) of a small diner type restaurant. One of that kind that are affectionately referred to as a “greasy spoon”. You probably can’t hire someone to do your job without losing money. Your business is not the right size. But there are other restaurants where the owner doesn’t cook. What size, or how profitable does yours have to be for that to work? It may not be possible in your current space, or with only one store or whatever. But those are all choices. You can decide to grow it / shrink it / serve a more profitable menu or not. Or you can stay the way you are.
Problem #5 – Let’s say you’ve upgraded the menu, added a few tables, changed the hours, whatever and it’s now profitable enough to pay someone to cook and let you have a bit more time off. But you can’t find anyone who can do it like you do. This is a very common problem with super-stars. It’s common in sports that great players make worse managers or coaches than more mediocre players. People who do things really well, are often not conscious of how they do them. So they can’t train others. But maybe someone else can help you do that.
My friend Nick, runs a deli. It took him a long time to realize that every time he walked by a refrigerated case, he stuck his hand into it just to make sure it was cool. That way if a compressor went bad, he knew before all the food was ruined. His employees didn’t do that automatically – why would they? But when he realized it, he didn’t make them stick their hands in the cases. He instituted a policy where twice a day it was someone’s job to take and record a temperature reading for each case. That took him out of the loop and actually gave a better indication of the health of the equipment than he had before. It’s lots of little things like that, that make you replaceable.
Takeaway:
“Has anyone given you the law of the offices? No? It is this: nobody does anything if he can get anybody else to do it. … As soon as you can, get some one whom you can rely on, train him in the work, sit down, cock up your heels and think out some way for the Standard Oil to make some money.â€
- John D. Rockefeller
Rockefeller often came home for lunch, took frequent naps, spent summers away from the office and retired in his 50′s. Oh, and he was the wealthiest man in the world at the time (an maybe ever).
[tags] small business, entrepreneur, work life balance, CEO Skills [/tags]
Leadership has been getting all the spotlight in recent years, but management is really where the action is if you want results. Management is the hard work of developing (as well as sustaining) an environment that supports people to be successful in a common goal. The common goal, of course is the success of your company.
Joel Spolsky said it well:
You can go into any coffee shop in the country and order a short soy caramel latte extra-hot, and you’ll find that you have to keep repeating your order again and again: once to the coffee maker, again to the coffee maker when they forgot what you said, and finally to the cashier so they can figure out what to charge you. That’s the result of nobody telling the workers a better way. Nobody figures it out, except Starbucks, where the standard training involves a complete system of naming, writing things on cups, and calling out orders which insures that customers only have to specify their drink orders once. The system, invented by Starbucks HQ, works great, but workers at the other chains never, ever come up with it on their own… As a manager it’s your job to figure out a system. That’s Why You Get The Big Bucks. [emphasis mine]
One reason the two are often confused is due to style. Management has become associated with an authoritarian style aka “Command and Control” Leadership has become associated with an more “empowering” style.
Sigurd Rinde makes this mistake in his post about leading children as training for MBAs.
When dealing with knowledge workers in our more flexible economy it’s usually more useful to use a more inclusive, empowering style whether you are leading or managing (not always but usually). It’s absurd to think you can create an environment that supports people without their input. But just leading people will not develop a scalable organization.
Takeaways:
[tags] Managing, Leading, Management, CEO Skills, Entrepreneur [/tags]
photo courtesy of GeekPhilosopher
This from Paul Orfalea
[founder of Kinkos which got acquired by FedEx
and now has 1,200 stores in 10 countries]
You must be flexible and astute and focus on the big picture. Busyness is not your friend. Startup entrepreneurs too often try to run away from their anxiety by being busy. But you have to leave time open on your schedule for hard thinking rather than hard working. Make sure you get plenty of sleep take vacations and don’t get mired in the details either at the store or at your headquarters. You don’t have to be at your desk in order to analyze cash-flow projections or revenue-by-category data, both of which I love to pore over by the way. Can’t get enough of it. You, as an owner have to be smart about managing your relationship with time. My definition of owning a business is to make money while you’re sleeping. If you can’t make money while you are sleeping, then your business owns you – you don’t own it.
Takeaways:
[tags] start-up, entrepreneur, CEO skils, running a business [/tags]
One of the services that makes this blog worth every dollar you pay for it, is the time I take to scour the web and find the gems for you. Two posts in blogs I love come together today under the heading :Why didn’t I think of that?
Seth Godin says make sure your system works before you make it bigger. DUH! My refinements are: Make sure you can sell before you spend more on marketing and advertising. And make sure you can sell at a profit (including the cost of sales) before you do more of it. No sense paying people to take your stuff.
Guy Kawasaki posts an interview with Jeffrey Pfeffer author of “What Were They Thinking?: Unconventional Wisdom About Management.” 16 questions and answers – You could spend 6 months on each one and your company would see vast improvement. Here are a couple of my favorites:
Question: What can companies do to get smarter?
Answer: Companies learn just like people learn—by trying new things and seeing what happens. That requires, first, a tolerance for failure, since by definition, learning means doing things you aren’t very good at.
Second, it requires structured self-reflection—after-action or after-event reviews so that instead of having one year of experience repeated 20 times, people and companies actually accumulate learning over time.Question: What is the proper role for a CEO?
Answer: To develop others and their talents and to create an environment in which people can do their best and want to. It is not to make all the decisions or, like some kind of “sun king,†absorb all the light and the attention.In fact, sometimes, as the Grammy-award winning Orpheus Chamber orchestra shows, the best leadership is less leadership. No seed can grow if it is dug up and examined every week, and for people to innovate and get things done, sometimes they need some time and space and resources.
Takeaways:
[tags]small business, management, CEO Skills, entrepreneur [/tags]
I’m reading “The 4-Hour Workweek” by Timothy Ferriss and it’s so good I have to post about it before I’m done. Why are my free offers (see below) always around book reviews? I have no idea.
Bad News First (In deference to The Toyota Way )
Now the Good News
Best Practical Concept: (so far – I’m only half way done) Mini-retirement
Why work for 40 years at something you hate trying to amass enough money and retain enough health in order to finally have a life you hope to enjoy? Instead, Ferriss aims to distribute “mini-retirements” throughout life instead of hoarding the recovery and enjoyment for the fool’s gold of retirement. By working only when you are most effective, life is both more productive and more enjoyable, It’s the perfect example of having your cake and eating it too.
He does give a lot of practical advice on how to actually do this.
Best Philosophical Concept: Happiness = Excitement
Obviously if you’re going to make such a drastic change as to only work 4 hours a week, you’ll have a lot of time to fill with other things. You’d better know what you want from the other 36, 56, or is it 96 hours you’ll free up. Ferriss gives a lot of practical tips on how to do it, but if you don’t know why you’re doing it you probably won’t even try.
But asking people what they really want or what their ultimate goals are is often too vague in a context like this. Most people will say their ultimate goal is to be happy. That’s where Ferriss’ insight about happiness is so powerful. I’ll use his words and his italics.
Bear with me. What is the opposite of happiness? Sadness? No. Just as love and hate are two sides of the same coin, so are happiness and sadness. Crying out of happiness is a perfect example of this. The opposite of love is indifference, and the opposite of happiness is – here’s the clincher – boredom.
Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase. It is the cure-all. When people suggest you follow your ‘passion’ or your ‘bliss’, I propose that they, in fact, referring to the same singular concept: excitement.
This brings us full circle. The question you should be asking is not, “What do I want?” or “What are my goals?” but “What would excite me?”
Takeaway – Free Offer
[tags] CEO, small business, Entrepreneur, time management, work week, happiness [/tags]
It’s well known that the pessimist says the glass is half empty – so his surprises are all positive ones. The optimist says the glass is half full and somehow keeps that attitude despite her negative surprises.
What does the CEO say?
The CEO says “Hey, don’t we have twice as much glass as we need around here?” And I phrased that as a question on purpose.
Maybe you need that extra glass. If your company is growing you have to have a bit more capacity to grow into, otherwise you hit a wall. But, if you have too much extra capacity, your costs get too high and your profit goes to hell.
The CEO’s job is to question the answers – not to answer the questions. Is it really half full – or is it more like a third and everyone just rounds up hopefully? Is there really twice as much extra capacity or are some vital activities getting put off or not measured? How much extra capacity is really needed? In what areas? What is your trend line in the recent past – and how accurate is it in predicting the future? Are there things about the past that won’t repeat?
The answers, off course come from the customers. But they don’t answer in words, they answer with their wallets. And you can’t wait till then to plan. So you’ve got to approximate your answers yet remain flexible. No wonder you get paid the big bucks.
Takeaways:
Thanks to Jerry Guirlinger of Mobile Shop Company – talking to him today inspired this post.
[tags] small business, CEO skills, entrepreneur, ambiguity [/tags]
Everyone knows reward is proportionate to risk.
When everyone knows something, it’s usually wrong. And there’s usually a bit of truth in it. Maybe the wrong bit comes from the fact that for everyone to know something it usually has to be dumbed down a lot. But I dirgess.
The fallacy in believing that reward is proportionate to risk is that you’ll believe the more risky something is, the more reward there should be. Not true. Another way to say it is that every reward is associated with some degree of risk. But not every risk has any reward associated with it at all.
The truth is entrepreneurs don’t like risk. Sure they tolerate it, but they like to minimize it. They often see ways to do this that others don’t so they appear to take more risks than they actually do.
The biggest risk in running a company is that customers won’t do what you want them to (buy your stuff at a high enough price point) and they won’t do it fast enough (before you run out of money). Your exposure to that risk is compounded if you don’t track what they do and how quickly they do it. And if you make up reasons for their actions or see patterns that don’t jibe with reality.
Takeaways:
[tags]small business, entrepreneur, business model, risk reward, CEO [/tags]
My natural inclination is to believe the facts but disbelieve the story. That is, I usually think there are explanations (perhaps luck, perhaps existing trends) that people don’t give enough credit to. Instead they tend to assume that everything good that happened was caused by something that they did.
Even with that caveat, Hugh MacLeod’s explanation is impressive.
Note: The picture is from the Stormhoek Blog
Takeaways:
[Update: The hyperbole is mine not Hugh's. I knew that. Check out Hugh's comment here]
[tags] entrepreneur, marketing, web 2.0, blogging, small business [/tags]
The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither it’s pipes nor its theories will hold water.
John W. Garner, Forbes “Thought” page Aug 1, 1977 from The Official Rules by Paul Dickson
It occurs to me that this applies in business if you substitute leadership, vision and other high level ideas for philosophy and you replace plumbing with management, training and oversight.
It’s amazing to me that amount of high falutin’ clap trap folks will espouse (not to mention pay consultants for) in the first category, without considering if the ideas actually work. Then they’ll go to all kinds of effort to convince themselves they don’t need to be consistent and specific in the later category.
The truth is, it’s more fun and feels great to philosophize about your vision and the like; while it can be tedious and time consuming to actually discover what’s important to measure and hold people accountable (especially yourself).
If you want to play football, a game plan is nice. But accomplishments happen on the field, in the huddle and executing plays. You’ll do better with good execution and good huddles and no game plan than the other way round. Better if you have people who can do both well.
[tags] management, leadership, vision, business, CEO, entrepreneur [/tags]
Right after I tell you that you have a lot of bosses comes this article by Joel Spolsky about Seven Steps to Remarkable Customer Service. That’s Seth Godin’s definition of Remark-Able: Being so good, people remark.
Takeaways:
[tags]customer service, entrepreneur, customer, small business [/tags]
What a thrill it is when that day finally comes. That is the company founder’s joy. Also the company founder’s deception. Also (potentially) the company’s destruction.
Joy
Well duh! Now you can finally do what you know needs to be done without someone with their own agenda getting in the way. I think we can all relate to this one.
Deception
Of course you have a boss. In fact you have lots of them. The customers are your bosses. When Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert) quit working for the phone company and went out on his own (Dilbert was quite a success by then) he called it “boss diversification”. But this isn’t just a word trick. That’s why it’s a deception. These bosses don’t even tell you when they’ve fired you. And they rarely give you a warning. So they don’t make it as easy for you to know how to please them. Yet pleasing them an absolute requirement for success. Usually the only signal you have is that they’ve decided to buy (or not) and by the time you get that signal it’s often too late.
So your customer base should be considered a diverse, silent boss.
How could it be different?
If you treated them like you want employees to treat you what would you do? You’d make more effort to decipher their behavior. You’d probably test things more and pay attention to how they react to what you do. This is hard with a boss as diversified and silent as your customer base. Testing is tedious. Changing just one thing at a time so you can test feels limiting (just like having a boss). Recording the results can be inconclusive or ambiguous.
But it must be done. The difference between success and failure is due to how good you are at pleasing your boss.
Destruction
Thinking you have no boss can be your downfall. Why? Think about this, when you have a boss, they usually control what you do, how you do it, and how much money you have to spend on accomplishing your goals. That’s why we all went to work for ourselves isn’t it? (See JOY above).
Yes, but to get permission or budget approval your boss made you jump through hoops. In the best of times, that means you had to clarify your thinking, do a cost benefit analysis and show how your ideas would serve the good of the company. Don’t you appreciate it when your employees do that for you?
Without the boss requiring that – you can just take off on a whim, use nothing more than your gut to justify changes in direction or huge spending outlays. I don’t mean to disrespect your gut. I’m sure it’s wonderful. But clear thinking and careful analysis has it’s place too. Without a boss, it’s too easy to ignore these activities and not hold yourself to account.
This has caused the death of many, many companies.
How Could it be Different?
Put in place a structure for the kind of analysis your company needs before every major (and many minor) decisions. Use a board of director if you can – an advisory board at least and [warning shameless plug alert] a coach.
The good news is that you can still decide to go with your gut; approval won’t be based on corporate politics (unless you allow it); and you still have the final say. But finding a way to require some rigor will ultimately help the company grow to please the real bosses – your customers.
Takeaways:
[tags] entrepreneur, customer, boss, management, small business, CEO [/tags]
Among the many tasks of a CEO probably the hardest and most beneficial is to obliterate SHEEPWALKING. The term comes from this post by Seth Godin who defines it as what happens when you hire “people who have been raised to be obedient and [give] them a brain dead job and enough fear to keep them in line”
The opposite is: ‘At first, it seems crazy. There’s too much overhead, too many cats to herd, too little predictability and way too much noise. Then, over and over, we see something happen. When you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they do amazing stuff. ” – also quoted from Seth’s article.
Here’s why it’s so hard. Running a company you’ve got way to many things to do. You’re looking for things to control. You don’t do it consciously but creating a culture of sheepwalking is a comfortable way to run a company and think you are in control. In fact, you really are in control. And that’s the problem. The things you can control in a company don’t guarantee success. At best they only prevent catastrophic failure. At worst they cause the failure albeit slowly so you don’t realize what’s happening.
Why? As I’ve said before, business is like sex where success depends on the interaction between you and the other person. The control you think you have in your company is all about you – not about the other person and it limits the kinds of interactions and responses your company will have. Plus it limits the types (and number) of people you’ll be attractive to.
This may have worked in the old days when the markets didn’t change very much, and the types of interactions were limited. But that’s not true anymore.
Takeaways:
[tags]Small Business, Entrepreneur, Management, How to be CEO[/tags]
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