Sometimes I wonder just what it takes to open the eyes of the American voting public. I not talking about the dead people and convicts that helped vote President Hussein Obama in office, I mean just plain folks like us. And, who didn’t see this issue of NPR’s train wreck getting the attention and interference by Obama. When a business owner has a division that is problematic, and not making any moves to improve itself, then the owner takes action. That’s what has happened to the major players in the month’s long debacle that began with the firing of Juan Williams.
NPR has long been losing in the game of “fail and balanced” reporting and commentary, that’s reality folks, not my opinion. Also, I’m not surprised that the conversation has turned to the validation of NPR, that is, why does that organization even exist, where’s the value? The bar for NPR has been to become the American version of the BBC, but when compared, the BBC beams true news and commentary around the globe, and not everything that everyone hears on the BBC they agree with, but is there a secret agenda there, I think not. Does NPR still exist just because the funding is there, and it’s a good place to park left leaning cronies that have a track record of making poor management decisions? It would seem to me, that if the President of the United States truly wanted the very best for this country, he would be looking at NPR sideways, making tough decisions about where best to place hard working American’s tax dollars. No, he feels the need to throw good money at a skunk, and NPR has really been stinking up the place.
Question, does the President belong in the debate over the validation of NPR?
Deep Thinkers (DT) talking points;
We have a President that is more focused on just being President that doing the work of our President. That is, maybe he should take the time to actually meet and know the name of 60% of his cabinet members. DTs think that instead of sending thousands of paid pro-union protestors to the Wisconsin capital, the President should apologize to Israel for treating them like a three legged dog. On March 9th, White House spokesman Jay Carney said that President Obama considers increasing the appropriation of funds to The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports NPR from $420 million to $451 million as “worthwhile” and an “important priority”. Increasing funding to NPR, instead of cutting them off during a time when the national deficit is 14 trillion dollars, is reckless and indicative of a President that has never had to meet a payroll. It’s pretty evident that the strong sense of enablement and lack of concern for getting the right things done for the right reasons from the current administration will end in 2012.
Currently there are fourteen tabs open across the top bar of my browser, all are about NPR.
Three points first;
Recently the Deep thinkers did a piece titled “How to Screw up Like NPR”, the focus was mainly on the Juan Williams debacle and how Ellen Weiss and Vivian Schiller completely did everything wrong with it. As the owner of a consulting firm that teaches clients how to handle public issues the right way, the train wreck that is NPR gets a strong blip on my radar.
So, let’s deal with some real world stuff, and keep in mind that all of the following is relevant to all of us, with the singular exception of career politicians. Accountability; we should all be held accountable for our actions, let’s not assume that just because we’re hearing a rep from NPR speak about how “liberals today might be more educated, fair and balanced than conservatives” or “white, middle-America gun-toting… They’re seriously racist, racist people.” that’s a one-time brain slip. Ron Schiller believed it when it came out of his mouth, and he should be help accountable for what he said. Below is the recipe for implosion at NPR.
Lessons learned here; building cohesive value added teams…people that say and do the right things at the right time. Using transparency and clarity as tools to win, always telling the truth, not hiding agendas. And displaying positive professional values and integrity rise above the crowd and be proud to be seen as someone special. But are these lessons being learned by the list of characters listed above? I don’t know, but I hope so.
If there’s one thing I want to accomplish before my career comes to an end, and I’m not as young as I used to be, I want to reach an agreement to do business with a company that encourages its senior management to ask ‘Why Not’.
No-one understands the hesitancy of management to resist change better than me. Check this out; I was told one time by a senior manager, that he didn’t like the type of assessments we were using because ‘I didn’t think of it first’, I watched a playback of a security film as a senior manager has a security guard take the managers executive assessment for him, as this goes to publish, I know of a Human Resource Manager that has a ‘no appointment policy’ (supported by the CEO). Now, this goes far beyond the idea of an enabled workplace and being a VP, Pres, CEO, CFO, absolutely does not give you the right to advocate enablement to the point of a perceived total lack of professional ethics and integrity for yourself or the organization as a whole.
What causes people that have talent and value to become brainless pinheads to the point that they become; afraid of new ideas, afraid to ask the question ‘Why Not?’ and afraid to develop an organization that has be enabled to be proactive, to problem solve and return value to the organization? It’s simple really, CHANGE. Organizations love to embrace the idea of LODO, you know-Lights On, Doors Open. As managers walk down the halls (if they choose to get out from behind their desks), the lights are still on, everybody’s still doing the same old things, the same way-just like yesterday, and last week, and last year… As long as we’re still open and we still have our jobs and nobody’s rocking the boat with any new ideas, yeah- we’ll be just fine. And I may just give my job to my son when I retire, or maybe my brother in-law, yeah they won’t rock the boat.
Why Not? Well, I’ll tell you why not. Business trends are constantly evolving, I mean just look at what I’ve seen in my lifetime. As a young boy, it was the downtown business district- Main Street and all it had to offer. Then it was the malls and urban sprawl. Then we went to the big boxes, Home Depot, Wal Mart and the like. Now, Barnes and Noble wants to be THE online bookstore, and we can order pizza for delivery, have the dry cleaning picked up/dropped off and make sure that poochie gets walked, all online. Change is a good thing, so maybe we’ve just done a poor job projecting the future, maybe when we said to our clients-‘Your competition has an on-line presence (F/B, Twitter) and can ship a product as good or better than yours from China, in the same amount of time as you can make it,’ maybe we weren’t clear. Well…maybe
So, Why Not? Oh, I don’t know if they aren’t listening or if we’re saying it wrong, and at the end of the day it really only comes down to one thing. We have a commitment to our client’s that we will show them how to add value to their organizations and their customers and their employees. We will never stop giving everything we’ve got to that commitment. We too have had to evolve, now its live internet presentations instead of PowerPoint, its internet video meetings instead of rubber on the road or wheels up, and Cloud Echelon, a live Learning Management System available to our Tier One clients 24/7. I really do have a blast doing what I do, and I’m thankful for every client…but man---I’ve got some stories.
Houston Huggins
Yesterday I wrote a post about top-down versus bottom-up thinking. There is a corollary to that advice, which is “doing the right things is more important than doing things right.” Sounds simple but in practice I promise you most organization fall into the latter trap.
Here’s how it goes:
You have a business development group with two people. They are tasked with “getting deals done” so they race around talking to tons of potential partners inking anything from channel sales deals, product integration, international distribution agreements, co-marketing arrangements, M&A discussions, etc. You can often measure how many deals were achieved but there often doesn’t flow a steady stream of revenues / profits from these deals.
You have a marketing department with three people. They’re tasked with doing … marketing. So they create a task list of all the marketing activities an organization can do: press releases, web site updates, customer case studies, blog posts, daily Tweets, Facebook fan page, attending conferences, etc. You get a lot of traffic – not always results.
When you hire people in functional roles they want to show that they’re achieving results and results are easiest to measure by tasks accomplished. But many CEO’s and management teams fail to set clear guidelines on what the company objectives are and make sure that everybody is driving toward the same goal. It’s actually quite hard to lay out an annual company strategy that is articulate and underpinned by facts. So many CEO’s just carry on being … CEO’s –> fund raise, get media attention, attend conferences, hire staff, “set direction”, whatever. But this leads to organizational drift because staff will continue to produce “work.”
Let me give you an example. Let’s say you have a marketing department with an incredibly talented leader who knows SEO, SEM, social media and how to hit the cover off the ball on press coverage. So you generate a ton of traffic to your website. If the traffic is unfocused you actually can be doing a disservice to your company rather than a benefit. Your sales department has to have somebody has do deal with these inbound inquiries. If the people who wind up at your site are not high quality leads, you either piss people off by not responding to them or you respond and burn up your critical resources trying to be helpful to people who are not likely to convert to become customers.
It’s why I’ve often start when running marketing campaigns the most simple of questions:
- with whom are we trying to communicate?
- what messages are we wanting them to receive?
- what is the best channel to reach these people?
- if they receive our message what actions (if any) are we hoping for?
- how will we handle those responses
And the reality is that you might be better off doing less activity but doing “the right” activities really well. To do the right activities you need to start with a top down assessment with what you’re trying to achieve with your marketing.
Similar with product features. One of the most important movements in software design in the past few years has been a return to simplicity – a move away from the Microsoft era of every release adding a new 150 unused features. One of my favorite sayings in this area comes from a portfolio company, RingRevenue, who like to say “ease of use = use and use = revenue.” I love that saying. If you don’t know WHY you’re adding features don’t do it just because you have a development team. Better that they work on new initiatives, performance improvements, operational features to help internal management or anything other than just cranking out features for the sake of it.
But the counter case is equally ineffective. You sometimes find CEO’s who want press coverage, want to speak on important panels or want features that their competitors offer without knowing whether their customers care about these features. So they direct staff to meet these objectives without considering what the purpose of activity is and what the end result will be. People will certainly follow orders and do the things you ask of them.
Smart people produce high quality work. As management your job is to make sure that everybody understands how their initiatives tie into the overall company strategy. Do the hard work and try to define your company’s objectives and get them on paper. Everybody should be able to answer the question, “why am I doing this?” Otherwise they’re likely to be doing things right, but not the right things.
Thanks Mark Suster!
For the first 5 years of my career I was a “bottom up” thinker and worker. I assembled tons of data, grouped things, found results and drew conclusions. It was difficult to make the transition to a “top down” thinker but as a senior executive – and as an entrepreneur – you’re far less effective without this skill in your arsenal. You need to be able to structure problems / solutions at the appropriate level to communicate effective and drive decision-making. The difference is in formulating hypothesis then testing conclusions / data vs. assembling data and finding patterns. I know it might sound a bit esoteric so let me explain: I started my career as a programmer. We did big, boring but necessary implementations for large companies. I started by doing billing systems. In billing we literally started thinking about all of the types of bills that would be generated for customers: full payment, partial payment, split payment, senior discount, student discount, level pay plan, etc. We then made groupings of the common features of each piece of logic so we could figure out what “shared services” we could build so that we could have reusable code. This is bottom-up planning. It is useful in many situations and was useful to me in this situation. I next moved into system design where I designed computer systems to deal with large industrial natural gas customers and telecommunication companies. I had to understand their business requirements and document them all. I had to understand all of the normal business rules as well as all “edge cases.” Again, I grouped them into related functions and then designed systems to handle the rules. I spent the first 5 years of my career as a “bottom up thinker.” It was appropriate for my job and stage of career. Post MBA I went into strategy consulting where my job was to problem solve for clients. Often I had a very limited time. Clients wanted to see “preliminary findings” in 4-5 weeks and final results in 8-10. This is a problem for a strategy consultant because you are, by definition, a generalist that is thrown into new problems again and again. I struggled on my first few assignments. It took too long for me to get around to speak to every departement, get data, assemble it, analyze the data to formulate conclusions and then communicate it to executive staff. The wisest mentor I ever had was Ameet Shah, my partner on several projects. He taught me much that I know about critical thinking. He coached me that I had to start with the answers. WTF? How can I START with the answers? How can that be effective? ”Well, we know the basic structure of the problem we’re trying to solve and we have hypotheses about what some of the answers will be based on our experience. You need to put this all down into a structured diagram from the first week with the answers that tie to the logic of the problem we’re trying to solve.” Heresy. But he had more insight, “once we know the structure of the problem and our solution we can plan the data that proves or disproves our theories. The key is not to be wedded to our original answer. But by problem solving in a ‘top down’ manner we can be much more focused about what data we collect. We can also begin to socialize our answers with people in the company to get their reactions. That alone will help us solve the problems.” It was very difficult to get used to it because I didn’t think I had it within me to do this kind of top-down structured thinking. I bought the most popular book on the topic, “The Mind of the Strategist” by Kenichi Ohmae, who is ex McKinsey. I found this book very useful but still a little bit hard to implement. I’m glad I read it though. I later took a course with Barbara Minto (who taught McKinsey people) and bought her book “The Pyramid Principle.” This was a breakthrough for me. It is about structuring your thoughts, presentations and communications. You group items into component parts in a top-down manner. The book is expensive but for me personally this helped me enormously. This and frankly a lot of practice. But I approach problems in a different way now. I start with answers and structure what I think the organization of the problem is. I then try out my solutions by interviewing people to “prove or disprove” my conclusions. I’m never right the first time so I spend time adjusting my frameworks. And if data is required then I apply actual data to my conclusions. The process is bankrupt if you simply tweak the data to support your hypotheses. But applied correctly and this is golden. I often go into meetings with portfolio companies with a structure worked out of what I believe the critical issues are. I structure it top down so we don’t get bogged down in the details that are irrelevant. To give you an example it might go something like this, here is a made up situation that a portfolio company might face: - We currently sell through channels. - We’re the market leader in signing up our channel partners. - But not enough volume of business is yet going through the channels. - Our three options are: spend more time helping the channel sell, spend more time with customers bringing them into our channel partners or sell direct. - My guess is that we aren’t prepared to sell direct because that would require a broader team and more capabilities than we have. So the real question is – do we spend more of our time and limited resources helping our channel or educating and marketing to their customers. - On a less critical path we should evaluate the capabilities required to serve customers directly if we ever needed to and know what the channel’s response would be.
Thanks Mark Suster!
As we all know, Toyota is a very visible company, a company known around the world for making quality products priced for almost any budget. Toyota’s approach to building quality automobiles has changed very little in the past sixty years; quality only comes second to safety, compare that to the disgusting reputation of what used to be known as ‘The Big Three’. However, the process of assembling automobiles has changed significantly in those sixty years. Way back in the day, car companies used to build their product on their assembly lines from the firewall to the finished product. Today, the process of putting a car together involves building a family of support companies that manufacture the many parts of a car, to the car company’s specifications. Most automakers depend on a large pool of Tier 1 and Tier 2 suppliers for many components that the car companies assemble in their plants. In this regard, Toyota is no different. So, for the assembly of a Toyota vehicle, Toyota depends on their suppliers to provide high quality and safety critical products to Toyota plants that are manufactured to the high standards of the Toyota Quality System.
So, with Toyota’s high profile safety and quality issues still fresh in many people’s minds, let’s do this one differently, let’s consider the things that Toyota got right:
It’s not often that the rest of the automobile industry gets to take shots at Toyota. In truth, all manufactures have their issues and their crosses to bear. The best thing to come out of this was that Toyota’s management got a wakeup call. From time to time people tend to get slack, make too many assumptions that everything is always going well. The “Toyota Way” teaches about observing the value stream, getting out from behind the desk (go see) and looking for what can go wrong. You can bet that for Toyota its back to the basics, back to doing the things that propelled them to being the best car builder in the world.
I was spending some time in the “war room” yesterday, this is the central hub for Echelon, gosh was I surprised! Several things hit me; just look at how far we’ve come in 2 short years and listen…you can hear the voices, but not the equipment(more on that in a minute)—so let’s run this down.
In just 2 short years, Echelon’s gone from a casual conversation between my wife and I, to a company that has gone global. Echelon Value Consulting LLC was created with this mantra: “If you can see it in your mind, and you believe it in your heart, then do it with your hands”. It is my goal to make Echelon the most effective, value added consulting group anywhere. Our teams’ collective experience is over a hundred years of value added activities that are aimed at making our clients more financially fit. Ok, the commercial is over, let’s talk about the equipment I mentioned earlier.
Echelon Value is a paperless company, well almost. All of our information that other companies would print and put in a file folder, we mange electronically. So, what you won’t hear in the “war room” are printers, what you will hear are shredders. We scan every document into an electronic file and then shred it. We have continuous backup systems running and maintain an electronic master copy offsite. I never “heard” the phone ring once, but hold on a minute. Most of the distance communication we have with our clients is voip, that is that we have our conversation and we can see each other. Also, we can file share with them, use an electronic dry erase board and our distance conversation has significantly more value. Wow, sounds complicated, but it’s not-but it is change. Change from the days when companies had 10 people working in accounting, a receptionist out front, managers for other managers that had managers, 39 four drawer file cabinets, more printers than trash cans, and someone on payroll just to manage the 39 four drawer file cabinets-oh and a manager for the person working the cabinets. Understand, there is NO VALUE in that, none. We can accomplish the tasks of 60 people…..ready?…..with 5 people.
But, why wouldn’t we be good at this, after all—it’s what we teach. The days of having a front office loaded down with non-value added people are gone. If you still do it, you are way behind the curve, and more importantly, your company is throwing money away. Assess your condition, use the data that a loss of effectiveness index will give you and make the transition. Once you’ve done that, use the extra people, don’t lose them. Start a new line in the factory; add a new product, or start a new value added project. This isn’t about throwing people out of the workplace, it’s about being more efficient, being more effective and adding value to you company and your customers.
If you are ever give the job of 'troubleshooting' or investigating (apparent) poor performance, perhaps in another location or business belonging to your own organisation, or perhaps as a consultancy project, here are some simple tips:
Actually 'troubleshooting' isn't a great word - it scares people. Use 'facilitator' or 'helper' instead. It sets a more helpful and cooperative tone.
On which point, you could well find that the main issue will be people's resistance and defensiveness to someone coming in to their organisation do what you are doing. When you overcome that challenge, then you can start comparing what's happening with what the organisation sets out to do (mission, values, goals, priorities, targets, key performance indicators, processes, measures); how the people feel about things (staff turnover, retention, morale, attitudes); and how customers and suppliers feel about things too (actually go out and visit customers, and ex-customers particularly).
You must observe protocols very diligently - introduce yourself properly to people and explain who you are and what you are doing. Don't assume that your task gives you the right to be secretive, or to have access to anyone or anything without permission. Ask for help. Ask for introductions. Ask for permission. Be polite and courteous. Respect people more than you would do normally, because they will be sensitive, understandably so.
Look at the Sharon Drew Morgen facilitation method, which helps with the style and approach you should use. You must aim to help, enable and facilitate discovery and clarity, not work in splendid isolation, as an outsider, who's come to 'sort things out'.
And then be led by the people there as to what can be improved. You should adopt the role of a researcher and enabler rather than a problem solver.
Plan lots of questions that will help people to tell you how they feel about things - customers and staff and suppliers - and what they think can be done to improve things.
Avoid asking 'why' unless they're really trusting you and working with you. Used early, 'why' puts people on the defence and you'll not find out anything.
Look at the customer relationship materials as well - customers will tell you what's best to focus on, and will give you an early opportunity to facilitate some improvement responses. Also look at the employee motivation survey material.
It's likely that you'll have to write a report and recommendations afterwards, in which case try wherever possible to involve the people in what you say about them. Let there be no surprises. Be constructive. Accentuate the positive. Be straight and open with people.
Enjoy the experience. Be respectful and helpful to people and they'll be respectful and helpful to you.
© alan chapman 2005-2010
Planning, implementing and managing change in a fast-changing environment is increasingly the situation in which most organizations now work.
Dynamic environments such as these require dynamic processes, people, systems and culture, especially for managing change successfully, notably effectively optimising organizational response to market opportunities and threats.
Key elements for success: