Apr 12, 2012 | Management
We all do stuff in business every day, and largely assume that it needs to be done because it is in the budget. In other words, we are making investment decisions at a micro level simply because there is an institutional requirement to consume the resource.
Rather than just proceeding as the plan says we should, we should be asking ourselves every day if the investment at any level we are about to make is strategically the right thing to be doing, will it enhance the longevity of the enterprise, and the manner in which it contributes to all stakeholders.
It seems to me that often activities of planning and delivering are almost mutually exclusive. A senior bunch does the planning, then hands the completed plan on to others to deliver.
All the analysis in the world will not substitute for getting on and doing things, analysis is too often an excuse for procrastination, and the fear of being wrong. Then when the competition gets in first, the too frequent reaction is to be second, at a discount in the hope of gaining the share squandered by indecision.
Apr 10, 2012 | Management, Personal Rant, Uncategorized
I kept a diary of how I spent my time recently, and noted a number of things I suspected, but did not have the “data” such as it was.
- Being “connected” had reduced my productivity significantly. My concentration was broken when emails came in, seemingly demanding just a look, people ringing, texting, just wanting an immediate response/decision irrespective of my current load, and capacity to appropriately consider the response.
- The discipline of the “to do” list had been destroyed. As a young bloke, I did a list for the next day, last thing every night. That list offered a priority guide, time allocation, a memory prompt, and a record of activity each day. Whilst like most plans it was a point from which to depart, it still gave structure to my day, week, and priorities. That discipline has effectively gone in the welter of competing tasks surfaced by connectivity.
- My “head-time” had been destroyed. In the dim, dark, unconnected past, I had time to consider options, seek considered input, and just allow a situation to stew in my brain over a period, which often led to options not consciously in the mix at the outset. This happened as I walked at lunch-time, sat in traffic, over the weekend, and just having a casual chat with colleagues whose council may have added a perspective. All that valuable head-time is gone, driven away by the access and immediacy of the devices in my pocket, and the expectation of others that an immediate response is mandatory.
Years ago, a mentor urged me to distinguish between the urgent but not important, and the important but not urgent, and act accordingly. Being connected has given the urgent a huge increase in leverage at the expense of the important, and it is taking a real effort to redress the imbalance.
I have reverted to a to do list that structures my day, turn off all devices in the middle of the day and take a hobble around the block and talk to myself or a colleague, and set out to do the most important thing on my list first thing in the day. This added discipline is proving to be much harder than I thought, but useful. My personal productivity seems to have lifted, as has my satisfaction with the tasks completed every day.
Apr 3, 2012 | Leadership, Management, Small business, Strategy
A small manufacturing business I work with, operating in a domain now dominated by a few huge retailers, and cheap imported products, is facing a dilemma.
Three key people are leaving at pretty much the same time, for different reasons, just with difficult co-incident timing. This is a small business, there is no “bench” of executives who have been mentored, trained, and nurtured so that they can step in at short notice, no such luxury in an SME to whom every dollar of cashflow is critical to survival .
The purpose for this business to exist is to showcase the great products coming from Australia’s food basket, the Riverina, this is what makes them different, and gives all stakeholders, customers, suppliers, employees, and those who fund the business, a reason to keep on supporting it through the current challenges.
It seems that the opportunity presented by this sudden and unwelcome personnel churn is to start again, almost from scratch, to rebuild the processes, and renew the sense of shared purpose amongst the employees. That task however, is a bit like getting to the top of a sand-hill in a desert, and seeing just another sand-hill rather than the expected oasis.
The key distinction between leaders and managers is that leaders find the grit to climb this extra sand-hill, ways to bridge the gaps between peoples differing experience, expertise, and expectations, so that there is a shared purpose that is larger than an individual. Leaders are not leaders because they are always right, but because they listen, learn, and enable others to do the same. That is the opportunity facing my small client, to be a leader, and to remain one of the very few Australian owned food manufacturing businesses left.
Mar 28, 2012 | Leadership, Management
“Politics” is a dirty corporate word, but “Organisational Dynamics” appears to be OK, and is gaining traction as a cliché.
What is the difference?
Both describe the process of accumulating the wherewithal to exercise influence, and dictate outcomes.
It is a fact of life that those who have control of resources, the money, people, and information, have the power to deliver should they have the intellectual and personal drive to do so, have at some point exercised political power in some form.
We have all seen the individual with organisational power but who could not tie his/her shoelaces without help, and the one who with little formal power seems to be able to get stuff done. Both find ways to influence outcomes using the same resources in differing ways, differentiated only by the innate capabilities of the individual.
Mar 23, 2012 | Management, Personal Rant
Not the latest desperate revenue raising measure from a proliferate government, but the cost to stakeholders of the multiple levels of management that infest most large organisations, but which add no direct value.
Management manages, it manages those underneath them, successive levels of filtering, shaping, compromising, and dissembling of information between the coal face and the top.
I recently completed an assignment for a large organisation and realised early on that the job was not to consider the problem presented in a new light, to apply a new set of eyes and experiences to it, but to present to senior management a set of ideas that had in the past not got through the filtering process, and this assignment was a last ditch effort by a committed middle management to question the status quo.
This may be a legitimate management tactic, a way to progress an idea, but it is hugely wasteful. In this case, the conclusion was obvious to all but those who finally allocated the resources, and who owed their exalted positions to the continuance of the status quo. It was a redistribution of resources from shareholders to a bloated senior management without an original idea in 20 years, and to me, a grateful consultant.
Such redistributions in the hands of governments are called a “Tax”, why should it be any different in business?.
Mar 19, 2012 | Management, Operations
It takes discipline to concentrate on the process, and to let the outcome take care of itself, recognising that there will be stumbles along the way, but in the long run, the results will come when the process is optimised.
Business is filled with sporting analogies, very useful in making a simple point, so here are two more that make my point.
- Manly rugby league is seemingly currently having a tough time. Defending premiers, their coach left for the enemy under unsettling circumstances, and now their stars are being wooed to go elsewhere, after premierships in 2011, and 2008, and being runners up in 2007. A winning team is slowly being broken up. If you recall, several of their stars left after the 2008 premiership, and again in 2009 when they failed to do much, “what are they going to do for a half-back” the pundits cried 2 years ago. Well up stepped a young bloke to whom they paid relative peanuts, and turned it all around, and now wants to be paid his worth. Their team is packed full of rep players, many of whom have come through the ranks, if not from Manly, then elsewhere, and had their potential realised by the processes at Manly. This does not happen by accident, it is the result of the combined brainpower of the management and coaching staff. They have in place a set of processes, talent selection and management, injury management, players skills, team cohesion on the field and management of the players as individuals. All this comes together on the field, and is extremely hard to replicate in total, it is the bundle of processes that drives the results over time. It remains to be seen if Manly can continue when several of the key brains in building and improving these processes have left, but the playing roster is, for the moment, unchanged.
- Some years ago I watched the British Open on TV with my sage old Dad, (2005 I think) the one Tiger Woods blitzed by 5 shots, and seemed unstoppable. It was noticeable that he often hit off the tee with an iron when the others in his group all used woods, even on some of the long holes. This seemed incongruous to me, but obviously worked. Dad explained it by asking the objective of golf:
“Obviously, to get a low score I responded”
“How do you do that”?
“Get as close to the hole as possible, then sink it” I said, (or something like that)
“Is a long first shot always necessary”?
By then the penny was slowly dropping. Clearly not, the best shot is the one that makes the next one easier, and contributes the most to the outcome, a low score on the hole.
Dad reckoned Woods mentally put himself standing at the flag, and worked out his shots backwards, deciding where each shot should end up to make the next one easier, and more certain, and then selecting the appropriate club. By concentrating on improving the golfing equivalent of the interdependent processes required to get a low score, the low scores did come, more often than his opposition.
Pity he did not apply the same discipline to his life off the course, and I resist the temptation to pun on “score”.
