Category Archives: Leadership

Make your 2012 Resolutions on Mercury Time

Posted on 11 January 2012 by | Leave a comment

Another year dawns… and we go through the time-honored (but not people-honored) tradition of setting New Year’s resolutions.  We set them with the best of intentions, yet forget them and quickly fail.   You can either continue with what you tried last year (did it work?) or make some changes.  This year make your resolutions on Mercury time.

Make this year different.  This year, instill revolutionary change:

  1. Be selective and intentional – not all goals are created equal.  Choose fewer goals.  Choose the right goals, those that will matter in your life and your business.  Lose 20 pounds?  Or exercise 20 minutes daily?  Grow revenue 25% annually?  Or close one new deal each week?
  2. Set goals continuously – one of the jobs of a leader is to ensure the goals are appropriate as the environment changes.  To do this effectively one cannot wait until next quarter or next year to assess the goals.  Has your team met the challenge to close a new deal a week?  Set the bar higher.  Don’t wait for the earth to circle the sun again.  Do it now.  Too hard?  Then at least consider setting goals as Mercury circles the sun (every 88 days).
  3. Track results with a vengeance – where are we?  Assuming you’ve set the right goals, ensure that progress towards meeting them is known, published publicly and discussed in the hallways.  I once worked for a company that launched a company-wide initiative but failed to report results to employees for over 9 months.  The result?  People assumed the initiative was tabled, unimportant, or worse.
  4. Celebrate often –People appreciate knowing that you noticed a goal was met.  If we fail to celebrate or acknowledge we miss one of the simplest ways to build momentum to accomplish more each day.  (Author’s confession: an area for personal development.)

The pivot point is to set fewer goals that have more meaning and to focus on them relentlessly.  If we set our aspirations on the basis of the earth’s path around the sun, we would be better suited to becoming farmers than business people.

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Posted in Best Practices, Leadership

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Customer Service… No More Monkey Business

Posted on 27 December 2011 by | Leave a comment

I had to laugh at a recent HBR blog post titled “People Are Not Your Greatest Asset”.  “Your Baby Is Ugly” would have raised fewer hackles in popular business circles.

Customer Service… No More Monkey BusinessRest assured that people are the engine that powers a company.  But people without a structure are unlikely to succeed in maximizing the value of the firm.  Consider the ‘infinite monkey theorem’ which is defined as (my thanks to Wikipedia… donate here):

“A monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.”

So yes, it makes [some] mathematical sense that people are your greatest asset in the [remote] sense that a monkey is a giant in the literary field.  Given enough time, and trying random combinations of products, services, markets, and pricing, it is possible, though unlikely, to create the next economic juggernaut.  How much better could we be if we instead developed a culture that aligned people, process and technology towards a common goal?  If we don’t align, the theorem suggests a more likely scenario where people expend time and effort which yields little.

In the end, people can be the most expensive stranded asset without leadership, vision, culture, and execution to support them.  The pivot point is that in order to create that masterpiece our people, process and technology must be aligned to work together towards a common purpose.  If we don’t, our monkey business creates gibberish not value.

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Posted in Culture, Leadership

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Fundamentals for the Greatest Possible ROI

Posted on 6 September 2011 by | Leave a comment

An uncontroversial definition says that a company’s purpose is to generate wealth for shareholders.  But shareholders would actually prefer the greatest possible ROI.    Organizations that develop teams and processes that focus on customers thrive in the face of various economic climates and fulfill the promise of maximized ROI.  Here are four necessary elements of a successful company:

  1. Employees – Employees aren’t as interchangeable as employers often believe.  Employers must match the skills and passions of people to the jobs that must be done.  Otherwise, all we do is use the wrong tool (in this case, human capital) for the job.
  2. Products – Products that meet customers’ needs, sold at a fair price can sustain a business.  The opposite is not true: businesses cannot be sustained by products that fail to meet customer needs.
  3. Communication – Epictetus is said to have remarked that “we have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.”  This truism marks the beginning of communication.  Companies would do well to listen and do vs. ignore and delay.
  4. Leadership – Leadership will be either the beginning or the end of customer service.  An executive team that focuses on growth at the expense of customer experience risks a calamity and misses additional growth.

To be sure, companies can ignore customers and survive… for a time.  The pivot point is that by executing these four pillars simultaneously, by delivering a valuable customer experience, companies maximize the ROI.  Without one element, the stability suffers.  Without two or more, it’s more likely the company will topple and fail.

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Posted in Customer Service, Leadership

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