MBA on the Go
MBA on the Go Nicholas Bate
Contents
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Quick reference
About the Author
Strive to Be Different oney: Make It and M Measure It People Not (Just) Metrics E r, Wake Up, Get Real, Take Action: Brilliant at the Basics of Business aizen: Constant, K Never-ending Improvement The Plan
What will this book do for you? The answer to almost any business challenge you might have – now or in the future – is embedded somewhere in the modern MBA. The Masters in Business Administration is comprehensive, well-researched and providing you choose the course carefully, stimulating. Yes, it’s all in there: pricing, competitiveness and motivation; supply chain, strategy and ethics; macro- and microeconomics and psychometrics. The facts, the models and the implications. The only trouble – the big trouble – is it takes time, it takes money and sometimes it’s truly difficult to see the wood for the trees or the strategy you really seek for your business because of the matrices, layered pyramids and interlinked circles you’ll be shown. Having taught as a visiting lecturer on one of Europe’s leading MBA proÂ�grammes for six years I soon realized there was a need for something which did allow the wood to be seen for the trees and the correct strategy not to be lost in a swamp of essays, assignments and team work. Plus one or two missing sections, such as how to sell, needed to be addressed. I consult internationally and work with organizations such as Microsoft, the BBC, RSA and Oxfam. In MBA On the Go, tried and tested with many of those organizations, you’ll get the essential thinking, the critical models and the hard-won wisdom, which will make your business fitter and stronger. Quickly. It will remind. It will kick-start. It will educate.
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I
’ve structured this guide to be high value and fast and easy to implement. The majority of each section is structured as follows:
1. The Concept. I’ll explain the concept (e.g., “be different”) in a paragraph or two. At the end of this section you will understand what the concept is and why it is important. 2. Consequences. I’ll then explain what that means for you and your organization. The good, the bad and the ugly. 3. Actions. Critically, I will then move to the actions you might consider to protect your organization from competition, economic challenges and intrusions on profitability. 4. Specific Tools/Concepts Plus Cautions. Then reveÂ�aled are the practical tools to use at your off-site or awayday or brainstorms or planning meetings as you detail and implement these actions. And one or two cautions concerning their unskilled or even over-zealous use. 5. Case Study. And then to bring it all together a micro case study, which will illustrate in full relief the points made. What’s the best way to approach the material? It’s concentrated with “guaranteed no padding” so read a section in a sitting and then consider what that means
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for you, your team and your business. Once you have read all the sections and summarized your own thinking, then perhaps run an off-site. Take your selfgenerated checklist and create a 12-month action plan for the steps you need to take to innovate, develop skill sets and revitalize that which you know but had forgotten. There’s particular help with this process in Section 6. Work the plan and then re-start the whole process again in 12 months’ time. Importantly, they will not just address thinking and knowledge but also that vital implementation.
A note on symbols The material is designed to be immediate and ready to go and in the text you will occasionally see three symbols. It is perfectly possible to ignore the symbols but if used they can bring another layer of depth to the material: •
The * symbol – This means that there is a fuller explanation of a generally intuitively understood word in the Quick Reference section at the back of the book e.g., segmentation*. Many readers will understand that “segmentation” is a formal term and they do not need further explanation. But some might want to clarify what it means: the option is yours without disturbing the flow.
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The + symbol – This means that we will build on this idea in a separate (identified) section and will not pursue it any further at this point. Thus
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motivation+(3) means more on motivation in Section 3. You could follow the connection to the referenced section if that is crucial to you. Or simply wait until you get to it in the natural flow of your reading. •
The ! symbol – This symbol will take you to the tools part where you will find the detail you need, if you need it, without disturbing the big picture of the narrative. Thus SWOT!
There are five key sections – the Critical Handful – that in turn will be introduced, expanded and turned into working business tactics: 1. Strive to Be Different 2. Money: Make It and Measure It 3. People Not (Just) Metrics 4. Er, Wake Up, Get Real, Take Action: Brilliant at the Basics of Business 5. Kaizen: Constant, Never-ending Improvement 6. The Plan The key is to get good at working on and developing your business not just running around in your business.
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This book isn’t a full MBA. Nothing like it: that’s clear and obvious. It’s better than that: it will give you the essential thinking, insight, stimulus and planning tools to create a plan to reinvent your business in a matter of hours. What you do after that is what distinguishes the truly great businesses.
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Strive to Be Different
The Concept
Y
our organization must be different compared to your competitors for three reasons. Firstly, being different makes it easier to become the natural choice in your chosen market*. Secondly, if you are different (if you are not a commodity*) then you will be able to defend your price much more easily and maximize profitability+(2). And thirdly, if you are different, attractive to customers, able to defend your price and thus able to maintain profitability, you will be a popular company to work for and hence able to attract the best employees.
The best employees will be knowledgeable, skilled and mo tivated+(3) and with them you can build and maintain a world-class organization. And a world-class organiza tion will be more than aware that staying different is critical to both surviving and thriving. A success cycle+(5) has been created. (One small point: it is of course assumed that the difference you are offering is wanted by the target market. Obvious but worth stating; many an entrepreneur has fallen foul of
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his/her own dreams, which were not shared by a buying customer. Or not by enough of them anyway, e.g., Sinclair*.)
Consequences There are three ways in which you can create difference; ideally you will do so using all three ways and then each will leverage* the other. You can be different through your company, e.g., you have an office in China to serve the local market but your competitors do not. You can be different through your solutions, e.g., all of your solutions are managed in-house allowing the most rapid of bug fixes. And you can be different through your people, e.g., their sheer professionalism and enthusiasm and passion for your product. Your goal is to be improving all three areas, kaizen*, of course: the Japanese word for constant, never-ending improvement.
Actions 1. Improve your company.╇ There are two major ways you might improve your company. One is bottom up: to simply ask your current or potential customers what they would like, what can you do for them? This is certainly a useful if not vital source of data but it does need to be remembered that customers often do not know what they want (an example being markets/products which are appar ently created from nowhere, such as Schultz and
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Starbucks or Jobs and the iPad) and/or they say they would like something (better service in banking) but are not always willing to pay for such a service (How much are you charging me to run my account?). An alternative, or additional, approach is bottom down and this is to create needs, to create desire essentially for ways of making the customer’s life easier that they had not yet considered (e.g., the 3M yellow sticky notepad). A useful tool to help your internal discussions and analysis for both bottom up and top down analysis is the SWOT! methodology*: your internal strengths and weak ness; your external opportunities and threats. It is often suggested that one result of such sessions should be defining the organization’s mission, vision, and values. Perhaps. These might well be explored but can often result in meaningless plaques on a reception room wall, satisfying nothing more than a PowerPoint slide at a kick-off conference. Far better is to articulate your story! – what are you about as an organization? A story is something a customer can relate to (or not). A story is something that can inspire your people (or not). 2. Improve our solutions.╇ Once we are clear on our story we can provide solutions. And solutions that are different and constantly improving. This we do by being innovative. Innovation! might be defined as creativity + action. Creativity realizes potential new products and action brings them to market. Creativity in itself can be fun i.e. covering the board room wall with ideas but so often little is truly done with those efforts. That is where
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action! is vital. A particular challenge is that these innovation skills can appear to be mutually exclusive. Thus creativity! is free-thinking, open ended and accepts all; judgement is avoided. Project Management or PM! needs definition, closure and action; ultimately judgement is essential. Such dif ferent skill sets tend to expose the quality of our teamwork+(3). 3. Improve your people.╇ Clearly for your solutions to be at their best, your people must not just under stand the story but also live and breathe it on a daily basis. They need training so that they can deliver the story. And, most importantly, be moti vated to deliver the story. An idea we will explore further is that established by Maslow+(3) who identified that motivation is a complex mix of fun damentals without which a person often seems demotivated, the so-called hygiene factors+(3). And fundamental to getting the best out of a person is allowing them to grow to become the best version of themselves: the more you can get an individual to feel that his/her goals are aligned with the organ ization’s goals the more motivated they are likely to be. Read my publication, Professionalism 101, (ISBN: 9780956784841) for immediate ideas on what makes for a truly professional workforce.
Specific Tools/Concepts Plus Cautions 1. Difference Pie. Imagine a pie. Imagine it divided into three slices, three segments. One is labelled
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your company, one your solution(s) and one your people. That’s the image to keep in mind, to share with your people and to ensure that they under stand: which bit of the pie do they make special? Create and maintain the best difference pie that you can. Never let any slice become stale and having to be sold on price+(2) alone. 2. Story. We all love stories. Stories are memorable, stories have flow and stories beg us to want an ending. You must ensure that you have a story (and perhaps in multiple markets and/or multiple prod ucts, different stories) and that it is simple and engaging. And that each and every one of your people know how they contribute to that story and are proud of it. Thus we do not produce security software, we are in the business of “ensuring senior leaders can sleep at night knowing their data is secure from prying eyes”. 3. Awayday. Whether it is a full day or a half day is not crucial. However, anything less that four hours is not likely to get those attending into “the zone” of deep thinking from whence the breakthroughs are made. An awayday is designed to discuss the topics which will be covered in MBA On The Go in particular the Critical Handful. It is not designed to discuss the month’s sales figures nor why a project is failing: there should be different forums for those. It is to stretch the planning horizon; it is to do something today to help the long-term tomorrow; it is to create and keep difference, refine and strengthen the story and ensure everything
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happening in the business is supporting the story. Much more on this in section 6. 4. Action. Remember: a decision is not a decision until action has been taken. Decisions are easy “we must improve customer service”. A great intent: but what are the immediate actions that will make that happen? And those actions need to be explicit not implicit. Not “get some customer data” (implicit and vague). But “talk to 500 customers over the next two days and ask them on a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is dire and 10 is amazing, how would they would rate our customer service?” (explicit and measurable). 5. Innovation is the best of creative thinking turned to a practical use. It requires that creative thinking must be possible and that creative thinking must be harnessed through robust project management. An organization will become more innovative if: • it gives time to the process; • it works on developing the skill of creativity; • it refines the process by which creativity output is captured and explored through formal project management or PM. 6. Creativity. It is worth remembering that we tend to be pattern-seeking animals. Pattern-seeking? Yes; same old, same old, same old way. Thus it IS often tempting to copy your competitors, as after all they are currently stealing your business, but that approach has been done. The breakthrough will come when you leap your competitors. It is
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much more left-brain thinking. Yes – it is “thinking outside the box”. 7. PM. This is more right-brain thinking. It is the isolation of the action, the explicit action, and an owner and a milestone. And once that simple plan of action/owner/milestone has been captured, monitoring and keeping to plan. It is knowing where the box is, keeping it fully maintained and updated. 8. SWOT. The SWOT tool is well known and often used. It is worth reminding that strengths and weak nesses are internal to the organization. Opportunities and threats are external. Both strengths & weak nesses and opportunities & threats will tend to complement each other. Thus a strong manage ment team may well be an internal strength. But it might also reveal the weakness that there is little opportunity for career growth within the organization.
Case Study Totally Objectively Finally Ultimately-Globally Integrated, TOFU-GI, launched 15 years ago as a niche player in IT software services. Those were of course happier economic times. Success – their sheer expertise and focus in a particular niche of the demanding soft ware support area – brought them money (lots) and
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demand (more than they could satisfactorily handle). Money and demand caused them to broaden their serv ices in response to client requests and the search for easy growth. A demand which could not be fully handled caused them to allow their service and response levels to drop. As the economy faltered in 2008, customers started to migrate to the lower-priced services, which were available elsewhere as TOFU-GI had neglected its niche, and its original expertise (and the key reason to accept its premium pricing) had disappeared. Profitability plummeted as it was forced to compete on price. Largescale redundancies followed. The best employees left for the newer players in new niche segments. In despera tion they had started doing deals; the quarterly figures becoming all and everything. There was no planning time. They had no special story or, to put it more bluntly, their story was the same as everybody else’s: we’re cheap, buy us. Please. At a recent awayday (its first for over five years) TOFUGI recognized it had moved from being a specialist and niche payer in a buoyant market to a generalist in a tough market. But worse: this had not been a conscious decision. TOFU-GI’s crime was two-fold: firstly, allow ing the transition to happen and secondly, having no formally strategic planning process to avoid it. TOFU-GI needed to re-boot, reinvent and revitalize. Read on . . .
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Money: Make It and Measure It
The Concept
M
oney is not the sole reason for being in business. Some people start a business for fun. Some for the pure challenge. Some because they feel they can do it better. But an awful lot do start a business for the money. After all, as a firm moves from being a one-man lifestyle business to becoming a global player it’ll need to pay salaries, R&D bills and the occasional jamboree. And even if he or she does not do it primarily for the money, the entrepreneur realizes that their fun, their challenge, their “doing it better” will be thwarted unless they are making money. A charity has to make money. A corner shop has to make money. And, ultimately, what easier measure of success? Money is coming in! It’s true that sometimes there can be a delay in the process of making money, but ultimately there is a particular kind of money which everybody loves and that’s profit. What does an MBA remind you about making money and how to keep making money?
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Consequences To those new to the world of business it might seem that making money is about the ability to sell. Or having a cool product for which everyone is clamouring or the perfect advertising campaign. Or simply keeping costs down. The reality is that it’s a subtle mix of all of these and if any one function is failing to function, to do its bit, the sales force is demotivated. For example, if there’s a lack of innovation in R&D, or debtor days are right out at 120, then it’ll be pretty tough to achieve that panacea of healthy, steady profit. You should be truly seeking a symbiotic* relationship across all of the functions to avoid the potential, real nightmare of departments sitting in silos, often working with skewed, non-aligned goals and plotting politically to damage “rival” departments. Thus making money involves several functions within an organization; if you are a small organization, you will need to get used to wearing several hats: •
The marketing division/hat.╇ Responsible for much of what was discussed in Section 1, that is, ensuring difference, driving difference and creating the difference story. Remember: with the right difference, you will be chased, able to charge premium prices and able to attract the best employees to ensure the success cycle continues to turn.
•
The sales division/hat.╇ Responsible for implementing on a day-to-day basis the grand plans of the marketing teams: talking to customers, pitching
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winning stories and bringing home the business. Ironically the “classic” MBA has very little time for “sales” apart from perhaps a small mention at the end of a flow diagram in the marketing process. With a professional sales process in place there is no need to simply “wait” for orders. Or hope that the value of your product is understood. Good sales teams do that proactively. •
The manufacturing/solution/innovation hat.╇ Working closely with marketing and their ideas, and sales and their feedback from the field, to ensure wonderful, responsive and fast-to-market solutions are realized. An organization often launches with an innovation. But it is unlikely to be able to survive on that alone. Customer requirements come and go. Competitors copy. Innovation must be part of the fabric of the firm.
•
The finance hat.╇ And of course there is finance. Measuring the results: how much money is actually being made? How much profit is being generated? Can payroll afford to run this month? Providing management reports: can you afford that commission scheme that the sales director would love to implement? What would be the implications of out-sourcing to China?
Actions 1. Find your marketing strategy. The role of marketing is often not fully understood in smaller
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organizations, in particular the difference between strategic marketing and marketing commun� ications. And in larger organizations, those two departments (oh, irony!) tend not to communicate well. Strategic Marketing is about what is our story? It ensures considerable thought has been given to topics such as pricing, segmentation and positioning. Pricing is not simply about cost* plus margin* to enable you to make some profit! Price is as much about psychology: it gives signals as to where you are positioning* yourself in the market. Cheap and cheerful, or expensive and special? There is often significant elasticity to a price, i.e., the price can be increased without any loss of demand. It is certainly worth understanding through research and simple conversation, what elasticity exists. Segmentation* is our chosen cluster of potential customers. Marketing communications must understand that story and tell it well so that the positioning makes sense. If the organization sells to different segments, marketing communication will need to adjust its story for each segment but without damaging the story to another segment. A perfect marketing strategy will answer questions such as what? and why? A perfect marketing communications strategy will answer questions such as who? and how? Any part of the marketing team might use the invaluable tool 4Ps! to drive such thinking. 2. Create and build the solution with the help of Manufacturing/solution/R&D. Whether this results from customer feedback, from brainstorming sessions or both, it is vital that the flow from ideas
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generated in an off-site, to a product being clicked on a well-designed website as a result of a wellorchestrated Twitter campaign, is totally seamless. It must involve neither internal politics nor sales teams with arms folded, standing by the water cooler. 3. Recognize the different aspects of selling. There are the hunters who love the chase and bringing the business in to forecast under the toughest of conditions. And there are the farmers who can look after that account throughout all the seasons of feast and famine. There’s the pipeline of business: a steady flow of business at various stages of qualification well managed and kept full and flowing using the FUNNEL! methodology. And of course in the best of organizations, everybody sells! 4. Utilize your finance department. The perfect finance department will of course do the nuts and bolts. It will ensure debtor days are kept down, salaries are paid on time and expenses are promptly reimbursed. But it will also provide management reports such as where is money being truly made? What are your most profitable lines? 5. Balance action and thinking. A successful business must balance action and thinking. MBAs are often criticized for being too much about the latter. And those who have recently attended an MBA are sometimes ridiculed for being far too keen to quote a thought leader than pick up the phone and find some live business. It is certainly true that
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real-world business generates a lot of action and that action- orientated individuals are often rewarded. But it is also true that much of that action can be simply “noise” and not generating real results. As hopefully will now be clear, a little quiet and demanding thinking can save years of wasted effort. 6. Check your emotional intelligence. Teams often fall out because of different viewpoints: a classic might be the cold logic of finance saying “this deal cannot be afforded” and a sales person emotionality articulating that “if we just get this deal untold riches will come our way”. How are such issues resolved? Not by email+(4) which so often removes all nuance from necessarily subtle communication. No: it will be done by the ability to talk and look the other in the eye. An important concept of the more forward-thinking MBA is the topic of EQ! or Emotional Intelligence!+(4). This is a crucial part of what makes an effective culture+(4) in an organization. 7. Encourage proactivity. Any part of the business might simply react. Or it can be proactive. Does sales “just” sell or does it also bring back important feedback? Does finance “just” produce reports or does it make suggestions and guide the senior management team’s thinking as to where simple cost saving might be made without damaging morale? 8. Educate and motivate. It is easy to say that everybody sells. But why should the graduate trainees unloading lorries into the warehouse at 05:30
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feel they should do so? After all, they are not paid very much. Educate and catch them doing things right+(3). 9. Talk to each other. Sales, marketing, finance, strategic marketing, and marketing communications must regularly meet and talk to each other. With regular communication comes trust and with trust great things can be done. Ban the silo mentality!
Specific Tools/Concepts Plus Cautions 1. Profit is what’s left after we take away cost. There are refinements of course. Which costs? Thus just the cost of manufacturing or the cost of sales too? Just the cost of manufacturing might give the impression it’s a very profitable item. But when the cost of an experienced salesperson’s time and all his/her face-to-face visits are factored in, it’s not such a great product in the portfolio after all. Management reporting and a bit of education can reveal that a simple 25% discount on a price of 100 with a cost of 50 was not a 25% hit on profitability but a 50% hit. Frightening. 2. Balance sheet. What is the organization worth? A simple way to understand this is to think about your personal balance sheet. Add up everything you own, e.g., your house or flat and the painting Auntie Mo left you. Now subtract your liabilities, e.g., your
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mortgage. That’s your balance sheet. And of course in many ways that is more relevant than how big a salary you are currently earning; the same is true for an organization. 3. P&L. A snapshot in time. How are things looking at the moment? Profit vs. Loss for this quarter, for example. 4. Cash flow. Again a potential weakness for anyone who has been seduced by too much MBA thinking but will be well understood by the 4-man window cleaning business who does your start-up’s office windows. Cash is king. It doesn’t matter how good the projections look, if you haven’t got cash you may well not get to the point where profit is realized. 5. Debtor days. How many days before you get paid? Given the point above that cash is king, you’ll be wanting to keep the debtor days to a minimum. How do you do that? Ensure your terms are clearly stated in your documentation. Don’t give away extensions too lightly. Make sure late payments are chased. No – it will not annoy your customers. Not the ones you want to keep anyway. 6. 4Ps. A classic reminder from Kotler, upgraded and re-spun many times, including by the man himself. But ultimately, what is your PRODUCT and its PRICE and how will it be PROMOTED via what PLACE (i.e., through what channel)?
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7. FUNNEL. Selling is an art. Training and development coupled with experience will teach that art form. When to push and when to let it go. How to run this particular pitch. And what will be the key selling message. But selling is also a science: there is a methodology* to it. There are six essential steps. • Step 1 or F: Find them. Be constantly seeking out good quality business. • Step 2 or U: Understand them. What requirements do they have? Who can decide and what is the budget? Those fundamental three questions are the essence of good qualification, i.e., whether a deal is worth pursuing. • Step 3 or N: Niching or show that you are different. • Step 4 or N: Now (or create urgency) so that the deal can be closed ASAP. • Step 5 is E or excite. Get them excited about the solution so they value it and will tell others. • And then Step 6 is L: Love the customer so that they become a regular purchaser. Read my How To Sell Brilliantly in Good Times and Bad (ISBN: 9781906821586) for further detail on the sales process. Available on Kindle, too. 8. Everybody sells. This is a matter of education. It can cause a great deal of resentment to see some parts of the organization being paid apparently very high sums of money to bring in business and then for other parts on more modest pay packages to be told it would be great if they sold “indirectly” too. Er, but without the commission or bonuses. Explain why everybody sells. And see if there is a
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way to be creative so that there are rewards for spotting sales opportunities. After all, UK based John Lewis* manages it. 9. EI or Emotional Intelligence. An exciting concept that will be explored further in Section 4. But let’s introduce here Daniel Goleman’s famous equation: EQ=2 x IQ or Emotional Intelligence in the majority of situations is twice as powerful as pure intellectual ability or IQ.
Case Study The demise of Totally Objectively Finally Ultimately-Globally Integrated, TOFU-GI, was caused by a slow, steady breakdown of the moneymaking engine that all organizations must possess. Fun, contribution to world peace and intellectual satisfaction are all dependent upon the ability to steadily and reliably make money. Firstly, poor strategic marketing, as explained in Section 1, the shift from specialist, with all the benefits such a quality confers on an organization, to generalist, and the liabilities that can bring. Of course it is possible to make being a generalist something special, a differentiator in itself, but usually only if coupled with size. Hence: get big, get niche or get out. The second was poor communication and thus lack of trust between the various departments of the money-making machine: each department was choosing a different measure of success as each divisional director attempted to meet his or her commercial goals. Sales was doing
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deals to hit the quarterly target at all costs; Marketing was wildly experimenting with social media to demonstrate that it was fully up-to-date but to no avail, and Finance was in so much pain that it simply reduced and measured, e.g., stopping travel expenses above a certain level so sales people could not go out on some of the strategic deals. Facilities were taking away free coffee and sub-letting the recreation rooms and selling off the car park. Communication was poor. Trust was at an all time low. Strategic thinking was nonexistent. Deals were rife. Profit and motivation were plummeting. Of course, it all comes down to people. Read on.
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People Not (Just) Metrics
The Concept
T
hey might be your highly-paid key account managers who can close half million deals. Or the teams in your call centres who handle hundreds of transactions a day, be they relatively low-value amounts. Or the receptionists who manage your prestigious welcome area at corporate HQ. But without them, nothing happens. And in the toughest global trading conditions which most of us are currently experiencing, it simply isn’t sufficient if someone is performing at 60%. The material in an MBA helps you to understand how to get the best out of a person.
Consequences One of the thrusts of an MBA – as you will recall from Section 2 – is to measure. Guided by thought leaders such as Peter Drucker* who is attributed with turning management into a science and us into knowledge workers*, we learn that we can only be successful if we measure. And over the years there have been many,
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many theories of what does really, really make a person tick. How can you get the best out of a person? To an outsider and certainly perhaps to many of us earlier in our career it would seem that the simplest of answers is to throw money at the problem. Or other carrots, such as a nice car or a big office. It sort of works, but not consistently enough. It doesn’t always seem to get the best out of a person and, ironically, particularly not the highest of performers, who are so crucial to us. In addition, many motivational theories that were assembled post-WWII in the USA and Europe were based on factors not necessarily appropriate for those of a more recent generation starting out on their careers. So, what has really been learnt? What guidance can you rely on? What are some specific actions that you can take?
Actions 1. Resolve hygiene factors. A hygiene factor is something which when missing demotivates but in itself does not motivate. Have you ever had a member of your team go on and on and on about something. They want a desk by a window? They want a grander job title? They even want more money! And it become the endless focus of one-toone discussions. Eventually it is resolved: they get their desk by a window; they get their fancier job title; they even get some more money. They stop complaining for a while but then they start complaining about something else. How do you stop someone getting caught up in endless hygiene
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factors? By giving them something to bigger to think about. Read on. 2. The Maslow approach to getting the best out of your team. MBA programmes are full of models, especially ones expressed in 4 by 4 matrices or even layered pyramids. Maslow is one of the latter. He did a great job of expressing that we are motivated first to fix the basics, e.g., food and water, before the more specialized “self-esteem” driver and certainly the “I feel totally empowered with my job” driver. “First” does often mean chronologically: early in our career it’s about getting a good job to earn the money to get a roof over our head; but later in our career we might forgo the higher salary for something which is more satisfying. Satisfying? Yes: perhaps learning a new skill or contributing to others or . . . But if at any time the basic drivers are missing we will immediately move down to the bottom of the pyramid again; redundancy gets us to focus on what is really, really crucial again: money to pay the mortgage. The big desk can come later. So: what’s at the top? Self-actualization. Mmm, what does that mean? Well, it’s worth understanding as it might be the key you are seeking to getting the very best out of your best people. 3. Motivate your team. Self-actualization is a grand term which in essence expresses a state of work where we feel we are doing what we were meant to do. Be it baker, train driver, ballet dancer or CEO: this is “our thing”. One effective way to get people working at their best and get them out
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of the constant “this isn’t perfect” so “I’m going to complain” mode is to get them on the path to what they really want to do. But doesn’t that mean you’re going to lose them? You’re losing them any way if they are not giving of their best the majority of the time. This approach is simply take time to coach and mentor and, yes, work on their sales skills or ensure they are a better team leader or copy writer, but also get them thinking about the bigger picture. Where do they want to be in five years’ time, for example? A person with that bigger picture doesn’t need the perfect free gym membership to ensure they do of their best: you’ve ignited the deeper driver which is squashed in so many people. And if they do leave, as some naturally will, perhaps it is better to have somebody for two years at 110% rather than eight years at 22% and all the problems associated with that. This approach to motivation reminds us of the critical nature of coaching+(4) and mentoring*. 4. Catch people doing things right. Maslow talks about self-esteem as a motivator: getting people to feel good about themselves. A gentlemen called Ken Blanchard who wrote The One Minute Manager introduced the phrase “catch people doing things right”. When people feel good about themselves, their selfesteem rises. And as their self-esteem rises they are more likely to do of their best as they feel more confident, are less vulnerable to criticism and feel like going the extra mile.
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5. Lead by example. The biggest influencer of other people’s behaviour is your own. Of course this very much leads into the field of ethics*, or what is right and what is wrong. It is clearly wrong to “pad” expenses claims; but if you hear a senior person imply “don’t worry about it, everybody does it” a junior person is more likely to feel it is acceptable. Following a series of high-profile cases such as Enron*, a topic which was once thought to be too obvious is now deemed necessary to study. 6. Manage expectations: education and New World of Work thinking. Part of the difficulty in motivation is that of expectation. There has perhaps been too much of a lag behind the messages we give to any individual (“get a degree and you will be successful”, “turn up and you will be successful”) which maybe were reasonably accurate in an Old World of Work but need re-calibrating for a bolder, tougher world (“your degree is just the first tick on a very long checklist for a successful career”, “you turned up, now what are you going to do?”) And that’s where some New World of Work* is crucial. Much, much more in Section 5. 7. Become a good coach. There are two broad generations in the workplace: Generation X (1965– 1980), Generation Y (1980s and 1990s). It is often suggested that motivation not only needs to change for where someone is in their career and life, but also as a function of to which generation they belong (“Generation Y is less interested in money”). After all, for different generations different things
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are important. There is no doubt much truth in this but it’s good to be wary of yet more labels and possible generalization. Be a good coach. Listen: remember that the deepest human desire is to be understood. Read my publication Do What You Want (ISBN: 9780273771081) for ideas on how to create real drive in an individual. 8. Excel at Leadership. There are many models of leadership. One difficulty is that many of them are developed from a classical hierarchical model, which exists less and less in the flattened organization that many of us now inhabit. Or wartime models. Or a charismatic model. And how do those help “little me” as a team leader of twenty brand new graduates? Avoid the grand models of leadership and remember these simple ideas: • leadership is a mindset, not a job title: anybody can get the meeting back on track and if nobody else is doing so then be a leader and do it; • leadership is by example not by email: your team will be better at customer service if you treat them with respect.
Specific Tools/Concepts Plus Cautions Listening. It’s a tool? It is. It’s powerful and one which we use less and less. We increasingly “transact”: send pieces of information to each other. But for managing, no – leading – people, listening must play a part. What’s the difference between managing and leading?
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Management is about telling people to get things done. Leadership is about inspiring them to get the right things done. Leadership in particular is about releasing the discretionary effort, which so many people have. Getting them to move from OK to excellent. Remember the deepest human desire is to be understood and valued. This doesn’t mean somebody always gets their way: of course not. But they must feel they have been part of the conversation.
Case Study It was time for desperate measures at TOFU-GI. It was a time to get the sales force to step up. It was time to stop the haemorrhaging of costs. Severe restrictions were put on sales force travel and expenses and they were told to hit monthly targets by better use of phone conversation. Overtime bans were put in place for many of the support staff, many of whom could only afford their living expenses by doing overtime. Employee-submitted expenses were paid much more slowly as were bills from suppliers, to preserve cash flow. Of course the free coffee had gone long ago. All good ideas, you’d imagine, in an organization which had allowed itself to get a little bloated and which needed to save money? Perhaps. Of course TOFU-GI does need to save money; the good times had allowed many poor practices to become the norm from not requiring a formal PO number, to deleting and not reading essential
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management reports to abusing expense guidelines. But an organization will also only be able to move from surviving into thriving if it makes money and as we have stressed many times that will only happen if people are at their most effective: people who are desirous of contributing, not just frightened of losing their job. A sales force who are used to being able to get out and about do not need their travel budgets removed: they need some guidance, some leadership on the best approach. Support staff, used to a certain way of life and who have now had that curtailed and have to deal with longer queues on the phone, are hardly likely to be working at top form. And of course imposing a charge for coffee simply gives real fuel for the water cooler conversation. These are not changes that can be implemented by an email transaction; they need leadership to listen, to explain and to respond. The ideas implemented may be perfectly IQ intelligent but they are not very EQ (emotionally) intelligent, especially when the board have made no change to the company cars they drive, no reduction in the executive suite expenses, nor to the business class European flights they apparently require. Much more on EQ in section 4. Read on.
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Er, Wake Up, Get Real, Take Action: Brilliant at the Basics of Business
The Concept
S
ignificant portions of a “real” MBA are not exotic, “wow” or anything less than what appears to be obvious. The points hammered out in lectures and workshops are pure common sense. They can even be a bit frustrating for many a student: “but we know this” they say, “duh!” they exclaim. However, the principles being extolled are what effective businesses do. And that’s the key: of course a business may know it, but does it do it? Common sense is by no means common practice. In this section the goal is to remind you of how to be brilliant at the basics of business. Being brilliant at the basics of business is the route to the right kind of ‘er’s we seek in business. Faster, easier, smarter, all of which lead to the significant differentiation you seek, as discussed in Section 1.
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Consequences An organization sells a gorgeous, well-priced digital camera as part of its product range: it’s light, compact and in a range of fantastic acid colours. A humorous and thoughtful Twitter campaign, targeting a lucrative segment of the high-earning population, is driving very effectively its purchase and encouraging users of the camera to share their pictures. But the website from where the camera is purchased is – frankly – very hard work; layout is confusing, navigation poor and entering credit card details unnecessarily tedious. A bank may have identified a lucrative business target segment, mailed you and suggested you call and speak to your new business adviser. Shame you can’t get through because demand was not anticipated, the campaign was not staggered to avoid overload and no other real alternative was created to the “personalized” phone conversation. A culture change programme may be rolled out in a firm but 63% of the organization will not attend because they “can’t see the point”. The glamorous aspects of an MBA: studies of social media, learning Mandarin and acting Shakespeare as a way of developing leadership skills may all attract attention, but it’s the hard won basics which must be implemented first. In a business, we may all want to help in the cultural change kick-off programme as that’s fun, but what about the 1000s of hours of coaching which will be required to follow up and consolidate?
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We’d all like to do the cool stuff. But ultimately it’s about being brilliant at the basics of business.
Actions What are the basics? These help: 1. Allow adult-to-adult culture.╇ In an organization which fails, Enron* being the most recent notable example, in an organization which flounders, an irony which is well discussed after the shock waves is that everybody knew what was going on. Everybody knew there was corruption at the highest level. Everybody knew the women’s fashions were not working. Everybody knew . . . Indeed: so if everybody knew, why was nobody doing anything about it? Because of fear: fear of ridicule, fear of a poor review grade, fear of bullying, fear of losing their job. Effective organizations allow and encourage adult-to-adult rather than adult-to-child dialogue; with honest, open sharing of views, weaknesses can be rapidly identified and addressed. 2. Develop emotional intelligence.╇ IQ* we soon learn is fixed, but emotional intelligence or EQ is something which can be learnt and developed. Articulated and pioneered by thought leader Daniel Goleman* his research revealed that in so many situations EQ is twice as powerful, twice as effective as IQ. Your receptionist may be able to do a mean security badge, but can he/she manage the
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impatient client? The project manager may be cool on Gantt charts but can they stay self-motivated when the team is down two on head count? 3. Invest in training and development (T&D).╇ Encouraging adult-to-adult conversations, developing an individual’s Emotional Intelligence, getting a manger to understand that coaching IS part of their job. These all require training and development: the best organizations invest in their people and accept that when they do, some will grow and leave. But the majority will become empowered, feel valued and do a better job on a consistent basis. 4. Develop a culture of continued learning.╇ T&D is at the heart of a learning culture. In a learning culture all managers spend time coaching!, departments have their own libraries of development books, in paper, audio and digital formats. It is expected that people invest in themselves, that awaydays happen and that budgets for T&D are not deleted when times are hard. In a learning culture people grow and when they grow they both become more effective for the organization and they feel valued and tend to stay longer and contribute more. 5. Be proactive.╇ Ever been in a poor meeting? Of course. But did anyone do anything about it? If they didn’t they were reactive and of course suffered the consequences of frustration, wasted time and poor delivery of results. In a proactive organization, a weakness is addressed. A quality issue is not ignored.
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6. Empower the team.╇ And when everyone in an organization is being proactive rather than reactive we might say that we have an empowered organization. This is not a buzz phrase, but a description of a culture of devolved leadership: where it is truly recognized that leadership is a mindset not a job title. These hinder: 1. Use email and PowerPoint less.╇ Unpleasant things are often said about these two powerful tools which have revolutionized the world of work. Both are invaluable. But both cause irreparable harm when badly used. Email stops proper conversation: it is easy and it is efficient to send an email to someone. The difficulty is, that mail will rarely handle all the nuances that are necessary for the task to be executed or the issue to be resolved: that’s what conversations do. Conversations are effective. Efficient is getting things done. Effective is getting the right things done. The time spent up-front saves endless time further down the line. PowerÂ� Point discourages “joined-up” thinking. PowerPoint causes fragmented explanation: everything is reduced to single bold words or note-like sentences. Why? Because it is easier than writing the narrative, the story. Spend more time investing in dialogue and getting the story across. 2. Keep people focused in meetings.╇ There was always a danger that a meeting might be run poorly, i.e., without a clear objective, without a skilled
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facilitator and without agreeing the real actions. But in the New World of Work* technology brings distraction in the form of email easily available in the room, the dangers of trance with poorly constructed PowerPoint slides, and disconnect with conference calls. 3. Ban aggression.╇ Although you would not expect a thrown punch, and hopefully not too much shoving, you might get someone talked about negatively when they are not present. You might discover a senior manager intimidating a new joiner by suggesting that if they do not take on this extra work their next review grade might suffer. A person is aggressive when he or she no longer respects the right of another; be that to defend himself, for instance, or to go home on time having done a good day’s work.
Specific Tools/Concepts Plus Cautions 1. Training & development. Ensure a training programme is integral to the organization. Ensure courses are of excellent quality and respected. Expect attendance, good time-keeping and followthrough on actions. 2. Listening needs to be taught and practised. 3. Coaching is an excellent way to follow up on training courses and to build momentum between formal training sessions.
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4. Feedback. It is vital that all employees are given regular straightforward feedback as to their performance. Waiting three months until quarterly review is too long a period. Little and often. Remember that feedback should not all be about what is going wrong, ensure you regularly “catch people doing things right”. 5. Read my Brilliant at the Basics of Business 100 (ISBN: 9780956784810) for further depth.
Case Study At TOFU-GI the fight back had begun. After a very long period of poor use of resources and people, followed by a grim period of cost cutting and redundancies, at last a short window of opportunity had been opened. The new leaner TOFU-GI had a new leader and he implemented two simple initiatives. The first was strategic thinking. A series of fast self-managed sessions were run to decide: what story did they have, what story did they want to have and which product and services would they be supporting? This meant some products and services had to be ditched, much to the annoyance of certain customers, but being pragmatic these had never been profitable. Already the revenue stream was building and more importantly, the profit per employee was several times what it had been over the last few years. The second was the return of three training days per employee per year plus a personal budget for business
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books. Everybody was required to go through a “fundamentals of communication” course which focused on concepts such as listening, respect, everybody is a leader, and professionalism. There was plenty to be done but TOFU-GI was a player again: the success cycle had been re-booted.
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5
Kaizen: Constant, Never-ending Improvement The Concept The worst thing that can happen to your business is for it to become successful. It is obviously a natural quest – success, that is – but with it can come complacency, arrogance and an inability to move the supertanker quickly enough. Everything that got you to that hard-won winning position from ways of thinking, to infrastructure, to a cluster of high performing individuals, could now well be the components of the jigsaw which will hold you back. Yes, the worst thing you can do as an organization is to become successful and then believe you know exactly how to do it. No: you don’t know. You miraculously pulled it off: the varying forces and people and product launches that were discussed in the last four sections all became aligned and you got your just reward. You absolutely got your just reward. But success is no definitive goal nor target: it’s a journey, an adventure, a quest and it’s only just begun with that first taste of winning. Entropy* is constantly at play; that tendency
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for things to become chaotic, to fall apart before your very eyes. Markets change, customers have whims, your best people start their own rival firms and economies crumble as traders sell shares. No, nothing can be assumed any longer in the New World of Work* and that is why kaizen is so essential. Kaizen as we have previously learnt is the never-ending desire to be better than we were, to improve. Let’s first look at the drivers of change, the causes of that entropy. Because in the Old World of Work, a business could be created which was successful for decades with few fundamental shifts needed. But times have very clearly changed: understanding these drivers, firstly external to the business and secondly internal, will teach you how you can defend yourself from such new threats.
Consequences It is essential that we have processes by which, just when we are getting complacent, we are willing to reinvent things. How tough is that? Tough because when we are successful we tend to be busy and when we get busy we stop thinking. Ok, so those drivers of change and the implications for you: External: 1. Acceleration.╇ Change management. It’s a buzz phrase and a lucrative area for many in management
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consultancy (one of the largest career destinations of the MBA graduate). But perhaps we are a little misdirected? After all, for many it’s not change itself that is a problem: it’s the rate of change. Whether you have been in business five, ten or twenty-five years look at what has happened and notice how that rate of change has dramatically increased in the last few years. That is what you are attempting to cope with. And how do organizations cope? By becoming more efficient: getting things done. And as you become more and more efficient you can lose the plot because your increasing speed is ensuring you are losing sight of getting the right things done. What’s the answer? There is only one as after all there is no such thing as hurry-up thinking: slow down to the speed of thought: with decent thinking comes true kaizen. 2. Automation.╇ If it can be chipped it will be. If a person, or part of the function of a person, can be replaced by a silicon chip then an organization will do so. People are a nuisance: they have moods, want interesting jobs and demand holidays. The silicon chip just hums and does its job. The trouble is the chip is about IQ, about smart, about logical, intelligence. People are about EQ or Emotional Intelligence, which allows the subtleties of leadership, connection and builds the soul of an organization. With soul comes kaizen. 3. Alternate shores.╇ There is always somewhere cheaper. Ireland, India or Russia. Offshoring, outsourcing: call it what you will, will find you a
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cheaper production line, a lower-salaried finance team, a 24 by 7 support centre. But with such options come huge logistical, operational, communication and culture differences. Leadership must be at its best; in particular EQ leadership must be superb. There is nothing necessarily wrong with outsourcing but there currently is a lot wrong with much of its management. 4. Abundance.╇ In a world of too much choice – for T-shirts, financial plans and security software – it’s tougher than ever to compete. We know the core strategy: get big, get niche or get out. Given that we love what we do and we’re not that big, for most of us the only strategy is get special; remember that one aspect of the difference pie we discussed is the third segment, our people: get very good at what we do. In a world of abundance, make excellence your minimum standard. 5. Ambiguity.╇ The MBA – as we have seen – is about the plan. The marketing plan, the finance plan, the HR plan. Many of the classic tomes, the classic texts, are full of charts and diagrams that illustrate beautiful and orderly plans with neat beginnings, middles and realized goals. But in a world of ambiguity, how do you plan? Easy: quicker, faster, more flexibly. The plan is as relevant as ever, it’s just that we no longer have a year in which to do it. One week would be about right. Kaizen is about still doing it. But doing it faster.
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6. Anarchy.╇ The customer is now in charge. Once upon a time the big hitters in banking, in retail, in business schools, could call the shots. Their size, their power and unchallenged legacy meant the small guy had no choice. That’s all changed. In a global market with fragmented segments, the buyer is all-powerful. You must stay flexible in your thinking. 7. Adrenalin.╇ Stack those six factors together and you get people hunkered down in cubicles shivering with fear. Kaizen requires a forum, it requires debate and it needs people to feel confident that they can say what is necessary. The challenges are real, but smart people at their best can solve them. Internal: 1. Arrogance.╇ With success comes a dangerous feeling of infallibility, a dangerous belief in the rhetoric used at shareholder meetings and in press launches. A belief in the bullet-padded slide deck distributed at management meetings. We continue to believe our (now well-outdated) story of excellence. Any middle manager, any graduate trainee who should dare to question the marvels of senior management is on a fast route out of the organization. If kaizen is to happen, leaders require a degree of humility to not only realize they are wrong but also admit to being wrong and do something (quickly) to remedy the situation.
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2. Alienation.╇ With arrogant, bullying leadership comes alienation. A feeling of disconnect, a feeling that “I don’t belong here”, “My views are not worth anything”. And that’s a huge shame as no one has the unique perspective on the real breakthrough. Somebody, somewhere, in any organization knows exactly what to do. But are you willing to listen? Of course they may be naive, may not understand the full financial implications. But how will they learn to be more effective and become a regular contributor of good ideas if you do not encourage them? Kaizen can only happen if not only does a person feel their view will be given proper consideration, but they genuinely care about the organization and how it fares. 3. Complexity.╇ With success comes growth. With growth comes rules, “same old” and “that’s the way we do things around here”. The trouble is the rule that got you there may well be the rule that traps you there and stops the next breakthrough. Be wary of adding layer upon layer of rules and bureaucracy. For kaizen, whenever a rule, system or process is introduced, or a page is added to the corporate handbook, ask what can we drop and or tear out? When was the last time you spring-cleaned your firm? 4. Reactive.╇ Rather than proactive. An organization that isn’t observant, isn’t looking at the fringes of their market, isn’t noting what is happening out on the distant horizon or with their early adopters, will end up being caught on the back foot. Kaizen comes
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through being ahead of the game: open before official opening time; have your website ready well before launch date; make sure your staff are trained in anticipation of new legal rulings. 5. Dulled.╇ An organization that becomes successful and as a consequence often becomes too busy to think is slowed by exhaustion. For kaizen to occur an organization must stay awake, vital and excited about what it does. 6. Excellence.╇ Make excellence your normal and expected standard. Ensure people are not confused. Excellence is not attached to rank or role or experience. It’s a choice. 7. Bigger picture beyond money.╇ With success come the demands of the shareholder. The demand of big hitter salaries. When we are beholden to such demands, it is often difficult to do our greatest work.
Actions 1. Slow down to the speed of thought. Take more five-minute breaks. Stretch, sip some water, step outside. Look at the real horizon and become grounded again. 2. Develop EQ in your business and never let it lose its soul. Review Section 3.
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3. Leadership will be more critical than ever when increasingly operations are on different parts of the globe and embedded in very different cultures. Review Section 4. 4. Excellence must become your new minimum standard. Define it and lead by example. 5. Plan faster. See Section 6. 6. However big you become in turnover, profitability and people, stay small in flexibility, responsiveness and desire to do better. 7. Create an adult-to-adult culture where all are willing to wake up, get real and take action. 8. Ensure a culture of humility rather than arrogance. 9. Encourage and coach rather than judge or ignore. 10. Simplicity rather than complexity. 11. Proactive rather than reactive. 12. Great leadership. you must maintain passion for what your people do. 13. Excellence is not a job title, it is a way of being.
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14. Never be beholden solely to the shareholder. They will destroy your dream.
Specific Tools/Concepts Plus Cautions Refer to or print the above action list and read it daily.
Case Study Life at TOFU-GI is better than it has been for years. Money is coming in, profit is being made and customers are delighted. Employees are feeling valued and excellent candidates are coming forward for interview. The crisis has been stemmed and the new CEO congratulated. How is he feeling? Cautious. Now is good. In fact now is excellent, but what about tomorrow and next year? He hasn’t got it fully thought through but he is planning to pull together a couple of small, fast teams. People from across the business: different functions, different levels of experience but selected for their passion for the business and willingness to avoid complacency. They will meet monthly and initially be tasked with creating a culture which lives and breathe the 14 actions he has on a card in his wallet, starting with Slow Down To The Speed of Thought. No easy task, but he’s confident it’s worth aiming for.
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The Plan
The Concept
A
“real” MBA is commonly done for one of three main reasons. The first is to increase one’s personal marketability and thus to get a “better” job and of course a higher salary. The second is to “take some time out” to think where to go next with one’s career. And the third is to understand how to run a business more effectively. Clearly the three are not distinct and separate but overlap. My own experience of teaching on full-time, part-time and companydedicated programmes is that points 1 and 2 are of higher priority to the full-time student, and 2 and 3 to the part-time. A noticeable point though is that for a large number of students, the MBA it is seen more as a qualification, a line to add to a CV rather than a store of knowledge to apply “back in the real world”. And that is a huge shame because as expressed in our opening premise: the modern MBA is a refined body of knowledge, which can solve any business issue or challenge your firm might have.
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Thus it’s a pity if action doesn’t happen following such studies. One challenge as we have stated is that in the overabundance of ideas, concepts, theories, simulations, study groups, reading lists . . . it’s difficult to know where to start. There may be many advantages to the full-time MBA over this MBA On The Go, but one distinct asset we do have on our side is we are stripped back, lean, mean and ready to act. Read on . . .
Consequences Without a formal knowledge into action process, the valuable resource of MBA thinking will not be manifested. Day-to-day busyness will prevail. Occasionally at meetings someone will mention “We ought to get some data on that, shouldn’t we do a SWOT analysis?”
Actions Our study has covered “The Vital Handful”. Through a focus on these areas, there is much you can do to improve, protect and re-invent your business and if you give attention to these five you are unlikely to leave any essential area undisturbed. In rapid review: The Vital Handful: 1. Be different.╇ If you are different you are an easier choice, you can defend your price and you can attract the best employees. Being different requires
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a focus on the difference pie or company times solution times people. In essence the company is about what is your story? Your solutions are about innovation. Your people are about getting their personal goals for growth aligned with yours as an organization. 2. Be profitable – money and measure.╇ You must make money. It might be your raison d’être, or it might be a means to an end but an organization ultimately must be profitable. Making such profits requires all parts of an organization to synchronize to support the story; it requires clear and detailed measures for simple and rapid feedback on what is working and it requires a deep appreciation that marketing – strategic marketing – is not just about another Twitter campaign. 3. Motivate – people not metrics.╇ MBAs encourage measuring and measurability. And it’s been tried with people. After all: you want to get the best out of your people. Motivation is as much art as science but it is not complicated: there are some broad-based principles that work and if each is applied with care, an empowered and focused workforce will be created. 4. Be brilliant at the basics.╇ Many a potential thought leader has found him- or herself on the slippery slope of trying to find what does make for the perfect, successful organization. Many of the thought leaders* made their name with their particular version. Tom Peters: In Search of Excellence;
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Jim Collins From Good to Great. But when you analyse such studies, although fine words of praise may be put to particular aspects or processes, in the end, notably, the best organizations are brilliant at the basics. Their websites are easy to navigate. Products work. Account managers are courteous. How hard can that be? 5. Practise the kaizen method.╇ Success is a path, a journey not a goal or a destination. And given that the terrain will get more challenging, you will constantly need a better map and a better vehicle. That’s kaizen and it’s essential that it is an embedded process in your organization. The Planning Process: 1. Create a planning cycle.╇ Get the awaydays, the off-sites, into the diary and stick to them. How many days are needed? Only experience will tell but it is likely that every part of the business will need: • a day of audit, a day of how you are doing when SWOT is applied; • a day of creativity, when as a result of SWOT, new solutions and new ways of doing things are identified; • a day of project management to distil all that has been agreed into working actions with identified owners. Thus if initially one awayday per quarter were booked, that should meet the requirements for successful high-level off-site planning.
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2. Fast plan.╇ It is vital that the planning process is done quickly but with no loss of quality. In the New World of Work, markets, competitors and opportunities all come and go very quickly. How is the planning process speeded up? You should: • advance plan the days that are required: there’s always a rolling schedule of off-sites so that everybody know when they are needed; • create small teams: as far as possible working in threes. If larger groups are needed, work in threes and get them to co-present. A large group attempting to reach consensus is a slow and laborious process (sometimes culminating in the discussion process being abandoned); • never leave sessions without detailed and robust action plans and ensuring owners of actions know exactly what they have to deliver. 3. Planning discipline.╇ Insist that it happens, insist that all work at it and get better at it. Strategic thinking, deep debate and drilling down for an explicit action are all hard work and for many of the action heroes of the business they are distractions from the day-to-day job. It may well take up to 12 months for some of the results of your efforts to be realized. Stick at it: ensure planning – strategic planning – becomes a core of your business. 4. Cross function.╇ It is natural to plan in departments; it is natural to focus by sector. But other departments have great ideas; they could contribute and/or sanity check your plan. A simple step to add to your planning process is that you present
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your best ideas to all “connected” departments and ask for their feedback. It needn’t take long but it should improve the quality of your plan and avoid problems later on. Behaviours: 1. Reward ON time. There is often a sense of guilt associated with being seen “doing nothing”: to be thinking, to be reflecting. There is IN time, that’s working on things which are important and urgent. And there’s ON time, which is working on things that are important and investing (but often nonurgent). The battle in any living business is pulling people away from the here and now to work on the future so that next year’s here and now is easy. Don’t cancel investment activities: awaydays, training and development and personal holidays. Make them happen. 2. Practise thinking. Thinking is a skill and it does need to be practised. Start with these. Put them on the flip chart or whiteboard at the front of the planning room: • Proactive thinking or what do we need to anticipate; • Critical thinking or what do we need to do better; • Lateral thinking or what do we need to do differently? 3. Insist on actions. After long sessions of planning and tough thinking it’s easy for energy levels to
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falter and to assume that the bundle of ideas and the stack of brain-stormed sheets are enough. NO: push through that final hurdle and turn your work into actions. 4. Mini teaming x fast. And make point three happen by involving the smallest number of people for the least amount of time. 5. Read my book How To Be Brilliant (ISBN: 9780956784803) for ideas on how to get extraordinary things done.
Case Study TOFU-GI had now had six profitable quarters in a row. The cultural revolution was complete. The planning cycle was embedded. ON time was respected and although there was always a sense of “can do” and “focus on now” and what needed to be done, the air of panic and “a deal needs to be done” had long gone. Reception was no longer a stale room exhibiting tired copies of The Economist with boxes of copy paper sitting in one corner. It was now clean, simple and displayed daily fresh flowers. The working areas had more light, and clear objectives on the walls. The boardroom had been opened up so that anybody walking by could see what was going on. A new exciting, focused campaign was winning the right kinds of business. TOFU-GI had reinvented and would continue to do so because it was now also a learning organization.
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Quick Reference A brief list of “intuitive” terms which were referenced in the text but not explored fully are clarified here: Commodity: A product or solution which is only distinguished from its competitors by price and thus in a competitive situation the only way that it can be distinguished and made more attractive is by lowering the price. Of course, the danger is that the competitor will attempt to win back the business by undercutting your price. It can be seen that this is a strategy which really benefits nobody. It might appear initially that the customer does very well out of a price war but if service standards drop too much, or even worse, the supplier goes bust then those reductions are of little help. Core competencies: A term articulated by thought leader Gary Hamel and a label for what you are really, really good at. A core competency typically benefits the customer, it can be used widely in the organization and it is not that easy for competitors to replicate. Thus it might be initially thought that Starbucks’ core competency is brewing coffee. A little more consideration will reveal that in fact one of the coffee giant’s core competencies is certainly its delivery systems in very busy environment. Of all the coffee shops, Starbucks tends
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to be best during busy commuter times at getting a handmade drink to you quickly. Cost: We all intuitively understand the term cost. But sometimes we don’t define it well enough. Is it simply a manufacturing cost? Or the consultant’s fee? Or do we add in the cost of sale? Or . . .? It’s critically important that our management reporting takes this into account and that as marketeers and sales people we really know where the money is being made or not. See Profit below. Enron: Enron went bankrupt in December 2001. Prior to that it had consistently won awards for its innovation and had fooled Gary Hamel into believing it was a true star of an organization. Post-bankruptcy, it was revealed that the only real innovative power of Enron was widespread deception and corruption. Ethics, the study of right and wrong, appeared on the syllabus on many MBAs. Entrepreneur: In the Old World of Work an organization was much more easily able to stay in steady state, change very little and remain successful. In the New World of Work there is a desperate need to keep reinventing, looking for opportunities and building something out of nothing. You need all of your people to be entrepreneurs: what opportunities are there to save money, to make money, to raise the standards of service to your customers? Entropy: A term normally reserved for the scientific community, but a surprisingly handy one for the
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business community: if energy is not put in to reverse the trend, any system will move from order to disorder. In a phrase: things will get messy. People will lose the plot. And what’s the energy you must put in to reverse the process? Leadership. Ethics: The study of what is right and wrong. Now an increasingly essential part of the MBA. IQ: A measure of innate intelligence generally understood to be numeric and linguistic. Despite many studies there appears to be no way to “improve” innate intelligence or IQ. John Lewis: A UK firm that has been consistently successful and particularly so over the last few years of very tough trading conditions. And what do we learn? Well, John Lewis does work all of the critical five consistently, but one thing that has been remarked upon is that all who work in the business are co-owners. Kaizen: A Japanese word, which means never-ending continuous improvement. The premise is two-fold; first any weak link in our chain of service or solution can be dramatically improved over time and secondly we cannot rest: whatever was good enough this year will certainly NOT be good enough next year. Knowledge worker: A person who is valued not for their skill in a production line or a bakery but for their “knowledge”. Increasingly, of course, we are all knowledge workers.
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Leverage: Any factor in a business which can add power to another process in a business. Ideally any team, any department, adds leverage to another team or department. Of course this is generally a function of good communication and trust. Margin: The difference between price and cost. Generally speaking we are keen to improve the margin we are making on any product or solution. Market: The potential customers you would like to speak to. For example, the market of iPad users. Mentoring: An elusive term and often used interchangeably with coaching. Most would probably agree that coaching is at the heart of mentoring and that mentoring has a broader brief of “being available”, “giving guidance”, and so on. Methodology: A process or method. Methods – be they chasing for delayed payment or allowing employees to voice their concerns – need definition to ensure they are optimized. This can generally be achieved by interviewing those involved and documenting accurately what is currently done. “Tweaks” of improvement can then be tried and if they work captured in the updated, documented methodology. New World of Work: A term I use to express the transition from a time when the human brain was the fastest thing around (the Old World of Work) to when the electron became the leader (the New World
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of Work). The transition period was the mid 90s for most people when email became most commonplace, and the mid 00s when the mobile phone become less phone and more computer. There is no “spike” nor critical point when it all took off, but a gradual increase as mail becomes more and more intrusive. Positioning: A combination of factors such a price, colour of logo, channel used, etc, which reveal to the market who is the appropriate customer for this product. Profit: Profit = sales price – cost. A simple enough equation but fraught with dangers, especially when buried somewhere within a spreadsheet. As with any formula it can only be as good as the data put into it and the result can be misleading unless firstly, true and accurate costs are being used and secondly, confidence can be assumed in the sales price. Discounting can do enormous damage to profitability. Segment: A sub-division of a market, e.g., of iPad users there is a segment that use the iPad mini. Sinclair, Clive: British entrepreneur and inventor with many successes to his name but most fondly remembered for the C5 electric vehicle, which, although wonderful to read about and observe, was a terrifying experience to drive. Symbiotic: A relationship where there is mutual benefit. Clearly, something to which it is worth aspiring rather than the normal “silo” mentality.
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Thought Leaders: Peter Drucker – he who made management a science: “Effective leadership is not about making speeches nor being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes.” Daniel Goleman – who gave the world Emotional Intelligence: “If your emotional abilities aren’t in hand, if you don’t have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can’t have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.” Tom Peters – the first real management guru: “If you are not confused you are not paying attention.” Michael Porter – the definitive writer on competitive strategy: “A strategy delineates territory in which an organization seeks to be unique.”
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Gary Hamel – the UK’s own guru and for whom “core competency” will be his legacy: “All too often a successful business model becomes the business model for companies not creative enough to invent their own.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb gave us The Black Swan. Some things, we simply can predict even though we might like to rationalize them after the event: “If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.” Jim Collins, who encouraged us to all get on the same bus and have audacious goals: “If you have more than three priorities you don’t have any.”
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About the Author
N
icholas Bate is passionate about supporting people to ensure they realize and release their true and full potential. It is the simple purpose of his organization, Strategic Edge. After a career in sales and marketing in the IT industry, culminating in leading sector marketing for Research Machines, Oxford, UK, Nicholas launched Strategic Edge. A pioneering “thought leader”, Nicholas has introduced and worked with his clients on a range of simple yet powerful concepts, which help with the challenges such as ever-demanding productivity, work-life balance and new routes to innovation and competitiveness. He has produced and teaches five pioneering courses: 1. Personal Excellence 2. Brilliant at the Basics of Business 3. Personal Presence 4. Leadership Excellence 5. Instant MBA
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Consistently rated as an inspirational yet highly pragmatic keynote speaker, Nicholas teaches around the world (UK and continental Europe; USA and Canada; Asia) and is particularly skilled at working in an experiential and engaging manner. He is the author of a range of acclaimed books, which are most easily available via Amazon. He has an active and inspirational yet highly practical blog with a worldwide following: www.nicholasbate.typepad.com Nicholas Bate: +44 1865 764953
[email protected] 65
This edition first published 2015 © 2015 Nicholas Bate Registered office John Wiley and Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom. For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com. The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Wiley publishes in a variety of print and electronic formats and by print-on-demand. For more information about Wiley products, visit www.wiley.com. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. ISBN 978-0-857-08521-4 (ebk) ISBN 978-0-857-08520-7 (ebk) ISBN 978-0-857-08522-1 (ebk) Set in 11 on 14pt StoneserifStd-Medium by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited
