Archive for April, 2007

Fifteen years ago we traveled to Chicago to purchase a new tool for our production shop. We had researched the vendors before visiting the tradeshow, however, we were looking for both the “hands” on and the discounts typically offered for the “limited” time.

The chosen vendor’s booth had all their equipment on display starting from the smaller units to their ultimate model that was typically used in companies several times our size. The salesperson asked our usage volume and then proceeded to show us the first machine capable of doing the work. 25 units a day meant a $600 purchase. To us that meant a person needed to be involved in this task all day long. We asked about the next model up stickered at $900. That machine could do the same job, however, could do 50 a day. The salesperson did not calculate that now the same person could work half a day and accomplish the same task with time to do other work. We asked then about the next and then the next and then even the last full size model. That model could do almost 300 units per day meaning that the employee that once had a full time job could now be either part time or a current employee could do the job now taking a full day in less than an hour a day, freeing up time. Besides the equipment had all the extra bells and whistles that make the machine stronger; stitches would not wear out for a much longer period of time and even the warrantee was better.

The salesperson, in doing their job, did not know our numbers or was even thinking about our business. As a buyer, it’s your job to do the math and to do the thinking.

The same could be said about software or any other purchase. The features typically designed in the upgraded model will save time and effort that the larger firms are trying to achieve. It’s your responsibility to know when too much is overkill. Like buying the newest computer system and paying top dollar where you’re most likely not going to use 1 billionth the features and could easily just upgrade to the model new out 6 months ago. The human costs are also typically less than the added features, if your strategy is to get things done faster, better and cheaper.

Some key points.
* Buying the best means reviewing what the top firms in your business are using and then taking a look at the gap you have with them.
* You need to determine if the added features would improve either your customer value or your human capital needs.
* Listen to your sales advisors, however, just like you do, they are calculating their commissions as you get closer to buying. They’re not calculating the ROI for your business.
* Take the life span of the purchase and add human capital costs to it to determine if time can be redirected.
* Think about employee comfort. Tedious jobs do wear on employees and with the challenges of finding qualified hires, it pays quickly to upgrade.

All the best tools in the world are not worth a dime if you don’t spend the time thinking about the proper installation, placement, and usage. We recommend that the purchaser of any new technology utilize it themselves for a day. Be the order entry person, the inventory manager, the dock loader, the carpet installer, etc. to see if the purchase really fits the needs and is utilized properly. If you’ve even filled in for an employee and said, “What has this employee been doing all day,” or “Why are they using it this way, it’s not supposed to be,” then you understand.

1. Tunnel versus Funnel. Too many leaders-managers get tunnel vision in the ideation phase. The key to finding the best outcome is in having enough alternatives to toss out.
2. The whole purpose behind NPSD is to decrease risk and uncertainty throughout the mechanism as time moves on towards launch. Justifiably the cost is at first low and increases as time progresses in an inverse graph increase

3. Me-too products don’t create a competitive advantage.
4. Any model must include the voice of the customer built into the product development model. You can’t do it right in isolation.
5. Always work with leaders in an industry when looking to innovate products. They are most willing to work with other leaders and they accept innovation while attempting to continue to nurture it within their organization.
6. Cross functional teams are the strength when managing innovation. The diversity insures that what is developed can be developed. A novel thought.
7. Don’t fall prey to the innovation curve where your firm wastes so much time on pushing your cash cow that you don’t see new competition or threats on the horizon. Watch an antelope feed in a field as a cheetah makes its move. Two things may happen. The antelope goes down fast or uses up a lot of energy escaping. Wouldn’t it be better to be far ahead of the cheetah so the chase never happens?
8. The right structure for NPSD can lead to long term rewards. In the United States the highway system was built by Eisenhower as grid system from north to south and east to west so that at any time, if the military needed to do so, it can take over the system and get all vehicles to necessary destinations. Today, because the system works everyone can travel around the country in record time compared to traveling in other countries. (This system I’ve been told came from Hitler’s approaches.)
9. Don’t fall in love with your own ideas. Management often does. The best in class knows how to seek outside help.

When Tomizlav, the owner of several successful magazines based in Zagreb Croatia, heard me suggest that everyone steal from one another, he was surprised. He was surprised because in his life and most probably in yours, stealing a peer’s ideas is frowned upon.

When I work with management and leadership, it’s not.

In a group setting, stealing is a plus that combines objectives and strategy.

Here’s what I mean. There are numerous situations where I’m working with managers that have no direct link as competition with one another. In fact if you filled a room with executives in a metropolitan area, the industries would be as diverse as banking, tech, logistics, food, finance, software, retail, wholesale, packaging, design, advertising, etc. Taking a step further, if you were to break down the group even further, you’d see that each executive works for a different firm in either different markets or different product lines.

So Kali could work for Verizon in their call center and Peter could work for Sprint in their operations department and Victor may be in logistics for Avaya. With companies so large, there is little chance that any of them would find themselves even thinking remotely the same things.

In these situations, what I do, when there is a conceptual issue at hand, is to steal and share ideas from one to another.

Let’s say the group has to individually create a presentation about alliances. Mary starts out her presentation with great slides and yet is missing certain elements that make the presentation flow. Erin’s slides are OK and yet she’s nailed the concepts. John’s presentation has a new slant. Whenever I tell participants that they can steal from one another, they feel immediately responsible for helping others within the group succeed. As a result, I find that the entire group is elevated to a point far beyond traditional education.

My objective, when I teach, is to have everyone walk away with the skills to achieve their objectives. I don’t care about the competition at the moment given that most of what I’m teaching requires paradigm shifts and such information is best transferred when everyone in the room does not see others as a threat.

Tomaslav, a guest, heard 14 presentations one week. The following week, when the presenters returned with the same presentations…but with each presentation boosted with stolen ideas from others…Tomaslav was blown away. Everyone improved. Everyone. He said, “I’ve never seen such an improvement and in such a short period of time.” He was stunned.

What happened was Malcolm stole from Neil who stole from Jack who stole from Bly. Marcus improved what Sarah offered and then Melissa tied two ideas together to form a new third approach.

What’s surprising is that in the beginning, everyone is afraid of the strategy and then once given the freedom, they take notes like crazy: notes that only fill in the learning experience that they missed; notes that they feel they can apply. If you compared two sets of notes, they look nothing alike since everyone needs different information to improve their own life’s work.

Now consider your own environment. Imagine if everyone stole from one another and it was encouraged. What if… if you didn’t steal to “learn from someone,” you were demoted? This approach leveraged the group to 15 minds, mine included, versus me preaching from the podium.

This is not just interactive participation. It’s a clear strategy to allow stealing so that everyone grows.

In all my years, no one has finished working with me and said, “This was a mistake.” They are proud and often develop relationships with those they help. What a novel idea–stealing as an approach to growth, all approved by management.

I never thought I’d write such a statement, however, in my journey to become fluent in Spanish, I’ve learned much more about the complexity of teaching.

It’s not that I did not understand that great teachers have a skill set; it’s that through the discovery of talking with others about verbs and their tenses, I’ve found that most people have no clue how to conjugate verbs. I speak, you speak, he/she/it speaks, we speak, they speak. Easy, if your language follows these patterns, and you’re talking present tense.

Now try the same thing for past tense, future, irregulars and all the other tenses in your own given language. Could you teach it today to your best friend?

I asked a woman named Melissa from Columbia how to and when to use the imperfect vs. preterite, and she had no clue how to distinguish the difference. She just knew they were.

If the language study was in Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, Korean or the many other languages spoken on this planet, the same applies. Just because you can do it does not mean you can teach it.

When it comes to growing leaders, the same rules apply. Some of the best don’t have a clue how they do what they do. They just can.

This is what I recommend to improve the odds of passing down skills to your next generation of leaders. Focus on two areas: how to do it in the “how to sense,” and how to do it in the “thinking sense.” The first one is simple. The second means you have to teach people what really went into the decision making and processing you utilized to get to the point in which you’ve arrived.

A real life scenario might be you fired Sarah. To the office and to other managers, this may seem like a rash decision. To the teacher, much more needs to be transferred to the student.

What lead up to the decision?
How were previous reviews?
What’s company policy?
How were your reviews?
Did she have a bad mark on her record and what was it?
When did the tide turn?
Were others giving you pressure?
Did objectives change so that her job would be unnecessary in two months?

All these factors go into decision making and given that you can teach someone to fill out a form or to do the three next steps, it’s much more important to teach people how you think when it comes to managing.

The only challenge is….do you really know how you did it, or are you a natural that has that sixth sense? If you don’t know, don’t teach.

A business owner in an audience of 300 recently asked, “How do I start selling to the Spanish market?” I responded that he must first take the time to learn about the future customers, including who they really are as people.

For example, the question asked about selling to the Spanish Market versus the Latino Market. The question shows ignorance. Latinos make up the totality of the culture. Latinos can come from Argentina and Venezuela and Spain and beyond.

Taking it a step further, in the United States in 2007 there are three major groups of Latinos. The Puerto Ricans that primarily dominate the New York City region. The Cubans whose major influence is in Florida and the south. The Mexicans who dominate the south west including Texas, California, Arizona, New Mexico and other surrounding states.

The Mexican group, however, is even more of a challenge to define in that a group of Mexicans are completely Americans due to where they lived after to the Mexican War from 1846 to 1848. Geographically, Mexico covered a large portion of the southern region North America, and after the war, those that lived in Texas and above were given their citizenship.

This little bit of information could have drastic implication on how one could enter such a market, and in the case of the person asking the question, profound strategic and tactical implications.

I’d even suggest learning the language. There’s nothing like selling to a market as an individual that can talk someone else’s language. If this is too difficult, hire someone who can. The Latino market is highly family oriented, is tied to their culture, and has done very well bucking the system while maintaining their own culture.

The adage “when in Rome, do as the Romans do,” applies.

If you’ve ever edited a document with another person or a group, you know the frustrations you may have when flipping from page to page and line to line. “Page forty one, second paragraph, third line.”

It’s time consuming and difficult. You’ve know what I mean; do you count the two lines at the top as a paragraph? What about finding where the second sentence ends and starts.

Here’s a solution. Open up your WORD page setup. Select LAYOUT and then look for LINE NUMBERING. The new dialog box will give you several options that will generate a left hand column on your page where each line is numbered.

You can set it up to number page by page, the entire document, or section by section.

By utilizing such a tool you can now say, “Page 41 line number 63,” and you’re all on the same page. If you wish to use shorthand and have the entire document numbered, you can easily find line 1145.

This is a quick tip to ease the frustrations around having others edit your work or while working in groups.

I love it.

It was 1976. I was 13. The “suburban” of the times was a station wagon call the Custom Cruiser; a behemoth of a vehicle so large it would take 45 minutes for us to pack full when going on a family trip.

The process was simple. My father would stand at the car and I would bring all the boxes, suit cases and travel gear out the front door and down the steps to the garage repeatedly until finished. (My sisters would occasionally help.) My dad’s job, and I believe ambition, was to fill every last nook and cranny of the cavern.

So full we used to push select items in the final open spaces as we closed the tailgate and then window. When done you could not see out the rear window.

We then jumped in the car and raced to our destination.

After returning from one such trip, my mother opened the front door or our house only to find that the entire house had been ransacked by what appeared to be very sloppy thieves. Every bookcase had been emptied and every table item was either smashed or lying on the floor.

Given that we had no cell phones at the time, we slowly entered the house during daylight figuring that the burglar would be long gone. Our dog Camie had different thoughts. Nose down she ran right by our feet, through the front door, and straight towards a set of skirted living room chairs while barking as loud as she could. She then proceeded to race around the furniture.

Obviously, there was no burglar under the chair. Something had gotten into the house.

Our first call was to the exterminator who politely said he would not be coming to save the day. That he believed during our packing process, with the front door wide open, we let a squirrel or some other animal into the house. We found out that exterminators consider squirrels to be extremely dangerous when cornered, so he didn’t offer the service.

His suggestion, “Take the dog and place it in a room far away from the chair and then open every door in the house. The squirrel would eventually leave.

It did.

When cleaning up the mess one of my parents noticed that every window had some damage to the wood trim and the following day, they called a carpenter to come give us an estimate.

When he entered our home, tape measure and clip board in hand, he stopped and then burst out laughing. He couldn’t believe volume of damage. Every single window frame had been gnawed to the point where they’d all have to be repaired. The damages were equivalent to $12,000 in damage in 2007 dollars.

His only words were, “If the squirrel had only chewed at one spot he would have easily made it out of the house.”

The same Squirrel Mentality may hold true in your organization. Do you find that everyone appears to be working and not much is being accomplished? Or at a very slow pace?

Then consider this “A great strategy poorly executed will always be better off than a poor strategy executed well.”

To make my point, consider that you’d like to get from Montreal Canada to Mexico City, Mexico. Option 1 is you create a poor plan to head north and execute it extremely well by following the plan to the letter… only to find you have run out of gas and money sitting idle in Ivujivik on the northern coast of Quebec. Or use Option 2 where you develop a great strategy to take you directly to Mexico City but execute it poorly. Heading south toward Mexico, you make mistakes that eventually lead you to running out of gas and money, but you also find yourself in Indianapolis versus Mexico City. With Option 2, you’re still better off.

Here’s a great little link for setting up a conference call or telecast. I use it all the time. All you have to do is put in the time and everything else is calculated for you. This way you won’t miss your call to Bombay, London or anywhere else.

Try it.

http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedform.html

Over the years I’ve been asked several times to deliver information or presentations on how to help an individual move from tactical to strategic in their approach to business. In other words, how do people go from being “doers” to “thinkers?” This is a common challenge, especially in the HR department.

I mention this because a colleague just asked the question, “Can anyone name 3 CEOs of Fortune 200 firms that have come from the HR tract?” No one could, because as far as we know, there are none.

From my history, I would say there are four key reasons.

1. CEOs are not completely people oriented. They see a balance between the human and the technological side of the business. They know that people are not the most important part of the business; they are a part of the business. They must be seen as a tool to leverage. If they became too attached to employees, they would hold on to people longer than they should, and they might not see all the other solutions to leading a corporation.

2. CEOs don’t get stuck in the task routine ie doing check lists. They know that their role is to leverage assets and not cross off items on a check list. For example, if a CEO was to put on a conference, their goal and focus would be on outcomes for the long haul. They would focus on outcomes that drive the business. You can’t imagine how many times I’ve asked someone in HR, “What are the desired outcomes of my presentation over the next year?” and they haven’t a clue.

3. CEOs have sales skills that are both internal and external. They know how to sell everything from ideas to product.

4. CEOs are not about hiring or firing, creating benefits packages or training programs. They see these as important tools of achieving a larger goal. Often it’s to increase something such as sales, market share, stock price, etc., and it’s these goals that drive their decisions.

It’s not that HR personnel don’t deliver value; it’s that being strategic is much more than getting everything done.

In one presentation I offered 10 tools on how to make this happen.

It’s getting the right things done right.