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How to Win in Business

January 18, 2012 in Leadership, Strategy with 0 Comments

Photo Credit: Mattox

 

Whether I’m coaching one of my Six Sigma belts on their project or working with a business on their corporate strategy, I find there is an area that always needs revisited and refined: Clarifying the goal. It’s easy for a team to say we want to reduce costs or cycle time, we want to grow our market share, or we want to enter this new market. Great! But what does that really mean?

If you’re going to win in business you need to have a Vision and Strategy for your organization. For that vision and strategy to be effective, you need to begin with the end in mind. In other words: You need to define the win. If you don’t define what a win is, then you will never know if you get there.

1. Define the Win: Part of being an effective leader is defining the win. If you want to reduce costs, which costs and by how much? How much do you want to grow your market share and over what period of time? What does entering a new market mean – Is it having a new product or service available, landing that first client, or simply attending a trade show? Earl Nightingale in his The Strangest Secret says “A success us anyone who is realizing a worthy predetermined ideal, because that’s what he or she decided to do … deliberately.” Therefore, to win in business you must deliberately determine what it is you want to achieve.

2. Establish the Measure: To be able to define the win, you must identify what it is you are going to measure. By measuring, we can determine from where we are starting, where we want to get to, and how big that gap is. Once you’ve established the metric, baseline, and goal, you have something to monitor your progress towards that goal.

3. Develop the Plan: Look at what you defined as a win and work backwards to identify the milestones you need to hit to achieve that win. What are the quarterly or monthly activities that must take place to move you towards that win? Break those activities down further into the weekly and daily tasks you and your team must accomplish. Now when you are planning your day you know what those activities are that will get you closer to your win, versus just a random to-do list.

4. Communicate the Plan: It’s not enough to simply define the win, establish the measure, and develop the plan. Countless organizations have developed beautiful strategic plans in nice three-ring binders that sit on a shelf gathering dust, never to be looked at again. You must communicate the plan and get people involved. There is a great verse (Judges 5:2) that basically says “when leaders lead, people will volunteer.” If you do an effective job of leading, people will want to follow up and be a part of what you are doing. Remember, people are not against you, they are for themselves. Make sure when you are communicating the plan and the win that you connect it to how the people on your team will be impacted. If you reduce the cycle time, what does that mean for the amount of overtime people have to work or the additional capacity you create to take on more work or the available time for innovation? What’s in it for them?

If you follow these four steps you will set yourself and your organization up to win in 2012.

I would love to hear what your “wins” are for 2012, please share them in the comments.

Vision, Strategy, & Goals – Keys to Achieving

January 11, 2012 in Leadership, Strategy with 0 Comments

Photo by Vivek Chugh

 

This time of year people often talk about their goals or plans for the year; businesses talk about strategy. Unfortunately, only three percent of people actually achieve their goals. So what can you do to improve your odds of achieving your goals, either business or personal?

First, we need to understand what these terms mean. I’ve often heard people use the words strategy, goals, missions, and plans interchangeably. I’ve also noticed that people overlook things like purpose, vision, or tactics. Simply understanding these terms and how they connect to each other can help you achieve more of your goals.

1. Vision – Vision is training yourself to be able to see what is to come to pass. It is a mental attitude you must develop. Proverbs 29:18 says where there is no vision, the people perish. If you are leading others (or even yourself, for that matter) you must have a vision for your team, believe in that vision, and impart that belief to others.

2. Purpose – Purpose is the why. Vision seeks clarity to better understand why you want to do or accomplish something. Purpose gives meaning to people and helps them develop their own internal motivation towards the vision.

3. Goal – Goals are mile markers that help you know if you are moving in the right direction. They can be short term and long term, but they are the “what” that drives toward the vision. Goals help you determine what a win is and keep you focused.

4. Strategy/Mission/Plan –Strategy is the “how” of accomplishing the vision. Strategies may, and sometimes must, change depending on circumstances, but the vision never changes. Remember also, that you may not have the entire strategy laid out in perfect detail. If you know the next step to take, you are not lacking in direction.

5. Tactics – These are the precise disciplines or behaviors which you follow in order to implement a plan and strategy. These become the day after day and week after week actions that enable you to execute your strategy.

If you simply funnel everything into this structure and execute on it, you will place yourself far ahead of those around you.

Guest Appearance on the Solutions 21 Show

August 4, 2011 in Leadership, Operations with 0 Comments

Let me publicly say thank you to Buddy Hobart for inviting me back as a guest on Friday’s “Solution 21 Show” on The American Entrepreneur Radio. I was joined by Rob O’Donnell, Managing Director of Solutions 21, as we answered listeners questions on how to maximize their business’ productivity while keeping your employees from breaking down, especially in a tight economy when these workers are more put upon than ever before.

 

Listen to the Audio.

Too Much Strategic Planning

February 7, 2011 in Leadership, Managing, Strategy with 2 Comments

As I meet and talk with executives and business owners, I discovered there are three types of leaders when it comes to corporate strategy: Those who do strategic planning, Those that don’t bother with a strategic plan, and Those who actually implement their strategic plans. Unfortunately, the percentage of organizations that actually implement their strategic plans – and as a result, achieve their annual goals – is quite small.

“Most of the time, strategists should not be formulating strategy at all: they should be getting on with implementing strategies they already have.” – Henry Mintzberg

According to a recent survey by McKinsey & Co., of the respondents that actually do strategic planning, 69 percent reported that there was a breakdown in the alignment of the company with the strategic plan and poor execution of the plan.

So what can you do to make sure your business is in a better position at the end of the year versus where you are today?

1. Make sure you actually have a strategic plan. If you don’t have a strategic plan, develop one – it’s not too late. Define your business mission. Assess the external forces that affect your business (economic, environmental, political, legal, competitive,  etc.). Conduct an Internal Audit of you business including your culture, management, marketing, financial/accounting, operations, HR, R&D, and IT. Define your strategic objectives and strategies to achieve those objectives.

2. Communicate your strategic plan. You should be able to distill your strategic plan down into a single page. If you cannot communicate your strategic plan on a single sheet of paper, it’s too complex. Not only that, but your team members will struggle to understand how what they do relates to or impacts the business’ strategic plan. Everyone from the executive offices to the shop floor should understand where your company is going and how they contribute to getting there.

3. Translate your strategic plan to measurable goals. Based on your strategic plan, where should each department and person be at the end of each quarter, each month? These measurable goals should now be driving weekly and daily activities for each function and team member.

While this is a very high level approach, following these three steps will help ensure your company’s daily activities are aligned with the business’ strategic plan.

If you have other approaches that have worked in your company, please share them in the comments section, I would love to hear what you’re doing.

5 Habits To Get Yourself Unstuck

December 13, 2010 in Leadership, Managing, World-class with 7 Comments

As we are pursuing our goals, there are times when we get stuck. We start going in circles instead of towards our destination. I ran into this problem earlier this year in my business and spent too much time going in circles instead of breaking out and getting back on track to my destination. As I went through that process, I focused on building five habits back into my life. I can’t take credit for developing these habits, I picked them up from the book of Proverbs. (If you read that book 12 to 15 times, you’ll practically get an MBA, it’s in there.)

The preface to all of this is you have to seek to get unstuck. Which means there must be an energy, a passion in your efforts and activity.

1. Don’t Be A Loner. If you want to get unstuck or grow in a certain area, you need fresh information coming in to you. Go get counsel from someone who is where you want to be or can give you an objective assessment. Get advice from others who truly care about your success and don’t have their own agenda.

2. Don’t Make Excuses. This usually sounds like, “this isn’t going to work, so I’m not even going to try.” Listen, when you make excuses it changes your focus away from the real issue. Not only that, but it paralyzes you. You become very good at finding ways to shoot down every potential solution you come up with. Learn to change “I can’t … ” to “I can….”

3. Don’t Love Comfort and Ease. Don’t be a comfort addict. Life is not supposed to be comfortable. If you’re comfortable you’re not growing. At the end of the day, it’s not about how you feel, it’s your destiny that matters. You were put on the earth to accomplish something. Change isn’t comfortable, get over it, it will help you grow up and mature.

4. Don’t Get Preoccupied. When we’re stuck and going in circles, we are often just focused on what we are doing. Instead, focus on why you are doing it. If you’re a plant manager, you’re not just running a plant and shipping products; you’re providing people with good jobs, serving your customers with a product or service they need, and making your community a better place to live.

5. Don’t Be Hard-Headed. Be teachable. Just because you thought it, doesn’t make it right. Always be looking, gleaning, growing, seeking. Ask questions. Let others talk more, not you talking about yourself. Read. Five years from now, you will be in the same place except for the conversations you have and the books you read. Be teachable.

By incorporating these habits back into my life, I got myself and my business back on track. I would love to hear what you have done  or your thoughts on how to get unstuck.

Keys to Becoming World-Class

November 18, 2010 in Leadership, World-class with 0 Comments

If you’ve been running your business for more than 20-minutes, you have at some point thought about what it takes to develop into a great company. Often we refer to these great organization as world-class. Regardless of whether you lead a division in a 25,000 person multi-national company or you’re a microbusiness, you want to perform at your best.

So what do world-class companies do that the rest of us can learn from?

1. Use coaches/mentors/consultants. Ok, this may sound self-serving, but it’s true. From sports figures and actors to Fortune 100 companies, world-class performers seek out people and firms that help point out what they don’t do well and help they become better. These “outside” eyes can be outside firms or an internal department. When I was at GE, in addition to the outside firms we hired, we also had Corporate Audit Staff (CAS). CAS operated like a consulting firm inside the company to the different GE businesses. If you don’t have someone providing this role to you, you need it. Go find someone or a firm that can help you identify your blind spots.

2. Use Feedback. Solicit performance feedback from your customers. Pay attention to those areas you could improve upon. It’s those minor tendencies and weaknesses that are stopping you from getting to the next level.

3. Be Deliberate. Once you identify where your organization is weak or has blind spots, stop running on autopilot! Consciously make different choices and be super aware of what you’re doing until the new behaviors become ingrained in your culture.

4. Develop Un-natural Skills. Sometimes what you need to do to improve may seem counterintuitive. Realizing what needs to be done, even if it goes against what you would have done in the past, and doing it is a characteristic of world-class performers.

One of my clients that was hit hard by the recession in 2009 took a very different approach than many in their industry. When other companies were laying off people and scrambling to get any order they could, this manufacturer didn’t. Instead, they kept all their employees and reduced everyone’s work hours, stopped raises and bonuses, and invested in their lean and quality initiatives. They reduced their cycle times, improved the quality of their product, and slashed their scrap rates. By early 2010, they were hiring people, back to three shifts five days a week, and wining new customers.

5. Develop an Action Plan. After identifying your weak spots, pick just one or two – no more – and develop a plan to improve. Make sure your action plan is documented, communicated well, and measurable. Once you’ve made significant improvement in those areas, pick one or two more and develop those.

By following these steps, you can build your organization into a world-class performer as well.

If you have other ideas or examples of how your organization improves, please post it in the comments section, I would love to hear about it.

Get Bigger or Better?

October 23, 2010 in Leadership, Managing with 5 Comments

There is a great story about Chick-fil-A founder Truett Cathy. When the company faced it’s first real competition from, now, Boston Market, the young executives started furiously working on how to grow Chick-fil-A bigger. They wanted to open more stores to compete with Boston Market. After working for about a year or so on how to make the company bigger, the staff was in a meeting discussing the subject. Truett Cathy, who was then in his 80′s, began pounding on the table. Everyone else quieted down and looked at the founder who said “I’m tired of hearing all this talk about how to make the company bigger. Focus on making ourselves better and our customers will demand that we get bigger.”

There are a couple things about this story that I love and think are quite applicable to all organizations.

1. Don’t Let Others Drive Your Strategy. In the Chick-fil-A story, the young executives allow Boston Market’s strategy of opening lots of stores to shift their focus away from their strategy. As a result, they become fixated on trying to open more stores than their competition.

When you look at your own business, understand what your goals are and stick to the best strategy that will get you there. Don’t ignore your competition; you should monitor what they are doing. However, you should not mimic what they are doing in an effort to gain more market share.

2. Don’t Lose Sight Of Your Corporate Values. Part of this story involves the Chick-fil-A executives seeking out investors and looking at lines of credit to expand quickly and open new stores. This strategy was completely contrary to the company’s values up to that point. The company had very little debt, if any, and was owned by the Cathy’s.

As you evaluate different marketing and business strategies, make sure you consider how they align with your corporate values. Don’t get caught-up in the urgency of the short-term, instead consider the long-term implications.

3. Bigger Isn’t Always Better. Truett Cathy recognized that if the company focused just on getting bigger, they may lose ground in their quality, hospitality, customer loyalty. Instead, they needed to maintain their focus on becoming better, and as a result, their customers would demand they get bigger.

We’ve seem plenty of examples of companies that expanded too much too fast and then had to shutdown operations or even ended up going out of business. Really evaluate if bigger is better. For some companies staying smaller is better, look at 37 Signals for example. They are a phenomenal company that is focused on not getting bigger for bigger sake. Instead, focus on how you can make yourself better in all aspects of your organization. Then you can let the market demand you get bigger. Isn’t that what we  want?

Stop Reading Books

August 23, 2010 in Leadership with 0 Comments

We are spending too much time just reading books. We live in the information age and have more information available to us that any other time in history. We are practically drowning in information. And we need to stop it, NOW!

Please, hear my heart on this. I absolutely love to read because I love learning. I love reading books, articles, and blog posts. I listen to podcasts on business, entrepreneurship, and leadership during my morning runs. I’m just as much an information junkie as the next person, but we are really missing it here folks.

What are we missing? The application.

Chances are you’ve heard the saying “Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.” And with good reason. When you read you expose yourself to new ideas, ways of looking at things, and new information.

Unfortunately, it’s almost becoming a competitive sport. How many books have you read in the last year or month? I’ve fallen into the trap myself plowing through two or three books in just four or six weeks. It wasn’t unusual for me to be reading at least two books at once.

Here’s the problem: We read a new book, say that was good, toss it aside and dive into the next one. Yet, look at books like Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, Linchpin and Tribes both by Seth Godin, Crush it! by Gary Vaynerchuk, Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, and Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh. These books are a culmination of the authors’ struggles, successes, and resulting experience and we graze through them like a summer novel.

I think we need to stop reading so many books. Instead, we need to start applying what we are reading. It’s in the application that we are falling so woefully short. So what if you’ve read 12 or 15 books this year or even 5 if you’re not doing anything with the information in those books. The person who reads just two or three books a year, but studies them, takes notes from them , and then actually goes out and applies what she has learned will be much further ahead at the end of the year than the person who read 12 books but didn’t apply any of it.

In an effort to help walk this out, I’m going to start blogging on how to apply the principles in these books in addition to my usual blogging. Want to join me? I’m going to start with Seth Godin’s book Tribes. (I just picked this book up a few days ago.) Go get the book from the bookstore or the library and start reading with me. Next week, I’ll have a post on how I think businesses and entrepreneurs should apply the concepts covered in the first few chapters. You need to give me some feedback on how you are going to apply the concepts in your work environment in the comments section.

Let me be clear on what this is NOT. First, this will not be a book review – book reviews are for sissies, we are getting our hands dirty here folks. Second, this is not going to be some let’s sit around, sip wine, and discuss the theory of these concepts book club. Now, I may have a glass of wine while reading, but we are going to be applying what we read and talking about what works in which environments and what needs tweaked. I want to hear about your successes and what you’re struggling with. That is how we are going to change and transform our businesses to be better tomorrow than they are today.

EntreLeadership Announcement

August 20, 2010 in Leadership, Managing with 0 Comments

We are pleased to announce that Operations Strategy Consulting is hosting Dave Ramsey’s EntreLeadership simulcast on November 5!

The event will be held at Living Hope Church in Whitney, PA (near the Arnold Palmer Airport in Latrobe, PA).

The Simulcast will begin at 9 a.m. (doors will open at 8:30 a.m.) and wrap up at 3:30 p.m.

Tickets for this event are $39 and may be purchased through Operations Strategy or online. Tickets will be available until October 22 or they are sold out.

Learn more about this event including lesson overviews.

What’s Your Why?

August 10, 2010 in Leadership, Managing with 0 Comments

This blog entry is focused mainly on business owners or companies that are still privately held. However, if you’re in a publicly traded company, the concepts will apply to your department or function just as easily.

This week, I just have a challenge for you. As you go through the week, pause before each activity you must do or meeting you attend and ask why are we doing this, or why is this important. You and your team need to know and understand the why behind what you’re doing. Why? Because human beings innately need to believe that what they are doing has meaning, otherwise, they will give up on the activity.

If you are the business owner or founder, why did you start your business? It’s not just to make money. Starting a business is really hard work and there are easier ways to make money. So what was your why?

Now, do the other people in your company know, understand, and believe in your why as much as you? If they do, great! You’re in a very elite group. If not, you need to make a commitment to change that.

Ask your self, how much time do you spend talking with your team about your company or department’s vision, where you are going, and why.

When taking on a new initiative, do you share the reasoning behind it or simply declare the new direction?

Do your actions reflect what you say is important or do they send a different message. For example, we care about quality, but the product better ship by the end of the day or there will be some explaining to do.

Your “Why” for being in business needs to be personal and compelling for everyone on your team and in your company, otherwise, it’s just another job to earn a paycheck. And as a business owner, do you want people working for you that are just looking to earn a paycheck?

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