Archive for May, 2009

When our kids were 4 and 5 years old,  they went through a brief stage where they would argue over whose turn it was to select and watch the program airing on the family-room TV.  Since we limited television time overall, we wanted to come up with a fair solution that took us parents out of the equation and allowed the kids to solve their own problem.  So I created a tool to empower them to do just that.  It was a daily chart reaching out over 6 months at a time.  The chart would work in 30-minute intervals and the kids alternated days.  They used to define who had control over the TV by their half-hour mark.

We also set up a few rules.  Your time is your time.  If you swap your times and you end up with a conflict, we will adhere to the chart to solve the challenge.

The results were amazing.  No more arguments at all.  None.  They managed themselves.  If you’ve got a busy household, systems and structure can rapidly create new time, harmony and balance.

Using charts, schedules, technology, and standard procedures, you can erase conflicts within your organization and provide the tools to empower your staff to work through their own challenges.

The head manager of the DSW store located at Union Square in NYC has a tough challenge. Her store is located in the heart of the fashion capital of the world and smack in the middle of a busy part of town.  Her job is to sell value products while at the same time being hip.  This is a double-edged sword.

She recently told me that last year, the buyers were off.  They missed the trend and everyone was looking for  a certain style.  DSW does not always worry about the brand if at least they have an alternative in a particular style.

This year, the buyers hit the nail on the head when they purchased some wide-calf boots.  The result: the boots were their number-one seller.

I can tell you from experience that the calf circumference of boots being sold is often too small for the majority of women who want to purchase knee-high boots.  By opting to carry wide-calf boots for shoppers, this DSW store offered style and captured the current trend, too.

Yeah, everyone knows you need the “right people on the bus” and anyone who doesn’t should not be in a leadership role.  The challenge with the statement is not getting the right people but more so, how to find the right people and to make the group work after selected.

A few pointers.
1.  Hiring interviews should consist of a multi-step process, especially the higher your selection choice is within the firm.

2. Don’t only check references, check to see if they are winners in a myriad of environments.  Multiple winners have a tendency to win over and over again and a single winner is like a one-song wonder.  The candidate that has only one win should be observed to see if they have the capacity to win again or was it the environment and timing that made it happen.

3. The hire is only a fraction of the success of those “on the bus.”  What’s more important is, do you have the mechanisms in place to help this person win.  Do your business model, tools, and systems and structure give the new hire a high chance of success?  If the candidate worked at a large company with supportive services where when they turned around in their seat and IT was there along with engineering, logistics, HR and other services, the same type of environment may be necessary for them to win again.  Make sure that you deliver the other 75%.

4. To insure success, automate the mundane tasks and hire for intellect. The mundane takes away from the ability to THINK and often leads to fire fighting.

5. For those hired for management, make sure you understand their thinking process given that the person is being PAID TO THINK.  Don’t just see what they’ve accomplished. Strive to understand their thinking so you can determine if they really have the smarts to make what you want achieved a reality.  They must be able to work in a virtual world.

6.  Make sure to kick people off the bus when they are not working out.  Everyone says they do, but look around you. Are there still under performers working in your office?  I rest my case.

7. Last, make sure your bus is going in the right direction.  In the book Good to Great, 7 of the 11 companies in the book fell from grace within only a few years of the book being published.  The conclusion was the bus driver and those on the bus crashed.

I received a phone call from a rep from Callbox Sales and marketing an international firm offering sales solutions.  I took the call, spent 10 minutes on the phone, and scheduled a meeting for 2PM EST.

A positive sign for the employee from CallBox.

Within 2 hours an email confirmation arrived.

Hi

I hope everything is going well. I just would like to confirm your
appointment with our Senior Account Executive.  She/He will call you on 13th
of March, 2009 at 2:00PM EST  for a more thorough discussion about our
services and rates for your company.

If you need more information, you may go over our brochure by clicking on
this link: http://www.callboxinc.com/pdfbrochures/about-callbox.pdf

Call or email me if you have questions.

Best regards,

(name withheld)
Inside Sales
Callbox Sales and Marketing Solutions
Encino, CA
xxx-xxx-xxxxDirect Line

Optimizing sales performance.
http://Callboxinc.com/2500 HotConnect©

At 2:30 in the afternoon, NOT 2:00, the Senior Account Executive called and without skipping a beat started into the sale asking me about how I can use the services.  I reminded her that the call was for 2:00 and informed her that I had started another project since I did not hear from her.

She hesitated and replied, “Well, I was on another line and just finished.”

This from a company that focuses on making outbound telemarketing calls for companies to generate revenue.  Do they not see the connection as to their performance and my perception of the business?

This to me is a sales issue; someone could have called. It’s also an operational issue; the mechanism was not in place for a call center company to miss a call.

If you know me well…this is losing by a nose.

A Director at Siemens, one of the few windmill manufacturers in the world that supplies those huge 144-foot fins unused on large-scale wind farms, recently told me that just as the finishing touches on a manufacturing plant were completed, their sales blew through the roof  so much so that they already had overgrown the facility.

My first thought was is this connected to the problems related with India’s Suzion Energy’s troubles with stress fractures.  One of Suzion’s several customers,  Edison Mission Energy, has had stress fractures.  In Edison’s case, over 1251 blades were recalled.  If consider how the blades are 144 feet long and must be hoisted over two hundred feet in the air to be installed or removed, you can imagine that this is a costly problem for both manufacturer and customer.

The end result would be, since this is public news, that other prospects would most likely choose another vendor and contracts for production would be canceled.  Add to this the down time associated with such a fiasco since no energy is being produced.

So I asked, “Was this related to the blade recalls from the Indian company?”  He hadn’t heard anything about the troubled firm.

My thoughts are simple on this. Part of the role of management is to be aware of key issues related to your industry, markets or future.

In this case, this Director was not responsible for marketing, sales, or engineering, but he was responsible for Asset Management.  His role is to search for or build new facilities to meet corporate initiatives. As part of his portfolio he might have 200 real estate assets he’s managing besides building new facilities. So it would be easy to say, he’s only responsible for the physical asset.  And if he does this right, he’s done his job.

People who are Enterprise Thinkers and are Paid to Think, think beyond the normal and realize they must at least be aware of any happenings that pertain to their job and beyond, as well as what might impact their future.  They see the 50,000 foot view and realize they are not hired to just build a plant but to build a plant that takes advantage of today’s business and the firm’s future.

In this case, when a major supplier has a recall, you’ve got to bet that other customers could be canceling orders and shifting suppliers, which is exactly what happened.

Here are a few ways he could be “Aware.”

Set up a Google Alert for the industry key words.  I for example have the words “Paid to Think,” “Enterprise Thinking” and a host of other topics or phrases I’d like to get reports on regularly.

Another source is to subscribe to industry publications that would highlight such issues.  In this case, this was a multi-million dollar facility that casts fins with fiberglass, balsa wood, and a binder.  Yes, I too was surprised to find the balsa wood is in the fins.

Lastly, for a few dollars a month, he could hire researchers to keep him posted on any topics related to this project.  There are PhDs in India, China, Ukraine, and Argentina that will work for very little as a resource.

Just being aware of what’s happening could easily have changed the future of Siemens’ project plants; even if they made the decision not to do anything, this would have been a result of being informed.

Sources Siemens Windmills and WSJ  India Windmill Empire Begins to Show Cracks

I was sitting next to a woman who complained that her friend, who was seated in front of us, never replies to her emails.  I told her the solution was easy.  Surprised she asked how could she get her friend to reply.

I said, stop sending her long emails. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the receiver shaking her head in agreement, and I never saw one email.

The rationale was simple.  Short emails are more likely to get replied to than long emails because short emails set the stage for short replies.  Long emails place a burden on the other person, especially if their contents are personal.

So picture a family environment.  You send a long email about your entire week and the recipient feels obligated to reply back with some history of their life.  They put the reply aside for later.  Later becomes more than later and the reply is never going to happen.

Now sometimes you may want to send a long email and still want a reply.  If so, at the end, do one of the following.

1.  Say at the end, no need for a long reply…. just need the date and time of arrival.
2.  No need to reply.  This lessens the pressure of obligation and encourages others to send a simple reply.
3.  Ask them to reply to the following items….I need the following three items.

By removing the burden, you give the recipient a way out.  Realize that just because you wanted to type a disertation does not mean the other person has the time nor the desire.  Besides, if you told them that your business is up 300%, your kids just got into Harvard, and you won the Nobel Prize, they might feel like what they say would be trivial and it would be best to trash the email.