Leadership Conversations Blog

A Time to Recheck the Course

Chris Gregory — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 18:50:00 GMT

Did you see the current economic storm coming? Were you listening to what the reputable commentators were saying and reviewing the likely impact on your business?

If not, its time to raise your eyes from working in your business and look at what is happening around you.

Upheavals in world financial markets caused by the US sub-prime mortgage problems has made many business owners very nervous. Every day the news seems more gloomy as world stock markets tumble and yet another banking icon declares losses that are incomprehensible to mere mortals who occupy the small business world.

When economic sentiment turns from optimism to caution cutomers tend to close their wallets and wait for the air to clear. As a result, business owners are forced to review sales forecasts, marketing strategies, production plans and cash flow projections to ascertain the best course to survive the storm and identify new opportunities.

What should you do when the world seems to be closing down?

Review your customer and product profiles - Is you business concentrated on a range of customers who are able to survive economic storms and do you provide the products and services to help them survive?
Review your marketing strategies - Do your customers, and others like them understand understand the total solutions your business provides? How are you making this information available to them and what mesages are you delivering? Are your current marketing strategies still appropriate? What new opprtunities present themselves in difficult times?
Review your production plans and processes - What is the balance between production and inventories? How does production align with current market conditions? Are your production processes producing the best output for the least appropriate cost and minimum waste? Are you producing what your customers actually want and at a price they are willing to pay?
Review your cash flow projections - When times are tough, cash is king. Are your credit and cash collection policies current, appropriate and complied with? Are your inventory holdings in line with current customer requirements (inventories can be one of the hidden stores of cash in your business)? Do you have other assets which are surplus to requirements and could be sold for cash? Will projected cash flows allow you to ride out the storm?

Any good sea captain uses all the resources available to him when storms arrive. He not only relies on his own knowledge and information provided by his instruments, but also on his navigator, engineer, and the rest of the crew , as well as advice from outside his vessel to help steer a safe passage through the storm.

By all means use the institutional knowledge within your business to plan your way through the current economic turmoil. Remember though, there is advice available from outside of your business also, and often the perspective from outside is clearer than from within. Your banker, lawyer, accountant, trade association and business coach can help you steer a course to new opprtunities and/or safe havens.

Focus on Results

Chris Gregory — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 17:23:00 GMT

Everything done by you or your business has an outcome, a result. The very purpose of a business is to produce results in the form of value for anyone with an interest in the business, especially customers.

The mistake many business people make is to focus on the work, not the results. The purpose of work is to produce a result. If you focus on the work, you get what you get. If you focus on the result, it will direct the work toward the outcome you want, and you'll get what you want to get. It's actually a chain of purpose:

Goal leads to Work leads to Results leads to Success

It's a simple principle: set goals to achieve the results you want and keep your eye on those results as you work toward them.

Define Success

Chris Gregory — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 09:05:00 GMT

It's only after the fact, after you've accomplished something, that you can call it a success. Before the fact it's a hope, or if you do it right, a goal. Setting goals is actually defining success before it happens. Goals give you something to aim for, something to direct your efforts, something to motivate you, and something to keep you on course.

The first point about defining success is the simple act of doing it. The mere fact that you define success before leaping into an activity goes a long way toward insuring that you will, in fact, be successful. So look ahead and consciously decide what success means to you and to your business.

Stripped to the essentials, success is nothing more than setting a goal and achieving it.

There's a deeper experience of success. Each of us has an inner drive that motivates us. It's something that was shaped in our earliest days, that's so basic to us it seems inborn, part of our characters that operates mostly at an unconscious level. It needs to become a part of our conscious awareness so we can factor it into our decision making, and use it to tap into our passion and motivation.

We call it "Core Purpose" because it is core to your personality and it shapes your sense of purpose in your life.

Core Purpose

The main point about Core Purpose is that the goals you set for yourself and your business can't conflict with your Core Purpose or you're setting yourself up for failure or an unfulfilling life and career.

What is success for your business? Again, success is what you say it is. And again, it's not quite that simple. Defining success for your business should be done in a way that actually launches you toward that success.

Goal-setting is an important part of that, so are setting a vision and mission for the future of the business and deciding on how it will operate and how the people in the business should behave. In our Full Spectrum program, we ask you to define something called "Strategic Intent."

Strategic Intent

Strategic Intent is a clear statement of what the business will become in the future when it is successful. Strategic Intent sets the stage for success and puts your business on the right path to succeed.

So, success is what you define it to be - both for yourself and your business. If you don't define success, how will you know whether you have achieved it, or not? Part of the business development work you do on your business is setting goals. Don't limit those goals to just financial goals - look at your business as a whole and set goals in non-financial terms also.

A New View For A New Year

Chris Gregory — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 04:28:00 GMT

The summer holiday season has finally come to an end for Australian and New Zealand businesses. The "silly season" from mid December till the end of January brings everyone back to work with suntans and refreshed minds.

Holidays provide an opportunity to get away from the business to spend time pursuing other activities. The business however, is never far away. Unless you are totally out of range of telephones and the internet, the business goes on holiday with you. You do get time to reflect though, away from the bustle of working every day in the business:

How have we done in the last year?
What mistakes did we make that we can avoid in the future?
Where is the business headed?
When do I plan to retire?
What new opportunities are out there that we need to look into?
Is there a better way of doing what we do?
and so on...

Why not start the new year by writing down your goals for yourself and your business for the next year, and the three or four years beyond that? What is the strategic intent for your business, and what is the gap between the current reality and this strategic intent?

Writing your thoughts down gives you something tangible to think about and gives you the opportunity to develop strategies for change and prioritise them. This means that the actions that you take in the new year are taken intentionally, and therefore have a greater chance of success.

And, don't forget to ask for help if you need it - you probably don't have all of the answers yourself.

Think With The Whole Mind

Chris Gregory — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 03:15:00 GMT

Have you ever wondered how people make decisions about what they do and how to do it? Maybe you've noticed that some people seem to be very intuitive in what they do, but others are very analytical. What kind of person are you, and how do you make decisions about your life and your business?

Human beings come fully equipped with both logical and intuitive thinking abilities, and somehow, over the years, most of us learn to rely on one more than the other. Neither is better than the other and neither is more reliable.

People who intuitively "trust my gut" are just as likely to be right or wrong as people who "figure it out" logically. The people who learn to use both logical and intuitive thinking get the best results. It's as if they had two brains, and everyone knows "two heads are better than one."

If you tend to be a logical thinker, wouldn't it be better if you could double-check your logic with your intuition?

If you tend to be intuitive, wouldn't it be better if you could build a logical case for what your intuition tells you? Of course, the answer to both questions is yes.

This principle of using your whole-mind will make your decision making and business management far more effective than relying primarily on one thinking mode or the other.

An understanding of the importance of conscious and unconscious thinking and logical and intuitive decision making will dramatically increase your effectiveness as a business person and leader. It's a theme that should run throughout your business development process.

Think Principles NOT Rules

Chris Gregory — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 01:59:00 GMT

We have all heard "rules of thumb" about how to improve the way we do business. In some circumstances these seem to work quite well, but not always. A rule of thumb is really a formula someone has worked out for their business that seems to deliver results for them, most of the time. We hear them from acquaintances, from golfing partners, and sometimes from business consultants who offer them as a panacea or cure for business ills.

When we say "formula" we include rules, templates, best practices, and other "cookie cutter" methods, which are simply attempts to transplant methods that worked in one business into other businesses.

Formulas make sense, don't they? Only if your business is exactly the same as the one where the formula was developed. The problem with formulas is not that they don't work. The problem arises because your business isn't the same as any other business, not even other businesses offering the same products and services to the same markets.

You're not like other leaders. You have your own strengths and weaknesses, and they're not like anyone else's strengths and weaknesses. And your specific situation isn't exactly like the situation for any other business.

A business principle is an underlying business reality. Principles are fundamental laws. You cannot change them. However by knowing and understanding them you can build these principles into the design of your business. You get to have them powerfully working for you rather than against you.

A business principle is deeper, more fundamental than a formula. A formula is a generalized attempt to solve a general business problem. But your problems - and opportunities - aren't general. They're specific. What you need are specific solutions to your specific problems and opportunities.

You don't want "approximately" or "good enough." You want "exactly right" for your business, and "outstanding" for your customers, investors, employees, and others.

The previous four posts to this blog highlight a number of key principles that you can use in your business. In case you missed them they are:

1. The customer must be paramount
2. Systems are the solution to business frustrations
3. Deliver Full Spectrum value
4. The 80/20 Rule

The next few posts will bring some additional principles for you to consider. Using them as a basis for you business development thinking, you will begin to develop some ideas about how your business might become different. Now that's a thought!

The 80 20 Rule

Chris Gregory — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 02:49:00 GMT

Leverage yourself and your resources

Effective people know to focus their attention and their resources on the small number of tasks that get the greatest results. It's called the eighty-twenty rule - eighty percent of the results produced by a person or a business are produced by twenty percent of the work.

There's nothing magic about the "eighty percent" number. Just remember that smart people know to leverage themselves and their impact by putting their attention and their resources where they'll get the greatest results.

The trick is in knowing which work and resources will get the results they want.

What are the driving forces in the business? That's where you put your attention.

What elements of value drive the customer's purchase decision? That's where you put your attention.

What business systems are the ones that get the most important results? That's where you put your attention.

What are the highest priorities for work to be done? That's where... well, you know.

This basic principle of business development asks you to figure out what "drives" your business, your customers, your employees, and to focus your attention on those drivers.

Deliver full spectrum value

Chris Gregory — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 09:24:00 GMT

Value is one of those words that means what you think it means, depending on your point of view. In business, value is anything you provide that someone wants. If you provide it and they don't want it, it's valueless. If they want it and don't get it, it's valueless. If they want it and get all of it, that's full spectrum value.

What might this mean to the people your business touches?

To the owner, value is wealth, profits, satisfaction, making a contribution, status ... and much more.

To customers, value is a good price for the products and services they buy, a good experience of the product and the provider they get it from, status, emotional satisfaction ... and much more.

To an employee, value is a paycheque, job satisfaction, a good working environment, respectful treatment... and much more.

To the community, value is a business that pays its taxes, provides jobs for its citizens, contributes to the positive energy and the economics of the community ... and much more.

The bottom line is this:

Value is whatever satisfies the needs of anyone having anything to do with the business.

Unless your business can deliver full spectrum value that can be recognised by everyone that it touches then there is nothing that will differentiate it from all the other businesses in the community that are its competitors. The less it is undifferentiated, the less reason there will be for prospective customers to visit and existing customers to stay, employees to remain loyal, suppliers to offer special deals, lenders to lend, and investors to continue their investment. The choice is yours.

Systems are the solution to reducing frustrations

Chris Gregory — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 23:04:00 GMT

A business is a system of systems within systems. That may sound like gobbledygook, but it's not. Systems are the foundation of business excellence and the best way to make simplicity out of complexity.

Systemizing your business is the surest way to getting the reliable, consistent, high quality, and cost-effective results that are necessary for success. Systems are the primary tool for building a business that delivers value for everyone.

At the heart of most business frustrations are one of three causes:

Lack of written policies or procedures
Faulty documented policies or procedures
Documented policies or procedures that work if they are complied with, but are not being followed.

A basic principle of business development is the documentation of key policies and procedures to ensure that important aspects of your business are performed the same way every time. This provides everyone that has an experience of your business with consistent outcomes and certainty about what to expect.

Where most small businesses have trouble is knowing how to document their policies and procedures and having the time to undertake a task that seems overwhelming in its scale.

Like all big projects, having a plan and the right tools allows the job to be broken down into smaller tasks that can more easily be accomplished.

The key to success with policies, procedures and systems is simplicity. Some points to consider when documenting policies and procedures in your business are:

Clearly define expected outcomes or results on every document
State which position in your organisation is resposible for producing the outcome or result
Keep policy documents short and to the point
Don't mix several policies into one document
Consider whether a checklist, form, flowchart, diagram etc can replace a narative document
Keep work steps in action plans or work plans short and to the point
Number work steps
Identify resources required to produce the expected result
Clearly identify expected performance standards and key performance indicators, where necessary.

There are a number of software tools that are now available to help make your business documentation easier. These include TKO Business Modeller and Touchstone Business System.

These types of tool allow you to:

Organize your whole business and all its key work into Systems & Procedures
Produce your own fully customized Operating Manual
Create a Dynamic Organizational Chart with integrated Job Descriptions
Develop & Control your business with Action Plans, Checklists, Forms & Policies
Produce the framework for your professional management system.

No matter whether you use a software tool as described above, or you document and organise your policies and procedures in some other way, the key message is to get started. If necessary, seek help to get it done

The customer must be paramount

Chris Gregory — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 21:13:00 GMT

Your customers are by far the most important people interested in your business. They are more important than yourself, your investors and your employees.

Unless you serve your customers and fully satisfy their needs, your investors, employees, and even yourself, will not be served, because your business will be nothing without its customers.

Customers vote with their feet and their wallets. The primary goal of your business is to deliver an experience every time your customers visit so that they have no reason to move their affections elsewhere. The experience must be relevant, timely, suitably personal, of value to the customer, and meet or exceed expectations.

And that must be the number one goal of your business, or it wont survive and no-one will be satisfied.

Customers Rock Free e-book

Chris Gregory — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 08:46:00 GMT

One of the blogs that I follow with interest is Becky Carroll's Customers Rock! As a thank you to regular readers she has published an e-book with the title "Customers Rock!™ - How Businesses Can Make Sure Their Customer Experiences Rock".

The eBook is a compilation of five of Becky's favorite blog posts from the last 12 months. she has also included the comments along with each post so readers can continue to follow the conversation; many of these were quite enlightening!

Topics include:

Taking care of existing customers
Customer or client?
Tips for listening to customers
Stories and the personal touch
Measuring customer relationships

On the topic of "How to Take Care of Existing Customers", for example, she writes "We have to focus on two main areas when it comes to our customers: bringing new customers in and taking care of existing customers. The old idiom, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,” comes to mind here.
"I like this definition from the New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy (Third Edition, 2002).
The things we already have are more valuable than the things we only hope to get."

This handy little book has some gems that are useful to any small business and is worth a read. As the book is freely available for distribution you can download your own copy by clicking here.

If its not written its not real

Chris Gregory — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 03:38:00 GMT

Life can be very painful at times, especially when legal rights and defences are concerned. For want of documentary evidence a right or a defence can fail, often with painful monetary consequences.

In the last year I have had to assist several businesses to defend themselves against claims where they had kept insufficient or inadequate documentation to support their argument or position. It becomes very difficult to construct a defense when the evidence is largely anecdotal and verbal.

Often the person or organisation prosecuting a case can support their argument with written contracts, meeting notes, correspondence, diary entries etc, and even though the moral ground may strongly be in favour of the defense, their argument can fail through lack of documentary proof. Procecution lawyers and revenue authorities thrive on these situations.

The fundemental tenet here, and one that business people need to adhere to at all times is "if its not written, its not real".

Its the same with business systems. If you want want the people in your organisation to perform key tasks in the same way every time to achieve the same results every time, your systems need to be written down. Some benefits of written systems are:

There can be now doubt about what is required to be done
Routine tasks can be dealt with quickly and easily
Performance measures can be easily understood by all
Performance can be measured against written standards
Documented systems form part of position agreements
There is transparency about what is required.

There is a moral here. Next time you don't get the results you expect or have to defend your position in a complaint or action against you, look for the written documentation to support your point of view. Whereever you find a gap, remedy it, especially if a material consequence could arise from its omission. Without written evidence your life will inevitably become more difficult.

Delegation - Art or Science

Chris Gregory — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 19:40:00 GMT

If ever there was a part of management that that has the potential to cause frustration, it is delegation. So often the manager who delgates tasks to others complains of disappointment about results produces by delegatees that one wonders about what went wrong.

For some managers, delegation is an opportunity to pass work off to others that dont want to do themselves, in other words, to pass the buck to someone else and walk away from the problem. This can be called abdication, and it inevitably leads to problems sooner or later.

This is not true delegation in any sense of the word.

The fundemental problem here is lack of responsibility on the part of the manager, and abdication from accountability for ensuring that the task is completed properly, within time, with the correct resources, and with a proper feedback mechanism in place.

A recent posting on the Slow Leadership Blog is headed "Delegation is Art and Science" defines delegation as:

"the act of assigning responsibility and resources for a task, holding or process to a subordinate".

This is followed by the statement "In effect, you sublet your work. Because they remain your subordinate, the task ultimately remains your responsibility. Since you chose to delegate this to them, you proactively decided they could handle the situation".

Now that's a whole different situation from the abdication example given above and it requires a whole lot more work on the part of the manager. This work can be summarised in three brief steps:

Communicate the task or responsibility.
Give the resources needed to accomplish the task.
Compare results to expectations then adjust.

Those three steps involve a lot of skills from the manager, both in terms of supervision and also in personal relationship between the manager and the delegatee. The dynamics change over time as the delegatee grows their own level of skill and gains increased confidence in completing the tasks.

So, delegation is one of the key tools in the kit that forms the art and scince of management. If it is used badly, the results will be poor. When used properly and with skill, the business gains and the parties to the delegation gain also.

I recomend that you read the full article on the Slow Leadership Blog as it expands on the comments above and provides some further context to the art and science of delegation.

cloning your best customers

Chris Gregory — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 00:06:00 GMT

So you want to grow sales in your business?

You have two main choices, sell more to the customers you already have, or find new customers to whom you can sell, or both.

Let's have a look at the second option. For the sake of this discussion we will assume for the moment that you have exhausted the possibilities for selling more to existing customers.

If you want more customers, where do you start? Let's start by looking at the customers you already have and ask the question, "how can I find more customers who are like my best customers?"

If your sales or accounting systems are able to provide you with the information, sort your list of "sales by customer" for the last year (say) in decending order from greatest to least sales. You need to be careful here that the results are not skewed by a few large sales which are outside the norm of how you do business.

Now look at the list and segment it into five equal groups by number of customers. This divides the number of customers into 20% segments. Total the value of sales for each 20% segment and analyse the results. You may be surprised to learn that a sizeable proportion of you sales, maybe 70%-80% are delivered to your business by customers in the top 20% segment.

What about the next 20% segment? How are these customers different from the top 20%? And the segment after that?

If you are able to segment your customers by trade or business type and sort sales by this type of segment, what can you discover here? What about by type of product or service purchased? For people who are smart with spreadsheet software, sorting customer data with pivot tables can reveal some very interesting results, especially in a customer type/product type matrix. But let's not get too complicated.

Now it's time to ask some probing questions. Who are your best customers? What do you know about them? Where can they be found? What similarities do they have? What do you know about their buying preferences? How do I treat them that is different from how other customers are treated? What is it that makes them "best" customers for my business? Who else sells to customers like these?

There are many questions you can ask, and you need to ask them if you wish to discover the best approach to attracting them to your business. Some of those questions relate to demographic characteristics and other to psychographic charcteristics. Demographic characteristics are those that you can generally count, measure or observe such as genda, age, income, lifestyle choices etc. Psychographic characteristics are generally about behavoural observations such as emotions, likes and dislikes, choices and preferences, comfort and discomfort, and so on.

Using your new found knowledge about who your best customers are, you can now develop strategies to target other similar prospective customers in your trading area knowing more about what and how they buy, and what is important to them and the business relationship they want with you.

Its time to do some analysis and thinking now!

If you don't have the knowledge or resources to do this yourself, seek help from someone who does. "Cloning your Best Customers" is a foundational marketing topic in Full Spectrum Business Development coaching.

sometimes you have to wing it

Chris Gregory — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 04:04:00 GMT

This posting by Carmine Coyote of the Slow Leadership Blog caught my attention. It neatly sums up attitudes to risk, which is very topical in light of the current credit squeeze resulting from the US sub-prime mortgage problems.

In her opening paragraphs Carmine says:

"Risk is one of the most misunderstood ideas in the world today—especially the business world. Despite all the time and effort devoted to risk evaluation and risk management, corporations constantly find themselves subject to far greater risks than they imagined.

The reason for this is rather simple: they confuse risk with probability and try to deal with it primarily by statistical or mathematical means.

Probability is, indeed, numerical. It’s the study of the likelihood that some event or outcome will happen—an attempt to understand the inner workings of chance.

Risk is something quite different. The easiest way to describe it is to say that risk is simply a substitute for knowledge."

Carmine argues that while risk can be assessed mathematically, the best way to minimise risk is to make business decisions based on knowledge - the more knowledge, the better the decision.

Risk can be assessed and amelierated as follows:

knowledge - the more the better - that gives you as full a picture of facts, events, personalities, economics, politics, etc relating to the business decisions you make; supported by;
mathematical risk probability calculations that attempt to rationalise the facts (knowlege) into numbers.

Relying on the numbers alone is not a safe option.

You can read the full article at http://slowleadership.org/blog/?p=186.

Quantification is a key process in Full Spectrum Business Development. Quantification includes both observation and calculation of key strategic and operational indicators.

service with a smile

Chris Gregory — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 03:40:00 GMT

Each year I try to take a skiing holiday with my wife. We have tried to make it an annual event for the past twenty five years. In latter times, instead of buying new skis every couple of years we have rented so that we can keep up to date with the technology without the investment. Not every ski rental company is the same however.

Fitting ski boots is a specialist task. Many ski rental companies carry a limited range of boots for hire and try to sqeeze their customers into "nearest fit" or "one size fits all" boots. The consequence of this is sore feet and shins at the end of the day, and a miserable skiing experience by the end of the week.

Imagine the pleasure therefore, when after a break of four years from visiting out favourite ski resort, we visited our usual ski rental company to be greeted by friendly knowlegeable staff who were able to find our old records on their computer system with the exact fit and setting details for boots and skis for my wife and myself. Nothing was too much trouble. Comfort was the key. Updates on new ski technology was offered and enquiries about whether skiing style or proficiency had changed. There was also an offer of ski or boot exhange if we were unhappy or wanted to try something different. Oh, and you could also pass your skis back in for any day you didn't want to ski and this would be deducted from your account.

You will realise of course that in ski resorts there are many companies trying to rent you equipment. We found this company ten years ago and keep going back to them. Why, because nothing is too much trouble. And they see hundreds of customers every day.

So the moral here is this:

Even though you may sell the same goods or services as your competitors, the thing that will differentiate your business above all others in your line of business is the experience you deliver to your customers. This experience doesn't just happen, it's designed to happen. It happens through how your place of business is presented, how your staff are trained to deal with customers and their knowlege about what they sell, and much, much more. If you haven't done so for a while, take a step back from your business and look at it from the outside, from the customer's perspective, and ask yourself, "would I like to shop here?"

And by the way, the $20 voucher they gave me for renting went towards a very nice pair of ski gloves from their retail store that cost more than I intended to spend!

Complaints are opportunities

Chris Gregory — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 05:30:00 GMT

Johnothan Farrington always has something pertinent to say on his blog Leadership Turn. Today's post is particularly worthy as it addresses an area that many businesses don't handle well - customer complaints.

The short summary at the end of the post reads as follows:

Complaints Are Opportunities:

Opportunities to do what?

Evaluate how well you are doing
Identify weak points in your system and processes and put them right
See situations from the customer’s point of view
Improve customer satisfaction
Create long-term loyalty – handling disgruntled customers well often leaves them feeling more positive about your organisation than before.

What system do you have for handling customer complaints in your business? Is it documented and easy to follow? Do you have a person in your business dedicated to customer care?

Remember, a customer is not just a single transaction. A customer is a lifetime of transactions if treated well. It costs less to keep an existing customer than it does to win a new one.

To read the complete article click on the following link:

http://www.leadershipturn.com/complaints-are-opportunities/

This is very sound advice for all business owners.

coaching is key

Chris Gregory — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 08:05:00 GMT

One of the great experiences of my life happened when a friend who owned a café created an Opera night. This night was made memorable by not only the food, wine and ambience that was created, but also the absolutely spine tingling magnificence of the singing.

One of the Opera singers that night was Simon O’Neill. At that time he was waiting tables to pay for his singing lessons. Today he is understudy to Placido Domingo at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Simon is due to perform for one night in Auckland and todays New Zealand Herald features an article on him http://www.nzherald.co.nz/topic/story.cfm?c_id=274&objectid=10456588.

In the article Simon talks about his conductor for his latest production Wagner’s Ring. Simon talks of his relationship with the conductor for this production, Antonio Pappano.

An excerpt from todays New Zealand Herald:

“It was Pappano's baton which guided O'Neill as Florestan two months ago.”

"He's terrifying," is the answer when asked what the high-flying conductor is like to work with, "but he is also so kind. He wants more than you feel you can give, which is a good thing ultimately. He wants more legato, more tone, more piano, more dolce, more depth, more declamation.

"He is with you all the time."

What is the relevance of this?

Well as coaches we aspire to be like Pappano, where we are a stand for our client’s success, and we are asking more of our clients than they believe they have to give.
We want more insights, more systemic thinking, more inspiration, more excellent execution, more learning and growth. Our role as coach is to set high standards and continue to demand that of our clients so that often they surprise themselves by producing results that they never thought possible. Our role is to “be with you all the time”.

It takes something to set the standards of Pappano. It is much easier to go with the “good enough” which is comfortable. To get to the highest level however, requires you to get out of your comfort zone and to push the boundaries.

those niggling extra charges

Chris Gregory — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 06:14:00 GMT

If there's one thing that always irritates me its those extra charges that businesses put on their invoices to cover costs that should already be part of their pricing. You know the sort of thing; statement charge, postage and packaging, cheque charge, and so on.

Think about it. If you add up all those charges that they collect from all their customers, you can get quite a healthy sum. And for what benefit to the customer?

Now I am as aware of the arguments offered for these charges as well as anyone. For my sins I spent thirty something years in accountancy. I also recognise that there are legitmate cases where these extra charge can be claimed, especially where the cost of delivery from store to customers is high, and the customer has the option of arranging their own pickup. But its those little extras that make me mad.

To me those small items are just part of the cost of running a business. The business should therefore include these costs in their calculations when prices are set.

In the case of the statement charge noted above, this was in addition to a healthy commission deduction for the collection of some rentals. And those cheque charges. I have seen customers offer a credit card instead, for which the cost to the business is higher and the charges are unable to passed on as an extra. The point here is this:

Each time a business annoys a customer by the addition of silly little extra charges which are for the benefit of the business only and not the customer, they are sending negative messages to customers that could cause them to take their business elsewhere. It might seem a minor thing to the business, but it can cause a major reaction with customers.

Just think, if a twentyfive cent cheque charge can send a customer elsewhere, how much in future customer lifetime sales value could be lost to the business?

time and effort saving ideas for busy people

Chris Gregory — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 11:19:00 GMT

One the first things I do each morning is to check for new blog posts for blogs that I subscribe to. One blog that I always get real value from is Carmine Coyote's Slow Leadership Blog. This post on Time and Effort Saving Ideas for Busy People particularly caught my attention.