It's not your fault....but it is your problem

Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival. W. Edwards Deming

I’ve been enjoying watching my son settle in to an executive-in-training job at a large, successful, growing national retailer that will remain unnamed but you would readily recognize by their red and white circles that make you want to find a bow and arrow.

First off I’m very impressed by how diligent they are at training their people and it explains a lot about why people shop them.

He’s recently moved to a new position at a new store under a new manager. While catching up the other day he was telling me about running head long into a situation that was left behind by his predecessor. Apparently while getting some “direction” from his manager about getting this issue resolved his demeanor, though not his words to his credit, screamed out “It’s not my fault”. His manager’s response is in the headline above.

Brilliant!

If you’re a manager, remember this pearl. It has all the basic food groups that form good management. It’s short, simple, benevolent and direct.

When you come to a fork in the road....

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it comes dressed in overalls and looks like work” Thomas Edison

“Be nimble”. “Focus or Falter”. “Opportunity knocks”. “Distractions kill”.

Mixed messages? You bet.

But if you’re going to run a successful, profitable, market-driven company you’d better get used to dealing with such dilemmas. After all, your customers want you to pay them homage by plugging in every feature they think of as they use your product. Prospects want everything (and more) that your competitor is telling them they have. Market analysts are telling you you’re going to miss the “next great thing” if you don’t give your strategy a total make over. Your investors want profits. Your employees want bonuses. You just want that gnawing in your stomach to cease.

What to do?

It’s imperative in a start up, and for that matter at any stage, to have clear and communicated objectives. Along any road you’re going to find new discoveries, opinions, criticisms, afterthoughts, doubts, moments of clarity and epiphanies. Any one of them could lead you riches or to doom. But, if you’ve identified your market opportunity, done your research and plotted your course based upon research and consensus rather than hope and guts you’ll better be able to determine which things that lie along the road to success are opportunities and which are land mines.

In other words, when you come to that fork in the road…you’ll take it.

No "do over's"

“How can you ever get better at golf if you don’t cheat?” Larry Loehrke

We all love “do over’s”. In golf they’re called a Mulligan. Hit a bad shot; take another one without counting the first. It’s harmless, just a little extra practice.

A “do over” in business though is not harmless, they’re costly. Sometimes the situation that causes the “do over” can’t be prevented because market conditions change, new competitors spring up, temporal events happen, opportunity knocks. But many times a “do over” is necessary because of mistakes, bad decisions or rash actions. And these can and should be controlled in order to cut down on the number of times you have to use a “do over”.

I once worked at a place where doing things over became an art form. The founder was always in such a hurry to get to a decision that critical facts were ignored, necessary research was squashed and round table discussions were scorned. So, we ended up rushing out with half-baked products that couldn’t stand up to the stress of production and weren’t robust enough to stand up to the competition. It seemed like we always had time to do things a second (and third) time but never time to do it once.

Now, the antithesis of this is the good ol’ paralysis by analysis where everything is researched, engineered and developed until there’s nothing left but dust. But that’s another topic for another day.

Somewhere between always having time to do things a second, third and fourth time (but never time to do it properly in the first place) and becoming jaw-locked is the magic. But it's hard because it takes someone with enough juice to battle through the "visionary", the "screamer", the "nay-sayer", the "professor" and the "consultant".

If this person is you then go in armed with a lot a facts and and pile of guts.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

“You live and learn. At any rate, you live” Douglas Adams

One of the books in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series – and subsequently a song in the movie – is titled So long, and Thanks for All the Fish. It represents a message from the dolphins who vacate the planet Earth just before its demolished. The books are really worth reading (or rereading) for no other reason than to be able to know what “The Ultimate Answer” is. But, my mission isn’t to sell more books for Mr. Adams it’s to try to make a point.

So, how can you be more like the dolphins and know how long to enjoy the fish but get out before everything blows up? This used to be primarily a problem in startups but anymore it’s just as important to figure out in big and what used to be “safe” companies.

Simon says: Take one giant step back. Back away from the Job and To Do lists and Friends and Loyalties and Paychecks (fish) and Upside Potential. Analyze your current situation the same as you would if you were first looking to go to work there, or better yet, if you were looking to invest in the opportunity.

What’s critical is to be totally honest. We all tend to see too much of both the good and the bad depending on mood and circumstance, thus the giant step backwards, for perspective.

Ask these questions:

How healthy is the company?
Is it growing?
Is it profitable?
Does it respect its customers?
Does it respect its employees?
Does it do “the right thing” (See Herb Greenberg article on MarketWatch http://www.marketwatch.com/ 10/28/07)

How healthy is your job?
How do you rate your productivity?
How do you rate your value?
Are you generally happy?
Do you recruit friends to your company for their benefit? (As opposed to yours so you’ll have a bigger support group).
When you get a call from a recruiter do you immediately think of people in your network or yourself?

Final question: In doing a good, old fashion sniff test how do the fish smell?

Wait, we can make this harder

“If you can’t explain it simply you don’t understand it well enough” Einstein

A good friend of mine is one of the best process engineers I’ve ever known. I was watching him operate the other day as he listened to a room full of people chatter, discuss, argue, fight for control of the white board and try hardily to come to some consensus opinion. Then, right on schedule, it happened. The phrase he dreads the most popped out. “Wait, we can make this easier!!”

He hates this phrase above all others because a) it usually comes from someone who won’t have to do any of the work; b) it usually comes just at the time consensus has been reached; and c) its never true.

But then, as is his talent, he wrestled his way through all the new debate, took all the data and mapped it out into a process diagram that nearly anyone could understand and follow. Really, this guy is good.

The problem is sometimes the person who utters the dreaded phrase really has had an epiphany and really can make “it” easier. So you can’t just throw the idea out – well, you can but you shouldn’t.

You may not be able to control your colleagues, but as for yourself when you feel you’ve had a brainstorm take some time, let the idea sink and see if it floats to the top again.

Then smell it…....

Competition? What competition?

“He who hesitates is not only lost, but miles from the next exit” Murphy’s Other Laws

There's a new blog out that focuses on companies that are " Tuned In" (http://www.tunedinblog.com/). In one of their posts they discuss why some new products/services fail. In this post they say "People who run tuned in companies largely ignore the competition".

Absolutely!!

This is a classic "are you market driven" scenario with Unit Sales up the Y-axis and Customer Satisfaction along the X-axis. The magic upper-right square is “Market Driven” on the “Path to Profitability”. The lower-left square is “Competitor Driven”, which of course puts it the farthest away from strong unit sales, good customer satisfaction and most damaging profitability. Why?

Chasing your competition means you’re a day late and a dollar short. Not to mention that once you’re clearly superior competitor sees that you’re chasing them you become subject to smoke screens and misdirection moves that cost you time and money and gives them great joy.

A friend of mine has this great poster of cowboys riding hell to leather down a hill with the caption, “You either make dust or you eat dust”. I grew up on a farm on a dirt road and I can tell you with certainty that eating dust is unpleasant.

Spend your time and energy paying attention to your market – your whole market. Yes, your competitors are part of that market and certainly you need to understand them and their strengths because casually dismissing your competition is just as bad as following their every move.

Spend your energy making dust.

Ten simple rules

"Hell, there are no rules here-- we're trying to accomplish something." Thomas Edison


As my kids have grown up and headed out into the work place we've gotten to have more conversations about their trials and tribulations of being wage earners. Around this I wrote for their benefit the following. I pulled this out the other day. Not for them, for me. I felt I needed a refresher. Each point is probably worthy of a blog session but let me give you the meat.

The 10 simple (well, they sound simple and should be simple but really aren’t simple) rules to being a successful employee.

1. The place you work is truly only interested in what YOU can do for them.
   Yes, good employers realize that happy, motivated, well-trained employees are great assets, but….


2. Never (ever, ever)….(ever, ever, ever) lie, cheat or steal. It will create a stigma that can never be overcome.


3. Always treat every assignment as an opportunity to learn something useful. Knowledge really is power.


4. Being positive and flexible can overcome many other faults. Most bosses greatly appreciate “can do” attitudes.


5. The people you work with want to get to know you, but, uh, not all that well. Actually they mainly want to tell you about themselves.


6. Ignore the time clock. Getting the job done should always be the priority.


7. Volunteer (without fanfare) for some real crap assignments. One, you’ll learn something. Two, you’ll show you’re flexible. But the “without fanfare” is the key.


8. You don’t have to like people to work effectively with them. You also don’t have to be subservient to people who are difficult, by the way.


9. Get to know as many people as you can (as well as understand what they do and how it affects the company, your group and you). See #3


10. If you’ve followed the first nine rules and get fired, shame on you for not getting out of that hole before it happened.
    
    Two bonus points:
    


11. Get to the point. People generally aren’t interested in the explanation, just the answer.


12. Learn to drink your coffee black (don't be high maintenance) and understand that business meals aren’t about eating (don't treat a "free" meal like dinner at home). Learn to recognize situations and adapt accordingly.

Get people to play their position

"The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that’s the way to bet” Damon Runyon

When my kids were young like all good yuppie parents we got them involved in organized sports. This of course meant soccer. Watching 6 year olds play soccer was best described as a “dance of the bumble bees” since all players from both teams swarm after the ball with varying degrees of vigor. Sometimes the ball inexplicably even goes in the net. Watching this event is amusing – for about 10 minutes. After that watching the parents and coaches is much more fun since they are much more serious about THE GAME than the kids, who would be having a great time if the coaches and parents weren’t screaming instructions at them.

Startup companies tend to be very much like soccer matches involving 6 year olds. There is so much new stuff always going on that everyone wants to be involved – with everything – all the time. Thus business tends to be a group of people all trying to do the same thing, together, all the time.

The successful startup executive must get people to play their position, because the ball is going to come their way at some point and they’ll be out of position and miss an opportunity. And where missed opportunities are important to big companies and critical to small and medium sized companies they can be deadly to startups.

Assuming you’ve hired normally intelligent and well-rounded people (and if you haven’t you have way bigger problems) you do this by COMMUNICATION. It works like this; you have a conversation with each of your key people to make sure they understand:

• their role
• how their role fits into the success of the company
• how their role fits with other roles
• why “playing their position” is critical for success
• what needs to happen before the “ball” comes their way
• what they need to be prepared to do with the ball

The total time for this conversation is about 30 minutes each. Then, a couple of times a month you refresh the conversation. That’s it, an hour per key player per month. And what you get are involved and informed partners in your start up who are on the program and ready to participate.

The total number of start up executives who actually do this?

Celebrating small

“Adventure is not always being in control” Paul Johnson

My old friend Paul Johnson arguably works harder in retirement than he did at Duquesne Systems/Legent Corporation. And he worked hard there, believe me. One of his latest missions is to sail all of the Great Lakes. He’s completed Erie, Ontario and Michigan in past years and just now has finished off Huron. Except this year he kept a journal and created a blog www.travelwithalbion.blogspot.com. Having spent a week with Paul canoeing in the wilderness of Canada I have wistfully lived this summer vicariously through his journal.

One of his later entries caught my attention with this thought: “There is a beautiful simplicity to a small sailboat. Big boats, lots of stuff, lots of problems, lots of things to fix and maintain. Big boaters are continually fixing and maintaining their stuff. They look on at Albions simplicity with envy. Frequently they will come up and tell me not about their big boat, but about that little boat they used to have.”

Companies have been compared to boats for a long time and here’s another great analogy. Big companies are like big boats, lots of stuff, lots of problems, lots of things to fix and maintain”. Also, I seldom meet a person who has successfully grown their company from small to big who don’t lament the early days.

So, if you’re one of the many who are beating your brains out trying to build your small “boat” don’t forget to enjoy the journey knowing that somewhere there is a big company CEO pining away for the days when life was smaller.

Love your customer (but lust your prospect)

“If I asked my customers what they wanted they would say ‘faster horses’” Henry Ford.

This just in! Your customers don’t always give you the best product direction.

In Pragmatic Marketing, Inc.’s e-book “The Secrets of Market-Driven Leaders” www.pragmaticmarketing.com they show a classic quadrant with Unit Sales up the Y-axis and Customer Satisfaction along the X-axis. The magic upper-right quadrant is “Market Driven” on the “Path to Profitability”. The point they're making is customer satisfaction is very important to success. There are tons of studies that discuss how much lower the cost of sales are to an existing happy customer as opposed to dynamiting out a brand new one. You want your customers to be happy and satisfied. More, you want them to be repeat buyers who are great references who sign off on their maintenance invoice without hesitation.

But, be careful letting your existing customers drive your product direction and release schedule. Unless they have a clause in their agreement of features you must produce (and shame on you for falling into that trap) you need to make sure you provide great customer support and a willing ear to their ideas – after all, they’ll be using your product more than you do.

Being market-driven means just that. You must talk to, listen to, and understand the whole market. It absolutely includes your customers as well as your prospects and the ones that got away and bought a competitive product (or did nothing).

A good “business barometer” of a healthy growth company that I learned during my formative years at ADP measures both growth in maintenance revenue (happy customers) and growth in new sales (a strong product line). In any established company this should be the goal.

Invest more, spend less

"Lack of money is the root of all evil” George Bernard Shaw

The difference between spending money and investing money is usually in the eye of the beholder. I once worked with a CFO and the running joke in the office was that the Grand Canyon was formed when he dropped a nickel down a gopher hole and went digging for it. To him any transaction that had the word “payable” attached to it was just wasting money.

I’ve also worked for some very wealthy people. They had to be because they spent real money like it was Monopoly money. Unfortunately I've worked for less than wealthy people who spent other people's money the same way.

The fact is spending money is fun; hiring bright people, having a cool office, state-of-the art equipment, leading edge marketing et al. What fun, just like a grown up company.

Unless, of course, if you're not a grown up company, you’re a start up, or a restart or a company in financial trouble. Somewhere between squeezing nickels and being cool is sanity.

I once played golf with a guy who said his father always told him to "swing easy whenever it's uphill, into the wind....and all other times". Pretty good advice for spending money too.

Ask these questions:
o What is this being used for….really?
o What business impact will spending this money have....really?
o If you spend capital on this what might have to wait....and which is more important?
o If one of your investors or board members is in the office when it/they arrive will you proudly show it/them off?
o Would you spend your own money on it/them?

Don’t get me wrong, every expenditure shouldn’t become the Spanish Inquisition but with anything that requires care and feeding or goes on a Cap Ex table you should swing easy.

Preamble

I do the Friday Quote thing I mention in my profile mainly to keep up with people. By virtue of hanging around for quite a while I’ve gotten to know a lot of people and if I can ping them a quick quote that’s either thoughtful, funny (or both) it lets them know I’m still around. A quirky form of networking, but hey, I’m from Indiana.

Since a blog allows me more space, and since you have to come to it rather than me sending it to you, I needed to decide if I could create a topic that would create even mild interest from enough people. My fear is that people won’t read it. My other fear is that people will.

Steve Johnson, from Pragmatic Marketing, (http://pragmaticmarketing.com/blogs/productmarketing) likes to call these subjects "Everything I thought everybody already knew about running a business." And that’s a good point; too many people assume too much. In fact, that’s a good topic for a future blog.

Anyway, my goal is to pass along “pearls of wisdom” as my ol’ Texas buddy Mike May likes to call them. Like real pearls they’ve been formed by a piece of grit that got stuck in a soft cavity. In these cases the grit is that old nemesis experience and the soft cavity is what passes as my psychotic grey matter.