“…Life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers…We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn’t it?”

Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts

I ventured out today. Booked a ticket to the Storyline conference. We were able to grab a group of 5 awesome guys to head out to Portland together.

Have you ventured out recently?

Post from: Joe Budde Jr. More about business operations and Joe can be found at his blog.

Let’s Venture Out: Storyline Conference

Lately I’ve been merging my drive for personal success with the success of my organization.  If I’m honest, it hasn’t been working.  It is wrong of me to align the two – because when I do, I find myself frustrated. But if I can be focused on the success of the organization and her ability to achieve her goals, when we achieve them, I can be certain the personal success will follow.  So its about time to think about how we can recognize it and be more intentional about combating.

So after thinking about this all week, I wondered what questions will help me determine if my drive is healthy.  Thankfully,  Michael Hyatt posted two questions that leaders should ask to determine what is driving them:

1. Am I using my strengths for the good of the project or the organization, or am I mainly seeking affirmation from outside sources like my boss or peers?
2. What is my true motivation for working on this project? Is it for the sake of others and the bigger picture or just to elevate my own status?

Now, I’m off to act on them.  My goal is to spend the day for the sake of others and the bigger picture.  Tomorrow, I’ll wake up and try again.  It’ll take training, but the great thing is that we can choose to be teachable.

Today, I’m choosing to be taught.  What about you? How would you answer these questions?

Post from: Joe Budde Jr. More about business operations and Joe can be found at his blog.

Should we be Driven by Personal or Organizational Success?

Many times we find ourselves measuring success with a singular static key performance indicator like profits, margins or revenues. But, there are other measurements that can inform us of our directional progress. These directional measurements ensure we are headed the right direction.

So how can directional trend variables help more than static variables? Well, for me, knowing YoY change of balance sheet items are much more valuable than knowing a snap-shot of a company’s liabilities, and beyond that it is even more helpful to know how that liability load compares to its shareholder equity.

So why do we continue to measure our success with static measures? It may be fun to know how many Starbucks stores there are (17,009 in 2010) or the average revenue per store, but I’d rather know the percentage of those stores that have revenues that are higher than their three year averages. This type of measure helps us understand the direction of the stores – growing or shrinking.

Another effective dynamic measurement is to apply a cohort analysis to examine groups trends. Analyze groups of customers, stores or members in any grouping to show how different groupings compare.

While it may be a bit NSFW, OkCupid, an online dating site, uses its massive profile database to chart and graph a wonderfully told story on its blog, OkTrends. However un-sexy our own data may be, there are some lessons to be learned from how they use dynamic measures and cohort anaylsis to tell stories.

The ability to build measureable triggers in our business processes is paramount to building businesses that can be measured directionally and further support our ability to achieve our objectives. Whether we choose an outcome measure or a process measure. The difference between these two types of measurement points are for another day.

Post from: Joe Budde Jr. More about business operations and Joe can be found at his blog.

Directional vs. Static Key Performance Indicators

Just read a great piece on the difference between good and bad procrastination by Paul Graham and it spoke directly to me.

You can’t look a big problem too directly in the eye. You have to approach it somewhat obliquely. But you have to adjust the angle just right: you have to be facing the big problem directly enough that you catch some of the excitement radiating from it, but not so much that it paralyzes you. You can tighten the angle once you get going, just as a sailboat can sail closer to the wind once it gets underway. [Emphasis mine]

Just a bit of a Thursday attitude change toward projects.

Post from: Joe Budde Jr. More about business operations and Joe can be found at his blog.

Catch it, but dont be Paralyzed

Picture via cliff1066 cc and flickr

“Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable”
- President Dwight D. Eisenhower

The more I experience in business and leadership, the more I realize that planning is both worthless and invaluable.  Dwight D. Eisenhower said it best:  ”In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”  While I don’t believe president Eisenhower is saying we shouldn’t bother planning, I do believe the statement does lend itself to viewing planning as a means of helping a team to learn the information necessary to execute and frequently adjust a project’s course.

President Eisenhower has created intentional gray space to allow his team to plan and adjust accordingly as seen fit as new information is gathered.  This shouldn’t mean that project managers outline every second and the minutia of a product.  I don’t think I am the only one that thinks my bathroom breaks should not be scheduled on a gantt chart!

As leaders we should build opportunities into projects that allow us to adjust course and allow our teams to innovate.  But that also does not mean we should allow operations to continue as if there is no plan.  Highlighting the large tasks and general outlines of tasks will help to reduce the ambiguity of a project and enable higher levels of innovation.  These opposing forces of rigidity and open space certainly creates a gray space  between planning activity that is seemingly useless and activity that matters.

Because of reasonable planning exercises, I have found myself more prepared to do battle and able to accomplish more in a shorter amount of time.

I’ve found three areas where I can embrace planning gray areas:
1. Vetting Financial plans:  Back of the napkin analysis is just as good as weeks worth of spreadsheet work, especially when we arrive at about the same result.
2. Long and medium term project plan development:  Embracing the gray areas while developing project plans allows for the insertion of relationship building and intention determination.
3. Assessing:  Allowing gray space in assessment of a new project, plan or measurable action allows for the creation of measures that creatively help to determine the next steps of the project.

The real trick is not to run to or from planning, but to utilize it in a way that advances the cause to a place where people agree on the vision, understand the large steps along the way and understand they have space to be creative.  Of course none of this can happen without mutual trust, both in the leader and from the leader. If the trust doesn’t exist, see Ben’s awesome post on how to handle office politics.

When leaders embrace the planning gray spaces, they can only continue to advance and innovate.

Post from: Joe Budde Jr. More about business operations and Joe can be found at his blog.

Planning: Value in the Gray Space

Over the past three months I have been non-stop learning!  From reading books and I’ve taken much of my readings from the past three months and compiled what I have found to be the four characteristics great leaders demonstrate daily:

1. Leaders have strong opinions but weak defenses

Bob Sutton author of No Assholes Rule, gives a great example of how leaders opinions can set organizational culture.  In a post he describes how Andy Grove’s approach to leadership pushes three points that can be summed up with the following phrase, “Leaders have strong opinions but weak defenses.”  He says leaders explore and doubt in private, espouse self-fulfilling confidence in public and always seek to understand and adapt.

2. Leaders seek understanding

Are we able to express our ideas clearly and most importantly can we actively listen? Leaders seek understanding through civil dialogue. In Donald Miller’s post on civil dialogue, he lists his five principles of civil dialogue that take leaders conversations to the next level:

1. Truth is not My Truth, it’s Just Truth
2. Methodology is Part of the Message
3. Without a Loving Heart, I am Like a Clanging Cymbal
4. The Other Person has Sovereignty
5. I Could be Wrong

3. Leaders consider business in their current state, not in its ideal state.

Seth Levine calls it “Your reality filter,” but it is just calling a spade a spade.  Ambitions, passion and excitement tend to cloud sound judgments on today’s decisions.  Put those feelings aside to make decisions based on data.  This practice of relying on data that describes the current state evidence based management.  Its the theory where we commit , “to finding and using the best theory and data available at the time to make decisions.”  Note it does not say feelings, or goal state.  When my feelings over run my logical ability to make a decision, I run into issues.  True leaders focus on the current reality and not the idealistic view of their business.

4. Leaders understand enough of each part of the whole so their ideas can have sex.

British author, Matt Ridley calls this “the mating of ideas.”  Ridley’s recent TED talk explained how ideas over the centuries have built upon traded with to enable an explosion over the past 100 years of standard of living.  He explains that people take their ideas or products and combine with or trade for other products creating new ideas or products.  His point is that not a single human knows how to make a mouse – drilling for oil to make the plastic, growing coffee for the rigger making the oil.  What is valuable here is that leaders can dive into details in a cross-functional way yet zoom out to make those details have sex and create value.

Leadership is an infinite resource, but finite in execution.  There are plenty of folks who know about these leadership characteristics, but very few who are able to implement them.  At the end of the day, we all ask ourselves the same question, am I implementing leadership characteristics in my life?

Post from: Joe Budde Jr. More about business operations and Joe can be found at his blog.

Four Characteristics of Great Leaders

We all clamor for professional development at some point in our careers, asking for trips, conferences, extra projects, but here are six of the most valuable minutes we will ever spend on our professional careers.  The video’s below teach us how to iron a shirt and shine shoes in less than three minutes each!

How to Iron a Shirt

How to Shine Shoes

Via the always stylish and entertaining men’s fashion writer Kenyatte.

Post from: Joe Budde Jr. More about business operations and Joe can be found at his blog.

Business Dress 101: How to Shine Shoes and Iron Shirts

Netflix spends considerable effort to maintain a culture of values congruence.  By aligning employees actions with their values, Netflix can build what I think is the most effective competitive advantage, a culture of trust.   Its values are action oriented and drive performance management and talent management across the company.

This Netflix slide deck explains how they maintain their culture.  After reading it several months ago, I have recommended it to several friends and colleagues. I didn’t want my faithful readers to miss the benefits, so I have embedded the slides below.

How different would the world be if all employers/managers were this focused on driving results from its teams?

Post from: Joe Budde Jr. More about business operations and Joe can be found at his blog.

Netflix Continues a Culture of Values Congruence

I love where I work.  Daily, the conversations are challenging, broadening and focused on achieving impressive goals.  As a non-profit, my organization is always looking to take its operations to the next level, especially in terms of engagement with our constituents.  The mission and vision are what drive the passion for so many of my colleagues and volunteers.  Difficult part about it is driving engagement via conversation.  Just yesterday my co-worker sent an email to a few of us at the office helping us tilt our mission and vision toward the conversation and our collective ability to drive it. Check out his amazing thoughts:

Guest Post adapted from an email by Kye Hittle

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You might remember that we threw out the idea of having the entire staff and talented volunteers become “compelling content producers” by way of blog, wiki, etc. That sounds very pie-in-the-sky, but it isn’t and it could offer a part of the solution to one of the immediate problems that we face in the comm arena (content creation). So, I thought maybe a tangible example that hits close to home for you might help.

Imagine you read this article (that came to me via twitter btw) which was just published today. You don’t have to actually read it, the exec summary is that charities often inflate their gifts-in-kind number to get a better rating on charity watchdog websites because it pushes down their cost of fundraising percentage.

The first thing you think is “wow, this reminds me why we are so conservative in our policies and, ya know, there really are some shadeballs out there.” And then “gosh, I hope our donors don’t think WE are like that.”

But, WAIT, how DO they know that we are any different? None of those policies are posted online. We don’t publish them in the annual report. (And even if we did who would ever read boring crap like that anyway?) We kill ourselves adhering to these policies and I betcha that, if surveyed, a bunch of our constituents just assume we are like the rest!  Ugh, we might as well play the game and get the better rating – sure would make our job a lot easier!

That’s not how our organization does things, however. So, you write a blog entry on the website blog linking to the article and going down how our policy handles each point Kathy Kristof levels against us nonprofits. Then you click Post and its done – 15 minutes. Now there’s no magic here – that doesn’t mean every potential donor automatically knows that we are above such shenanigans, but it does IMMEDIATELY put our position out there for the entire world (not just people we have contact info for, mind you, but anyone searching or stumbling across this topic). On top of that, the blog model invites a conversation, so people can say how much they appreciate our approach (sing our praises to the rest of the world for us) or ask further questions (allowing additional education we didn’t even anticipate was needed) or throw out a stupid and incorrect statement (that we can then correct in a public forum cuz you know if one thinks it, there’s a ton more that do too).

Try doing that with a magazine article, annual report or letter – or even a one-on-one phone call with someone that does care enough to call in and get the skinny. The reach would be far less and its a lot harder to refer to in the future when the question comes up again. Plus, when you need content for Foundation Flash or the Foundation e-newsletter, just throw in a blurb and link to your blog post for those that have interest (or didn’t but do now that you’ve brought it up for them). I could go on-and-on about the potential impact of that one simple post, but hopefully that begins to paint a picture.

That’s how it should work. You can probably imagine how this would play out for pretty much any staffer or key volunteer (there would be a ton of different scenarios). I really like thinking of the online content of an organization as its “resume.” Right now ours looks pretty thin and short of hiring someone(s) to beef it up, we’ll remain that way, unless we consider what new media offers.

This is one of the only tech-powered strategies that I would even consider at this early stage if I was in your shoes. Of course start small. What’s the cost? Staff/volunteer training, blog software (free, but there’s some setup), a shared strategy for what messages need to be advanced, strategy on one blog vs multiple. Are we ready for all that now? Probably not, but I’d say it should be in the consideration hopper. It just occurred that we can talk tools or theory, but a story would most likely be the best educator – hope it helped. Come hang out with Joe and I for an hour in that world and we’ll really blow your mind!

-Kye

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Now, the theme of this post is the response from YOU and the ensuing conversation, so both Kye and I would love to see your thoughts on this.  Please leave a comment and let us know what you think of this example and the start of a new more conversational and listening focused strategy.

Post from: Joe Budde Jr. More about business operations and Joe can be found at his blog.

Yet Another Futile Attempt to Explain Social Media for Non Profits

via dklimke on flickr

Whether your community is your co-workers, employees, or the group of people you interact with online, success is directly correlated to the strategy in place to achieve engagement.

At school teachers give you a syllabus.  They provide the “what to do” to learn what you need to.  In the real world, we must create our own syllabuses to drive results.  Here is the syllabus I follow to get results with my communities:

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1. Have a Plan – Put the Who, What, Where, When, Why and How on paper.  Make the Why answer drive the other answers.  The Why is the keystone for the entire plan.  Crafting a great How based on a community focused why is what makes marketing authentic.
2. Execute/Engage – Don’t just talk about it!  Go do it!
3. Listen – Put your ear to the router.  Put yourself in the feedback loop so you can actually hear the positive and negative conversations about your engagement. And don’t forget to ask for feedback as well!  People want you to improve!
4. Adjust – Take the feedback seriously.  Go back to your plan and make changes to ensure your plan aligns to your goals and the feedback you received.  Communicate this feedback loop to the community.  Create a conversation about the feedback and start the changes to the plan, accept your shortcomings publicly: truth and understanding is the foundation of healthy relationships.
5. Execute/Engage – When we adjust our actions, it is easy to feel like efforts to engage the community have failed.  Feelings of failure often lead to quitting.  DON’T DO IT! If we listen and care about our new relationships, we can care enough to improve.

Post from: Joe Budde Jr. More about business operations and Joe can be found at his blog.

Strategy to Engage a Community