Category Archives: management

TED 2012 Key Themes – Part Two

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Business

There were many business messages that I took away from TED this year, some intentional and some probably not.

One of the unintentional messages was that presented by a number of the science speakers.  These people surrounded themselves with bright, young things which helped to fuel their research engines and provide innovation and new perspectives.  We had a great experience last year when we hired a young turk to support a project we were doing.  She was just outstanding, and had a natural curiousity which shone through in her work.  Unfortunately, we couldn’t keep her – she is now in Australia doing her Phd.  But it was a useful experience for us in helping us to appreciate the perspective and value that smart new minds can add.

Jim Stengel, who was previously a Senior VP at Proctor and Gamble, talked about bringing our whole selves to work.  Much of the message was vaguely familiar but it was still a challenging talk when we turned it in on ourselves.  I’m not convinced that we articulate our ideal as strongly as we could nor that it has the inspiring resonance that we want to it to have.  Part of this, previously, has been the impact of working in a distributed team.  I think we have big opportunities this year to strengthen the clarity and impact of our ideal especially as we seem to be forming a central core in Wellington that ‘out of towners’ can move in and out of.  The other piece of food for thought was Jim’s assertion that when times are tough everyone will be judging your behaviour.  How true!  So, I think it’s important to hang on to habits and connections that during the good times may seem less necessary but by making them part of who I am in the bad times they will hopefully be there to draw upon.

I was looking forward to Atul Gawande’s talk having read and enjoyed his New Yorker piece recently.  He was talking about the world of medicine but much of the content has relevance for a technical business like ours.

Gawande stated that the best medicine is that which is less expensive, has fewer complications and gives the best results.  When he looked at the various different procedures, it was  the ones that looked the most like systems that were the most successful.  However, this is a challenge for professions and organisations that rely on smart minds.  In medicine the culture of autonomy and daring is a disaster and what is needed instead is a pitcrew!  This is especially true because the complexity we are dealing with today (in our business as well as medicine) requires group success.  We all need to be part of the pit crew now.

So, what makes a successful system?  Three things:

  1. Ability to recognise success and recognise failure
  2. Devise solutions – checklists – which have: (1) pause points to help catch problems (2) killer items…the key things that get forgotten (3) a mixture of obvious stuff and interesting stuff
  3. Ability to implement

So this really got me thinking.  We know we have good reference sites and strong advocates for our work.  But how good are we really?  Are we able to recognise when we have success and when we don’t?  One of the difficulties of running a business is that as things get busier it simply seems to be harder to get close to our clients and implementations.  Yet I think this is really important.  In a previous year we  invited to clients to come in and talk to us about how they thought we were doing.  This year I think we need to go out and visit them. This is particularly the case for our successes.  We tend to leave them alone because they are doing well with the consultants they are working with.  It would be great though to get some insights on how and why they are successful and whether there are ways to really build on this for greater success.

Technology / Social Media

Reid Hoffman talked about how the career escalator – get a good job, get a promotion, swap escalators, get another promotion etc. etc. – is no longer true.  He suggests that the fast moving interconnected world has replaced the career ladder.  I’m not sure that I agree with that fully.   I’m a pretty erratic user of tools like Facebook and LinkedIn and have certainly never really bothered to leverage them to make career related connections.  Maybe this is because we are in New Zealand and everyone kinda knows everyone anyway … or they are only a couple of steps removed.

However, the discussion of network identity – who you know shapes who you are – was fascinating as were the insights about how information flows within a network.

Sherry Turkle provided a contra view that was somewhat less positive about the role of technology and social media in our lives.  She said that technology supports 3 of our deepest fantasies:

  1. We can put our attention wherever we want
  2. We are heard
  3. We never had to be alone

With technology we move from “I feel xyz, so I’m going to connect with this person or people” to “I want to have a feeling so I’ll log in”  Freaky!

So, the takeway for me is that self-reflection and solitude remains important and that fiddling around on-line is not a substitute for these.

TED Live overall

Following two years of attending TED Active (Aspen then Palm Springs) we didn’t attend TED last  year… a little something like an earthquake got in the way.  But as soon as the first morning was over it was clear the value that TED gives us.  Through different perspectives on a wide range of topics both related and unrelated to what we do, we make the space to think about issues and opprtunities beyond ourselves.  The way that TED extends our thinking also helps us to think about ourselves and the work that we do with fresh eyes and we have had some of the best conversations so far this year as a result of our TED immersion.

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Great by Choice – at last Jim Collins is writing for the rest of us

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Jim Collins is well known for distilling large amounts of data about successful companies into catchy soundbites and key principles for running a good business.  Until now he has concentrated on hugely successful companies with billions of dollars of revenue and 100,000s of employees.

In Great by Choice, Collins looks at companies when they were starting out and faced particularly challenging circumstances.  At many stages in its life a company can be
fragile.  Collins focuses on how to protect and grow the company despite adverse events.   There is even a chapter on luck.

Several of the insights that seem like they could be useful for us are:

20 mile march – these are pre-set targets that essentially regulate behaviour.  If times are tough the organisation still needs to strive to meet its 20 mile target.  When times are easier the 20 mile target acts as a check on reckless behaviour and over-stretching.  I think the hardest challenge for us will be determining what an appropriate 20 mile march is.  Is it related to growth, profitability, sales, customer satisfaction, new products, new services or something else altogether?

Fire bullets, then cannonballs – trying small things first and then following up the ones that work with larger, big ticket efforts.  I think we do a little of this but not always in a conscious way.  The biggest handicap I think is that we don’t determine beforehand at what point (or at what results) a bullet should become a cannonball.  So we fire lots of bullets but sometimes pick up on the successful ones and sometimes not, depending on what else we have on the go at any given time.  Like all organisations, to launch a cannonball is a significant commitment and there is always an opportunity cost.  While we are preparing, priming and delivering our cannonball there are other things we are not doing.  We do have a really good internal reference point in the Polytech initiative that we ran and there are some learnings from this that we can apply to determining our bullet/cannonball strategy.

SMaC recipes  - these are the Specific, Methodical and Consistent ways in which a business is run.  The SMaC will tend to vary very little over the life of the organisation.  This sounds appealing but I think could be tricky for us.  My perception is that we like to be a little fluid and to have the freedom to do things if they interest us, not just if they fit in with a plan or ways of working.  On the other hand, maybe I am overplaying this somewhat and we flex and display fluidity within fairly consistent boundaries.  I’m not sure.  Fortunately, tucked away on page 188, Collins gives his list of workshop questions that he uses with executives to help them determine their own SMaC.  Time for a little self-diagnosis methinks.  I think I’ll be clearer about our SMaC or what is needed once I’ve applied the lens of these questions to our organisation.

Leading above the death line – this metaphor didn’t really work for me but the principle behind it resonates.  Collins calls this ‘Productive Paranoia’.  This is all about cash reserves, preparing for worst case situations, running scenarios and trials of
what can go wrong – building in the buffers and shock absorbers for dealing with unexpected events.  I think this is something we need to start doing and haven’t to date. This has really been a function of our evolving but steadily growing company.  When we were just a company of two or three, the worst case scenario was pretty easy to mitigate.  Now we are a company of 15, with hiring plans for 2012, things are a little more complex and negative impacts are less easy to cushion.  It is time for a different,
more cautious strategy here.

When reading the book too I got an uncomfortable flashback to one of Collins’ principles from a previous book.  This principle is that successful organisations celebrate success but also confront the brutal facts.  I think this is an area where organisationally we are weak. We tend to operate inside our own bubble a little with strong reinforcement from each other and our customers about how great we are.  We don’t often spend time with the ‘ones who got away’; we rarely review unsuccessful projects; and we don’t dwell, or
necessarily even share, the times when we lose bids.   Our internal news items are overwhelming positive. This makes us happy!  But doesn’t necessarily build the focus or care that we need and can make us too cavalier when we don’t shine.

Lots of food for thought in Great by Choice and some useful business planning and diagnostic tools.

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IBM’s Innovation Jam

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MIT  Sloan Management Review has just published an article on how IBM harnessed the ideas of its 150,000 employees and stakeholders to get its latest technologies to market.

Using bulletin boards and intranet pages, IBM opened discussion of innovation up to its entire global team. 

The findings of the research are that good ideas didn’t bubble up but rather that there was a huge number of ideas identified that then needed sifting and evaluating.  The authors identify the following lessons:

On the positive side:

·         Many people have important strategic ideas

·         Online conversation and sophisticated technology can provide a way for those ideas to impact on problems and generate value for a company

The limitations:

·         Few contributors built constructively on others comments in this online environment.

·         Analysts and managers were essential for taking the ideas generated and making them useful.

IBM’s Jam had a defined goal and process to help manage the movement of a brainstorming task from a real-time, real location exercise to one that took place 24/7 in an electronic environment. 

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Review: ‘Buying In’

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I’ve not given an awful lot of thought to brand despite owning my own business for the past 4 years.  I suppose I’ve thought that brand is something you need if you are a tube of toothpaste but not if you are a professional services firm.

Reading ‘Buying In’ by Rob Walker made me realise that we do have a brand and that there are specific reasons why people choose our brand and not another brand.  The more authentic we are, and the more we act in congruence with this brand the more some people will be attracted to it and others repelled.  We need to be telling a story to ourselves and to others.

Most importantly we need to realise that we are not so much competing against other brands as against other demands on peoples’ attention.

So, ‘Buying In’ got me thinking about brand.  Other than that it didn’t do much for me.  After 2 days of reasonably solid reading I’ve got 1.5 very small pages of big notes.  I liked the stories but couldn’t really generate many new understandings or ideas.

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Surprise and delight?

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Recently I’ve been on the wrong end of poor service from a couple of companies.  One is a professional services company, a legal firm, and the other has been providing some of our back-end accounts functions – primarily invoicing, payroll and debt collection.

So, this got me thinking…if I applied those things that I don’t like about the way these companies behave to my own organisation how do we measure up?

This was prompted also by Seth Godin’s entry Four Words in which he makes the point that if you fail to overpromise and under-deliver all of the marketing in the world isn’t going to save you.

Back to my legal firm…what went wrong?

·         Something that should have been reasonably straightforward became intensely complicated and way over the top for the scale of my business.  After four months, I brought my accountant into the picture who came up with a simple solution immediately that all parties agreed would work.

·         The four months!  In fact it has been even longer as we are now into May.  And we have only progressed at the speed we have due to constant prodding.

·         An under-powered junior assigned to my task.  Now, I can see the value of using juniors, especially if the saving is passed on to the customer.  But if it takes longer, and it uses more of my time, and the junior has to be poked and prodded then no thanks I’d rather pay the extra and get someone who knows what they’re doing.

And the accounting services firm:

·         Errors, errors, errors – again it cost us more in internal time checking, correcting and rechecking than it was taking us before we outsourced.

·         Constant reminders and things being missed.

What are the principles that should be distilled for us?  Here’s my top 5:

1.       Assign the right people to the job with the right level of competence. 

2.       Treat our customers’ business like our own – it has to matter to us and we have to get the detail right.

3.       Related to 2. Be proud of our customers.  If we can’t be proud of the work that our customers do and the things that they stand for then we shouldn’t be working with them.  Why not?  Because we won’t bring sufficient commitment and passion to the table.

4.       Our customers should never be chasing us up for deliverables.  That is not their job – it is our job to deliver on time when we say we will.

5.       Pay as much attention to ‘surprising and delighting’ our existing and past customers as we do to getting new customers.  Not just unexpectedly – to both us and them – but by asking ourselves for each assignment: “Is there anything extra here that I can give that would make a difference?”  We are not aiming for world domination, we’re not about grow, grow, grow.  We’re a team of specialists who pride ourselves in doing excellent work and making a contribution to New Zealand competing on the world stage.

Are we always going to get it right?  No…but certainly looking through the lens of these 5 principles will help us to get it right more often.

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More on email

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Oftentimes responding to email just gets me caught up in the respond-send-receive-respond-send loop.  If I’m undisciplined this can happen multiple times in the space of 30 minutes. 

Quick responses really speed up the email cycle.  Instead consider a batching approach to email – do all your email responses at a set time of day (or two or three if you really must).  I tend to live in Outlook because that’s where all my tasks are but switching it off while I complete a task makes me much more productive.

A similar approach is to batch responses.  With each email its possible to delay the delivery.  So, if you want to send bad news, controversial news or generally not prod someone who you think is prone to rapid responses then you can set the delivery for Monday morning instead of Friday afternoon (thanks Grant for this tip).  When you create your email, just click on the options menu (inside the actual email) and this is where you can choose the delivery date and time.

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Simple Email Management – Part 2

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A few weeks ago I described how I manage my email including my task management.  Here’s a few other tips.

I don’t have the reading pane turned on because I find it distracting. What does really work for me though is the autopreview which shows me the author, date and the first few lines of the message.  This means that I can quickly scan my emails to find the things that need to be dealt with urgently.

I find the autopreview is really useful when I’m on the road and working full days, often with evening dinner appointments.  This means that I can take 15 -30 minutes to deal with anything urgent leaving the rest (unopened but with me having a sense of what has come in) for later.

So, what about the rest?  I’ve found that one of the best uses of flying time is processing emails.  I usually get off a plane with any outstanding emails converted to tasks, deleted or with responses ready just waiting for me to get back online.

I’ve also recently started being more ruthless about what I move into my processed folder versus deleting.  I keep my deleted items for about 2-3 months before getting rid of them so I can feel pretty relaxed about ruthless deletion.  Consequently my processed emails are getting much smaller.

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Simple Email Management

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I was browsing email reminder systems at the weekend but none of them seemed like a huge improvement on what I already do.  Here’s my system which owes a lot to Michael Linenberger:  Total Workday Control and David Allen’s Getting Things Done.   My system is a huge oversimplification of these but works pretty well for me.

Firstly, I only run one email folder in addition to the standard default folders.  So, I have a folder called ‘Inbox’ into which new stuff arrives and a folder called ‘Processed’ where I put things once I have read them – unless they can be instantly deleted.

Why don’t I bother with more folders?  Simply put I’ve tried this many times and either my folders end up out of control; or I stop using them; or I can’t remember which folder I put an email into.  I usually know who the email was from, roughly when I got or what it was about.  So, sorting through my processed mail means I can get to the item within about 30 seconds.  I find that occasionally having to spend a little longer looking (and only very occasionally) is a small price to pay compared to having cascades of folders that I feel guilty if I’m not using.

So, what about the stuff in email that I want to do something with?  Most people leave things in their email inboxes because they know that they have to do something with them but they’re either not sure what or they don’t want to tackle it just yet.

I drag the email to my task area and create a new task with the due date being the date that I want to be reminded about it.  This sounds a little counter-intuitive but works really well.  So if I know I need to reply but don’t have time to do it now, I’ll drag it to my tasks and make the due date Thursday.  I then move the email into the ‘Processed’ folder and I’m done.

On the due date, the item appears on my list of ‘to dos’.   Using this system a few things naturally happen:

·        I can see where I’m procrastinating – some things have lingered on my ‘to do’ list for a couple of months.  Typically these are the things that I actually don’t want to do.

·        Over time the ‘long stayers’ on the ‘to do’ list become either irrelevant or urgent and can then get processed accordingly.

·        I get reminders about things I’ve set weeks or months in advance that would previously have been left to chance. These are often follow-ups.

I’m reasonably disciplined about using the priority settings.  I only tag as a priority something that MUST be done on a particular day.  Of course, some tasks when left too long suddenly become priorities and it is a simple matter to reset their dates to show this.

All in all, this system is extremely effective for me in keeping on top of email and on track of the things that I have to do.  I occasionally (very occasionally) use categories but only for projects that have a finite period in which to run.

I am also becoming more disciplined at storing business related emails on our SharePoint site.  Again, the processes here are very simple.  A drag and drop to the correct library using Colligo and the email is automatically filed with the addition of some simple metadata if I choose.  The best use I have found is actually with sent mail.  Here multiple documents sent in one email to a customer can all be registered with their email wrapper saving time describing each individually.

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Service experiences

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When I travel overseas I usually return to NZ feeling what a great job we do of customer service.  Not so this trip.

Absolutely awful start with Air New Zealand. The plane that we were scheduled to travel on had a defective slide so they could only take a certain number of passengers.  Lucky us – and good ol’ Air NZ we thought - because we were scheduled for an international connection they kept us on the flight.  We duly boarded and then spent 1.5 hours on the ground while they ‘trimmed’ the plane…worked out how much weight was safe to fly with.  They accomplished this by loading and unloading both passengers and freight.  What was truly appalling was how little anyone seemed to know about what was going on.  Once we were in the air our pilot apparently radioed multiple times to Auckland to find out about connecting flights but with no response.  Of course, we missed our flight and then had to endure multiple queues, including the most appalling display of ‘more than my jobs worth’ at the LA United Airline desk.

The great service we’ve been getting in San Franscisco has gone a long way to correcting my prejudice about Americans and service.  This included:

- the taxi driver who knew exactly where our hotel was and how to navigate the traffic to get there…one of the best runs ever

- the hotel who told us that the room that we had booked was not available for the first night and that they would put us in a different room for that one night for free

- the shop assistants, unfailingly polite and helpful.

Amazing!

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Verbal shortcuts

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We are all familiar with the concept of icons – visual cues that tell us what to do or what something means.

Occasionally I come across a word or a phrase that makes it into my vocabulary of verbal shortcuts.  This isn’t something that can be predicted in advance.  It just happens when the phrase fits and feels right.  Like a visual cue it conveys much more meaning than is apparent at first glance/listen.

Seth Godin’s book The Dip has provided us with a phrase that has been the most powerful verbal shortcut that we have used in our business in the past year.  This is not a book review – ‘The Dip’ has been out for a while and many have commented – nor is it a synopsis of the key ideas.  For a succinct summary take a look at Andy Wibbel’s mindmap of The Dip.

Rather this is about how a phrase, that captures the imagination and is simple but conveys much more, can help individuals and organisations accelerate their thinking.

We talk about ‘The Dip’ in relation to where we are on the chart.  Common questions for us are:

  • Is this helping us to be best in the world 
  • Is this making it harder for others to follow – Seth suggests finding a field with a steep dip and then making it through.  Things worth doing have a dip
  • Is this something we should quit – yes, sometimes quitting can be the behaviour of champions.  The key is not to quit when its hard (and emotions and challenges are both running high) but rather to know when to quit before the fact and then to apply that criteria when the pressure comes on – this tells us whether to quit or whether this is part of the dip and we need to persevere.

So, in our business when we say The Dip we’re asking all three questions and accelerating the speed at which we can get to the answers.

Another phrase that we use a lot is Big Rocks. I’ve got no idea who initially coined this phrase but was stunned recently when a group of people I was working with hadn’t heard of it.  Big rocks refers to getting your priorities in place first and then dealing with the other incidentals (the pebbles and the sand) that come up during the course of a week or a month or whatever time period you are considering.  Zen Habits has a useful piece about Big Rocks.  Of course, in my situation the verbal shortcut wasn’t because no-one else had a frame of reference for it so I had to start explaining about priorities and rocks and sand and of course the moment was lost!  Wise to this, I next used the phrase ‘big rocks’ in a training and preceeded it with a volunteer from the audience filling a beaker with rocks, pebbles and sand.

Using ‘big rocks’ in our business discussion helps us shift the focus quickly and smoothly to priorities.

What verbal shortcuts do you use?  Where have they originated from?

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