How to recognize when you start sliding

Posted on March 11, 2011 by John.Myrna

I joined Scientific Time Sharing Corporation in 1969 to participate in the lucrative mainframe computer timesharing market. By 1978 the market for timesharing had grown, we dominated our market niche, and our customer base was providing sustained profitability and growth. We had a successful IPO and life was sweet.

In 1981 we had another successful public offering, having renamed ourselves STSC. While we were busy doing the 1980’s version of high-fiving, the market turned on us.

But we didn’t notice. Why? Because revenue continued to grow.

That revenue growth caused us to overlook that we were no longer acquiring new customers. Our continued growth was coming from our current customer’s legacy applications.

With most products, winning a new customer is achieving a design win. The new customer has identified your technology or product as the best current solution available. The customer then incorporates your product into their operation. As time goes on, your product gets embedded. The customer’s employees gain experience with your product. Customer-specific reports and subsystems get developed and it becomes relatively expensive for them to switch to a different vendor. As the customer grows, their utilization of the systems incorporating your product grows, and your revenue grows.

Consider new applications, however, where the prospect, or existing customer, doesn’t have the sunk investment. They will again look to adopt the best solution available. If that is your product, you will gain new customers. If not, you won’t.

STSC stopped obtaining a significant number of “design wins,” i.e. new customers and new applications. This was hidden from view since revenue continued to grow, fueled by existing customers and their applications. It wasn’t until existing customers started to decommission applications that it became obvious we had a significant problem.

I drew two lessons from my experience with this phenomenon.

You need to track “design wins” – i.e., new customers and applications. When the trend turns down, it’s time to act.

If your product is no longer the “best solution,” you need to resist the effort to double down on sales and marketing. Invest instead in making your product the “best solution” or transitioning to a new product. Doubling salesmen’s commissions won’t make prospects think you have a better solution.

One final thought. Organizations have two customer bases. One is the folks who pay you for providing solutions to their problems – i.e., your customers. Second is the folks who invest their careers – i.e., your employees. Inability to recruit new employees, even while retaining your current ones, is as important a warning sign as the inability to obtain new customers.

To recognize signs of “sliding,” senior management needs to review and adjust direction, focus, and their product/market strategy on an ongoing basis. The best way to do this is through a well structured strategic planning process, including effective implementation. (For more on strategic planning, review the first two chapters I wrote in the Business Expert Guide to Small Business Success.)

If you’re interested in having a facilitated strategic planning meeting that sets your strategy and launches its implementation, give us a call.

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“If only they had asked me”–how sad.

Posted on March 11, 2011 by John.Myrna

We were sitting in a doctor’s brand new office. The Physician’s Assistant came in and was quite grumpy. “The examination table is placed wrong relative to the window. The sink and power plugs are all in the wrong places. And the room is set up so I can’t move anything around to optimize my examinations.”

“If only they had asked me, it would have been so simple to do it right.”

Later we were in the treatment room and the Head Nurse was rubbing her aching back. “The protection cage is set at the wrong height, it’s going to have to be moved up a foot since I can’t spend all day bent over like this.” Moving the cage will also require moving the overhead lighting in the ceiling. “And, it sure would be nice if the laboratory was set up so we could monitor the patients without having to constantly turn around.”

“If only they had asked me, it would been so simple to do it right.”

If only. Why didn’t the partners ask? Did it matter? The lesson is simple. You need to have involvement of all the people affected by decisions. Everyone wants to be respected.

There is only one way people know they are respected. You know you are respected when and only when your opinion is solicited, understood, and considered before decisions affecting you are made.

“If only they had asked me” is the saddest phrase a manager can hear.

An End to Meeting Madness documents our decades of experience in facilitating high-stakes meetings. If you’re interested in having productive meetings that help set your strategy and keep your projects productive and on track, read the book, listen to my On-Demand webinar Run Leadership Meetings That Burst With Fresh Ideas, or give us a call.

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How good is your employee fit and finish?

Posted on March 9, 2011 by John.Myrna

Based on how well an employee “fits” their job, they can be a platinum-level player or literally a lead-level player dragging the organization down. (For more on the Platinum-Lead model read my Strategic Downsizing article.)

What makes an employee a platinum-level player? Or lead-level, for that matter? It isn’t because they are “good” or “bad.” It is about being in the right or wrong job.

When you are in the right job you act with passion. You are exceptionally competent. The requirements of the job are in alignment with your personal life.

The more examples of specific behaviors consistent with passion, competence, and alignment; the closer you are to being a platinum, gold, or silver-level employee. i.e. the better the fit between you and your job.

The fewer examples of those behaviors, the closer you are to being a bronze, tin, or even lead-level employee.

How can you assess your level? Make a list of the specific actions and behaviors that you are exhibiting on a consistent basis.

Passion:

How have you expanded the scope and impact of your job?

What are specific examples of you exhibiting curiosity?

What are the specific examples of you driving to solve problems and deliver results?

What do you say and do that signals that you are “drinking the Kool-Aid?”

What specifically have you contributed in meetings? Asking questions, suggesting additional approaches, creating ah-ha moments of insight, etc.

When have you had to have your enthusiasm cooled down a bit as you got too passionate?

Where have you “moved the bar” delivering more than what was expected – more than the minimum required?

Where have you invested your own time and money – buying books, equipment, attending classes, etc.?

Competence:

How are your specific skills and experiences aligned with the job’s requirements?

What certifications have you earned (ones that actually document your competence)?

What specific commitments have you made and delivered on?

What specific new authorities have you earned – moving from
wait –> ask,
ask –> propose,
propose –> inform after acting,
inform –> act independently
(Read Turning the Tables on Performance Reviews for more on The Authority Table model,)

What weaknesses have you overcome? Where have you filled in a gap in your skill set, experience, and/or education that your position requires?

Where have you made a major impact and how frequently are you an impact player?

Where have you prevented potential fires? (Stopping potential arsons and eliminating the need for fire fighting.)

Where have you taken advantage of opportunities to improve your knowledge, to gain new experiences, or to understand new ideas and methods?

Alignment:

How do you see your personal success entwined with your group and company’s success?

What are specific examples that demonstrate alignment between you and your manager?

What specific examples demonstrate alignment between you and the other stakeholders in your job such as customers, teammates, support staff, etc.?

What specific actions have you taken that are aligned with company core values?

What specific times did you step up to meet a special need such as staying late to meet a customer request, covering for a worker out with the flu, working odd hours, etc.?

Where have you adjusted your daily task prioritization to match the needs of the organization?

At the end of the day, it’s the specific behaviors you exhibit in your job that make you a successful employee — and that demonstrate your “fit” with a job.

In the companies I’ve worked with over the years, the employees care deeply about their company. Their actions are consistent with what they understand their leaders expect. Everyone in the organization may be responsible for success, but failure is the exclusive fault of senior management.

Senior management needs to agree on direction, decide what to focus on, and make sure the right people are in the right seats. The best way to do this is through a well structured strategic planning process, including effective implementation. (For more on strategic planning, review the first two chapters I wrote in the Business Expert Guide to Small Business Success.)

If you’re interested in having a facilitated strategic planning meeting that sets your strategy and launches its implementation, give us a call.

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Do your employees know what they are being paid for?

Posted on March 8, 2011 by John.Myrna

Many years ago I sat down with one of my employees and asked why he hadn’t made progress on his assignment. “I haven’t had the time to work on it,” he told me. I asked him what he had been working on. His answer was both informative, instructive, and insidious.

”By the time I’ve finished reading Computer World, InformationWeek, Datamation, and the other IT journals, there just isn’t that much time left in the day,” he said. Since he was busy all day, he assumed that he was earning his pay. I asked who told him to read all those journals. “No one, I just assumed it was part of my job.”

Over the years I’ve observed that you can’t assume that employees understand what they are being paid for. I will ask someone what is the most important result they are being paid to deliver. If they answer with an activity, I ask again what is the result they are being paid to produce.

A receptionist may think that his or her job is to man the front desk between 9am and 5pm, when in fact the job is to make callers and visitors feel welcome and to connect them with someone who can solve their problem quickly. Can we blame them for their confusion if their performance metrics don’t specifically include customer satisfaction?

Every employee should understand the five or so key results he is expected to produce and how they will be measured. Job descriptions should focus on the results expected rather than the activities that may or may not lead to those results. When an employee understands what those results are and feels personally accountable for them, he “owns” his job.

I’ve outlined a process for a better way to structure the job description and performance review process in an article published in the Business Strategy Series (Turning the Tables on Performance Reviews: How to Create a Better Process That Empowers, Energizes and Rewards Your Employees). Take a look, and contact me if you’d like to learn how to apply this process in your own organization.

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Small teams + tighter communications = better productivity

Posted on March 7, 2011 by John.Myrna

For over twenty years I had a love affair with APL, the world’s most productive computer programming language. APL is elegant, concise, and powerful. When embedded in the most responsive IBM mainframe timesharing system of the era, it enabled our company to literally do magic.

Using our APL*Plus System, we could walk into a prospect’s office and blow them away. The prospect would say “you’re the third salesman to tell me how you could solve our problems, how are you different?” “Well,” we would say as we plugged in our “portable” 50-pound terminal and slide the telephone handset into an acoustic coupler. “We’re going to write a program to solve your problem right in front of you.”

And we did!

We estimated that we were ten times more productive than the alternative technology. That enabled one person to to do the work the competition would require a team to do. We could reduce the communications required to coordinate implementation from many to just two – the client and the implementer.

Consider the challenge of keeping a large team coordinated. With two people there is only one communications link. With three people there are three links to maintain. With four people on the team there are six links. With five team members there are ten links. With five team members there are fifteen links.

The smaller the implementation team, the lower the overhead required for communications. But to make sure the end result is successful, you need to make sure all the stakeholder’s expectations for quality, quantity, timeliness, and cost are clearly understood.

The optimal approach for achieving this is to use well-run meetings to clarify and agree on the expected results. Then match each implementation action step with the best available person. Imagine the productivity when there is a single, personally accountable owner for each task, using the best tools to complete their task, and working with a full understanding of every stakeholder’s expectations. An End to Meeting Madness documents our decades of experience in facilitating high-stakes meetings. If you’re interested in having productive meetings that help set your strategy and keep your projects productive and on track, give us a call.

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It’s a matter of degree

Posted on March 2, 2011 by John.Myrna

One of my technical mentors was bent out of shape by Celsius.

I used to shake my head at his apparent Luddite attitude. After all, one of America’s great embarrassments is its inability to join the rest of the world in utilizing the metric system. (Multinational companies do it. The military does it. Why not the rest of American society?)

After listening to his denigration of Celsius, I finally asked why he had such a problem with it. His answer was in fact rational and quite interesting.

Consider the difference between a one-degree change in temperature. One degree Celsius is 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit. There is a loss of precision in switching to Celsius.

By the time a Celsius thermometer registers a one-degree change, people will have already felt the impact.

The performance metrics you use should warn you before something undesirable has already happened. The traditional 19th- and 20th-century financial metrics of last month’s, or quarter’s, sales and profits don’t do it. It’s like trying to drive by looking at the rear-view mirror.

Of course it’s easier to create predictive metrics if you have a clear visualization of where you are going. For a pragmatic take on how to develop, refine, and implement that visualization, review the first two chapters I wrote in the Business Expert Guide to Small Business Success.

If you’re interested in having a facilitated strategic planning meeting that sets your strategy and launches its implementation give us a call.

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Are we there yet? When will it be finished?

Posted on March 2, 2011 by John.Myrna

Here is a trick question. Assume someone is working on developing a program that will take 100 hours to finish. If they are able to devote two hours a week to the project, how long will it take to finish?

The obvious answer is 50 weeks. The correct answer is never.

Never? Yes, never! The odds are that the project requirements will change faster than the pace of implementation.

A key strategy for implementation is to set reasonable due dates. I’ve found that making sure that no major project “chunk” takes longer than nine elapsed months works best.

Successful implementations require a proper mix of:

  • features: you need to make sure there is immediate value
  • resources: you need the required quality and quantity
  • timeliness: you need to keep ahead of the curve

Implementation strategies inspired by TQM or Six Sigma start with a productive meeting among the stakeholders to set expectations for quality, quantity, timeliness, and cost. (An End to Meeting Madness documents our decades of experience in facilitating high-stakes meetings.) If you’re interested in having productive meetings that help set your strategy and keep your projects on track, give us a call.

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What the world needs now is personal accountability

Posted on August 19, 2010 by John.Myrna

Who is accountable working

What does “being accountable” mean? Chances are, one of the definitions on this list comes to mind for you:

  • Commitment and/or buy-in.
  • Completing within agreed timeframes.
  • Having the authority and resources.
  • Knowing how it ties in and communicating this with others.
  • Pride of ownership.
  • Taking action – having to do it.
  • Taking responsibility for decisions and results.
  • Willingness to review decisions.
  • Ability to account for where we are.

Whenever I ask this question in a business context, there is never any doubt that accountability means personal accountability. Yet when we link a name to a key result or action step, people invariably want to say “everyone” is accountable, or it’s “the sales department” or “Jean, Jimmy, Jose, and Jenny.” We all have trouble separating the need to implement with the help of a team from the need to have someone accountable.

The very nature of implementation requires the coordinated efforts of several team members. How can a single accountable person deal with the challenge of managing tasks dependent on several people? Here are strategies that can help:

  • One, named individual takes responsibility for delivering the final result. That person manages both their personal effort (about 50% of their time) and the assistance they receive from others (about 50% of their time).
  • Up front, the owner of the result — the responsible, accountable party — makes sure every contributor knows what he or she is expected to contribute and by when. The owner can act as a coach once the contributors are on board, understanding and committing to delivering their piece of the puzzle.
  • The owner takes responsibility for 100% of communications, making sure the contributors understand the importance and impact of any memo, email or report.
  • The owner is proactive in making sure that the contributor is on track to deliver.
  • The owner pushes to simplify tasks, reassign tasks, call others in to help, or brainstorm if a contributor runs into any snags.

The key to successful implementation is two fold:

  1. The team agrees that the results they have promised to deliver are important and strategic.
  2. A single, passionate, named individual is accountable for the result and is proactive about making sure it happens.

For additional thoughts on how to establish accountability with the people to whom you delegate, read our article on strategic delegation, recently published in Employment Relations Today.

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Why do people resist change?

Posted on August 4, 2010 by John.Myrna

I believe that one of the reasons people resist changing the status quo is because every change creates winners and losers — and creates an uneven decision-making field. Studies have repeatedly documented that people’s decision-making is impacted three to five times more heavily by the probability of losing than by the probability of winning.

When you want to sell an idea, you focus on the myriad of positive outcomes while minimizing or denying any potential downsides. On the other hand, when you want to kill an idea, all you have to do is enumerate all the real or perceived downsides.

Allowing the fear of losing to prevail locks you into the status quo, a position that external events can eventually make untenable. Take, for example, a union’s relentless focus on holding on to past gains regardless of their company’s ability to remain financially viable and avoid bankruptcy.

Minimizing or denying all the potential downsides can leave you with a huge mess to clean up after you implement the change. Witness the auto industry’s relentless focus on the price of a part, regardless of its longer-term impact on overall product quality or supplier base viability.

To successfully change the status quo, you need leadership and a safe forum where all the real and potential negatives can be aired, thoroughly understood, and addressed. Over the past two decades, we at Myrna Associates have identified and refined the elements that enable teams to change the status quo for the better in their organizations.

Thirty-four years after my first encounter with strategic planning, I continue to be struck the power of that process to shake up the status quo in a positive way.

The right rules, roles, and process will consistently deliver results. You can find specific answers in the articles on our web site and our books on Strategic Planning and Meeting Management.

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Do you hire the best or the best available?

Posted on August 3, 2010 by John.Myrna

When you’re recruiting to fill a key position, there is a natural impulse to fill the position as soon as possible. Giving in to this impulse can lead to filling the position with someone who lacks the optimal mix of passion, competence, and personal alignment with the job’s requirements.

When you hire a “best available” candidate, the next year or two is usually devoted to the effort of fitting that square peg into a round hole. Denial gives way to anger and negotiation and finally acceptance that “hiring mistakes were made.” The employee sees the light and leaves, or is removed from the job — and the costly hunt for a replacement starts anew.

You are always better off paying the short-term price and continuing to search until you identify a candidate who is the best for the job rather than the best available candidate.

For more insight on identifying what a candidate needs to excel in a job, see The Authority Table™ section of my article on performance reviews.

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