Efficiency is NOT Enough

One must, however, not just work hard. One must work smart. As the saying goes, the efficient person gets the job done right, but the effective person gets the right job done. – John-Roger and Peter McWilliams

While sitting at home wearing my Rich Gannon number 12 jersey watching the Raiders beat the Cardinals 31-3 Thursday evening, I took a keen interest in how Sam Adams was playing for the Raiders. As the most recent member of the team signed, he has only been in training camp for about a week as opposed to the four weeks the rest of the team has been there. He reported to camp weighing 340 pounds, which is big even for an NFL defensive lineman. Because he is still a bit out of shape, he was running off the field after every play to sit the next play out, then running back on the field to rejoin the game. He would breathe from an oxygen mask as soon as he got to the sideline, and was visibly tired. Raider announcer Sean Jones remarked on this situation- he said that he remembered that as a player, running off the field after every play actually was more work than staying in the game to play consecutive downs. I came to think that the effort to reduce the workload for Sam Adams actually generated more work for him.I then thought about the things that I do that I think of as saving me time and energy, but actually are more work than the alternative. I lost my TV remote control a few weeks ago, and rather than just get up to change the channel, I spent 30 minutes turning my living room upside down looking for it. I eventually found it in the kitchen, but by the time I did I was both frustrated and annoyed, and I had spent a full inning of the Dodger game looking for the remote control when I didn’t even have a desire to change the channel.While I have suspicions that my two examples are activities that weren’t very effective, I decided to take it one step further. I measured the extra work that was done due to the manner in which these situations played out. Sam Adams ran on and off the field at least 10 times each way, running about 20 yards each time, so he ran approximately 400 yards. If he had stayed on the field, for the same number of plays he would have only had to run on and off the field twice each way, thus only running 160 yards. He ran an extra 240 yards in an effort to conserve energy. I spent approximately 30 minutes looking for my remote control, walking all over my apartment. To change the channel, it would take only about 10 seconds, so I would have had to change the channel 180 times before it justified spending that long looking for the remote control. The biggest problem with these situations isn’t that work was done poorly- Sam Adams ran about as fast as a 340 pound defensive lineman can, and I did a pretty thorough job of searching my apartment. The problem lies with the decision that was made to undergo these tasks instead of a more effective means of accomplishing the same end result.Those of you who aren’t football fans or couch potatoes are probably thinking, “Funny story Matt, but what does that have to do with my business?” Think for a moment about how often we as business people do these exact same things at work. How often do you undertake an activity with the stated goal of saving time, effort, or money and actually wind up spending more time, effort, and money? What can you do to streamline your operations to reduce wasted time and effort? While some activities might pop immediately into your head, not everything we do that can be improved upon is immediately apparent. There are five key steps to identifying waste in your operation and making your business not only efficient, but effective as well.1) Determine what you want to accomplish
You must first know what it is you want to do before you know if your activities are working or not. If you are advertising in the newspaper or on the radio, what result do you want to obtain from these ads? Is it a certain number of customers you want to acquire? If you are producing a physical product, how many do you want to manufacture and how long do you want it to take? If you are making sales calls, how many calls do you want to make and how many people do you want to speak with? Once you have figured out what it is you want to achieve, you can start to look at how you currently achieve these results.2) Measure the effort you are putting into your activities
Now you should measure the effort you put into your current activities. If it is advertising to acquire new customers, calculate how much you currently spend on advertising for each new customer you gain. If you spend $2000/month and gain 10 new customers, you are spending $200 per new customer. If you are producing a physical product, and it currently takes you one week to produce 10 of them, you know it takes ½ a day to manufacture each item. If you make 20 sales calls, and speak with 4 prospects in two hours, you know you must make about 5 calls to speak to one person and you can make 10 calls an hour with your current methods.3) Compare these results to your goals
If you spend $200 per new customer and gain 10 new customers a month, but you want to spend only $125 per new customer and want to get 16 new customers a month, you know that you need to change your advertising if you are going to meet this goal. If you want to produce 15 pieces a week instead of 10, you know you must decrease your manufacturing time from ½ a day per item to a 1/3 of a day per item. If you only have 2 hours to make sales calls and you want to reach 8 people, you know you must be more effective with your calling efforts.4) Identify waste in your operations
If there is a difference between your desired results and your actual results, you know that you are wasting efforts in some respect. For the advertising example, perhaps your media mix can be adjusted to reach a better audience for your products and services. If you are manufacturing products, there may be limitations in the physical layout of your operations that slow your operation down. If the 2 hours you spend making calls are in 15 minute segments spread throughout the week, you may be wasting some time in preparing for calls multiple times throughout the week instead of just once.5) Eliminate the waste
If you have come to realize that your product sells best to women aged 18-30, and you are currently advertising in AARP magazine, you are likely wasting your advertising dollars- shift them to a marketing vehicle that makes more sense for your target audience. If you noticed that you have to move materials across your shop in a zig zag pattern while assembling the parts, try changing the layout of your operation so you don’t have as much wasted energy moving things around. If you get a lot of incoming phone calls that interrupt your outbound sales calls, try switching your phone to send all incoming calls to voicemail before you start making your calls.If the Raiders had done this, Sam Adams would certainly have been more refreshed on the sidelines, and if I had followed this advice I would have just gotten up to change the channel and would have enjoyed an inning of Dodger baseball rather than grabbing a flashlight to look under my couch.We live in a society that moves at the speed of fiber optics. Information is flying at us from all directions. We constantly have to prioritize what is urgent critical or merely important. Today being efficient just isn’t enough. We need to find ways to be more effective.

Paralyzed by Fear

Are You Waiting…

for someone to lead and inspire you?
for the boss to recognize you?
for clients to thank you?
for coworkers to help you?
for prospects to find you?
for the world to hail you?Well here’s a news flash…. They are all just sitting there waiting for you.Someone recently asked me, what I felt was the biggest challenge for marketers today? My answer was complacency. Websters dictionary defines complacency as contentment and self satisfaction. You might say, “Hey hold on there Deo! Isn’t that what we are striving for as entrepreneurs and small business owners? Shouldn’t it be our ultimate goal to be content and satisfied with our business, finances, family and life?”I say, NO.When we become content and satisfied, we no longer have any motivation to get better.We drop our guard. We become OK with achieving the minimum. Unfortunately in today’s competitive environment achieving the “minimum” in the short term may just not be good enough to “survive” in the long term. This can be very dangerous in the fast paced, high risk, volatile economy of the 21st century. You may be thinking, “that sounds a little scary, Mark.”It is.Many people today are saying that fear is bad. I agree that too much fear can be debilitating, just as a complete lack of satisfaction can create disappointment and disillusionment. There are no absolutes. But if we completely eliminate fear from our lives, we lose some of our most base instincts. Think about when you first started your business or your first day on the job. Weren’t you a bit apprehensive? Didn’t you have some fear? You probably found yourself asking questions like, what if this doesn’t work? What will I do if I fail? What if my coworkers or clients don’t like me? Can I really compete? Do I really have the skills necessary to succeed at this?I think you would agree that this is the GOOD kind of fear. The fear that drives us to greater levels of performance. Fear that motivates us. It’s the kind of fear that makes us have more apprehension for things staying the way they are rather than bringing about change.What does this have to do with marketing, you might ask. Successful marketing must allow us to significantly differentiate ourselves from our competition. We need to look different, sound different and be different. We need to go beyond the expectations of our clients and prospects. We must be willing to always be a bit uncomfortable with the way things ARE if we want to change. We can not be content with waiting for change. We can not be satisfied with the most comfortable option.Here are some very specific things that you can do to make fear the friend that you consistently court, rather than the foe that you chronically avoid:1. When things look bleak don’t deny reality, accept it and begin to develop some options. Write them down and take action to change things rather than waiting for them to get better.2. Don’t allow yourself to be forced into change. Make the decision to bring about change BEFORE you are swept-up in the maelstrom.3. Find someone that you can mentor. Taking this leadership role with even just one person will allow you to see the power of fear and change in another person. In the end, this will make it much easier for you to cope with fear and embrace change.4. Look for situations where others are positively dealing with fear and change. Give them the recognition they deserve for coping with their changing environment. This will reinforce your own values.5. Change the way you celebrate achievements.Typically, we set goals, we work hard at achieving them, we reach them and we celebrate. We are content and satisfied with a job well done. Hopefully when the party’s over we set new goals and the cycle starts all over again. But shouldn’t we be setting new goals BEFORE we pop the cork on the Champaign?6. Be an evangelist for your company, product or service. Ask yourself, how YOU change peoples lives for the better. Focus on this. NOT features and benefits.7. Be a catalyst for change with everyone that you meet. Look for ways that you can help them to cope with the fear and change in their lives.8. Don’t try to eliminate all stress in your life. Like my old boss, Sue Schneider used to say, “Stress is good, DISTRESS is bad.” If we try to completely eliminate stress and fear in our lives we will be sadly disappointed. On the other hand if we find ways of coping with stress and fear, we will amass for ourselves resources of great value.9. Be the first. Decide from this day forward that YOU will be the first to initiate change in your organization and even at home. You will lead and inspire. You will give compliments and provide recognition. You will thank your clients and vendors. You will lend a hand to help fellow workers. You will seek prospects whose businesses and lives can be improved by your company, product or service.I hope this helps you to begin see fear as a friend and change as the precursor to growth.

The Death of Corporate America

Remember the old days?

Our fathers and grandfathers worked for the same company for 20, 30 or even 40 years. Generations of sons and daughters toiling under the protective arms of the “COMPANY.”

Today it’s more likely that we will outlive any organization that we work for.

It has snuck up on us. We turned our head and all of a sudden Corporate America is dying.

It is the result of a powerful force that has emerged in our society. Not a company or a new technology or even a new industry. It is the evolution of workers themselves. For the first time in history, there are more workers operating as “free agents” than there are people working for Corporate America. Fortune 500 companies no longer form the bedrock of our workforce.

How Has This Happened?
This evolution has been rapid and decisive. It has occurred for a number of reasons. First, the social contract of job security has long been broken. Jobs are no longer sacrosanct at Fortune 500 companies. One day these firms are in expansion mode and the next they’re “laying off” 35,000 workers. Second, e-commerce and automation technologies have leveled the playing field so that smaller companies with less people could provide the same benefits as larger multi-national firms. This resulted in corporate re-structuring and downsizing. And finally the loyalty/security pact of the previous five decades has been broken. This was evidenced in the mid nineties when IBM broke it’s “full employment policy” by reducing it’s payroll by a whopping 120,000 employees. In this century, being loyal to a company does not guarantee job security.

What Does The Future Hold?
Today the largest private employer in America is not Ford, General Motors, or even Microsoft. It’s Milwaukee’s Manpower Inc., a temporary help agency with over 1,100 office throughout the United States employing over a million workers. Temporary staffing has grown from a $1 billion industry to more than $80 billion while employing over ten million temps nationwide. It is estimated that there are over 33 million solo, self-employed workers. And there is an emergence of a new category called micro businesses. These are small businesses employing just 2 or 3 people to drive particular initiatives on either a full or part time basis. In fact, more than half of today’s companies have fewer than 5 employees! Don’t look to our government to reconcile this societal evolution. They’re a full century behind. The Bureau of Labor and Statistics still divides all workers into two categories: farm and “non-farm.” Figure that out.

What Free Agents Love
The work ethic of free agent entrepreneurs is considerably different than corporate employees. These entrepreneurs crave, freedom, control, security, and loyalty. If you think about it, these are the very job benefits lacking in Corporate America. Today free agents come in a variety of forms, entrepreneurs, independent contractors, consultants, advisors, 1099ers, hired guns, nomads, etc. But their focus is on producing a measurable result for an organization rather than performing a specific role within it. Free agents tend to provide a higher return on investment for organizations because of their accountability to themselves rather than to a hierarchy.

Freedom
Freedom is the ability to exercise one’s own will. Within the corporate cocoon freedom takes on the meaning that the company as a whole projects. Some companies smother their employees in affection others try to purchase individual freedom with stock options and incentives. Free agents can choose to follow their own work ethic. This extends not only to what they believe, what they do and where they do it but also WHEN they do it. Free agents have succeeded in melding work time with home time. Gone is the Monday through Friday 9am to 5pm ritual. Today they balance a full time home life with a full time work life.

Control
Life in Corporate America is about lining up behind the company culture and philosophy. Free agents can control their own destiny. Consequently they develop skills in areas which they desire to excel. They build relationships with those that match their business culture and paradigm. They focus on selling insight, talent, expertise, ideas, creativity and solutions rather than just performing tasks. They realize that what matters in the course of a day is what is accomplished not how many hours are worked.

Security
The last decade has been one of prosperity. Members of Corporate America had job security but that prospect is diminishing. While a high standard of living has reached deep into middle class many members of Corporate America do not feel that their lives have improved. This dichotomy has altered our expectations of comfort and prosperity. People are looking forward to more than just a comfortable retirement after four or five decades of “work.” People are realizing that it’s not good enough to work to make money and survive. They desire to work to make meaning for themselves and their families.

Loyalty
With free agents loyalty does not run up and down an organizational chart. It runs from side-to-side in allegiance to clients, colleagues, teams, projects, vendors and industries. In this sense free agents are far more loyal than company men and women. Companies can also afford to be more loyal to free agents because they lack the overhead that employees bring. Both benefit from the free agent structure because whereas vertical loyalty within an organization depended on one connection (boss and employee) this new horizontal loyalty depends on many connections.

How It Impacts YOU!
In the end I believe that we will see the free agent philosophy infiltrate every industry, profession and area of expertise. Those that are most prepared for this transition will benefit the greatest. Think about your own business. How could you use the “free agent mentality” to bring efficiencies to your business? If you’re an employer, how could you increase productivity and reduce overhead by employing free agents? If you’re an employee, how could you deliver greater production to your employer and increase your earning capacity by utilizing the above free agent infrastructure?

Team Innovation

Today, businesses large and small like to say they are “team oriented” (whatever that means). I guess it means they work in teams. Big deal. Does that improve their performance? Does that mean that the quality of their product or service is better than the competition? Does that allow them to complete a project more timely, profitably or effectively? Is teamwork really a better way to go about solving problems than say the “hermit” approach? What about Thomas Edison or Leonardo DaVinci or Alexander Graham Bell?

If you’ve ever worked on a team you know there is one thing that can not be avoided: CONFLICT. At some point someone is going to disagree with somebody else and then, look out! Getting to a simple solution can take hours or days while these two “team-members” fight over minutia. Sound familiar?Let’s face it, often times, teams can hit roadblocks that can sabotage their success. There are a number of things that can be done to ensure good teamwork:Conflict is GoodAs team leaders we must not allow ourselves to think that we solely carry the burden of resolving conflict. I see so may managers, owners and team leaders rush to squish the most subtle sign of conflict within their team. Without conflict we can not reach the best solution. This also places us in a patronizing, parental position that encourages your team members to abdicate personal responsibility for resolving conflict. It keeps them from developing the skills to necessary to grow, mature and hold each other accountable. Allow the team to detect conflict and manage only those that escalate.Guidelines for Managing ConflictAs leaders we need to model guidelines that set the tone for resolving conflict. In this way we will be educating our team members to take responsibility. These should include:

No personal attacks
No heated outbursts
No backbiting
No hostile assumptions

Establishing Expectations
Over the years I have noticed that communicating expectations to the team is paramount in achieving exceptional team performance. The following are areas that team leaders should develop clear expectations for members:1. Work methods – Make sure your team knows the methods and procedures you expect them to follow when completing the job. If they do not they may frustrate themselves by taking the “long route” and end up disillusioned.2. Deadlines – Make sure that the team fully understands the time frame for completion. This should include non-negotiable dates as opposed to to dates that can slip.3. Responsibilities – Ensure that every team member understands their role in the team process. This should be communicated one-on-one with each team member prior to establishing the team. Also ensure that the team members responsibilities are consistent with the teams responsibilities.4. Priorities – It is critical that team members know the proper priorities. What’s to be done first, second and so on.5. Performance – Paint a picture of the outcome for the team. Show them a vision of a “good” job vs. a “bad” job. Make sure they understand the degree of effort that you expect them to each contribute to the successful solution.6. Measurement – Establish a system to measure performance in small increments.7. Communication – Establish a format for consistent communication with the team. This forum will give you the ability to ask the right kind of questions to determine whether the team is “on-track.” At this pint you can provide feedback to the team and make suggestions on course correction.8. Resources – Make sure that your team members understand the resources that are available to them. This could include staff, facilities, technology, equipment, outside consultants and so on. Encourage them to use the resources to their best advantage but in a cost effective way in order to achieve their goals.As leaders it’s our job to foster innovation. Team members look to us for confidence, guidance, direction and innovation. What can you do to set the stage for creative thinking in the teams that you lead? How can you get your team to discover the best solutions in the most cost effective manner. Remember teams are not just resources, they are people. As I have said many times, we line in an age of relationships. How can you create relationships that go beyond just getting the job done. How can you create relationships that can produce the kind of Edison, Bell and DaVinci innovation.

Office Politics

Someone asked me the other day: “Mark what do think is the biggest challenge for small businesses today?”

I didn’t have to think about this very long. I know they were expecting me to say something about: the affects of the economy or the stock market or the impact of technology or the lack of funding or resources or even the breakneck speed which we are expected to operate at.But the reality is that these are relatively minor forces when compared with the most powerful force of all:Office Politics!If you could walk with my consultants and I, in and out of businesses we each see everyday you would see the obvious yet devastating result of office politics. I believe it is by far the biggest obstacle to change and growth for companies today. Not that this is new. Office politics has been with us for decades. But the changing financial, political and social landscape makes it more insidious than ever and literally threatens the survival of many small businesses and even larger organizations.Why? Because of the exorbitant cost associated with office politics.The cost of office politics is a kind of activity-based cost. It includes time lost, waste of resources, low staff morale and ineffective delegation. Some of these costs are tangible but not accountable. Often time this kind of loss is ignored or neglected. Since many political activities are cross-departmental, office politics can render an organization completely dysfunctional in a very short period of time. While it is usually unwise to let office politics freely develop, unfortunately many companies cannot tackle such a political problem and let it erode their productivity and profitability and sometimes even endanger their survival.Office politics is about the application, distribution and negotiation of power and resources in an organization. This power includes authority (formal power) and influence (informal power). Politics is basically the application of that power. The desire for power is determined by one’s personality. Leaders can affect this principal in every organization. Strong, ethical leadership regulates the application of informal power (i.e. influence) to avoid the overuse and abuse of authority. Abuse of authority will lead to a chain of negative effects such as low staff morale, conflict, bias, bad image, poor communication, dishonesty and social conflict.When ethical leadership exists, office politics will abate. This is because ethical leadership is essentially self-management and self-control as an example for subordinates to follow. It is the strongest influence for change in any relationship. As I’ve said before, leaders act the way they want their team members to act. Cultural actions cannot be ordered or commanded. Most political office issues are symptoms of weakness at the senior management and organization level.While every organization is different, most have some type of definable culture. Some call this the organization design. It is essentially referring to the general distribution and structure of authority, responsibilities and resources in the organization. Poor organizational design is a common cause of office politics because ineffective organizational structure allows too much room for the negotiation for authority and resources.The organization chart in the business leader’s mind is far more important than the official one. Ricky W.O. Lau, author of Politics in Business calls it the “hidden organization chart.” Often times this means that the leader has bias and personal favor to individual members but does not act openly and his delegation is based on the hidden organizational chart rather than the official one. This is a common yet unfair and very detrimental management practice.While delegation is the distribution of specific work, responsibilities and authority, in an effective organization, delegation must be based on the organizational structure. Otherwise, there would be structural overlap, confusion, conflict and politics. Conflict usually involves different interests of different people (especially in different departments). Conflict may be minimized if the focus is on the whole organization rather than individual department or individuals. Some management styles may easily lead to office politics because the focus is on the performance of individuals and departments rather than the organization as a whole.Certainly interdepartmental conflict cannot be completely eliminated. Nor should we attempt to do so. It is important to remember that disagreement is not equivalent to conflict. People may disagree or criticize others if:

They view the matter from another viewpoint
They have misunderstood other’s meaning
They want improvement
They want to challenge others’ position or power.

Out of the above four motives of disagreement, only the last one is the result of conflict and is a political motive. However, when a manager is too politically sensitive, he may mistakenly treat the first three motives as political motives, and interpret the conflict as an intention to challenge his position or power.Desire of power may be a strong motive to perform, but it may also lead to a negative and destructive result. An effective manager should apply his influential power rather than authority because abuse and overuse of authority can lead to poor relations, distrust, misunderstanding and disorganization.Are office politics an issue in your business? If any of these symptoms are present in your business, its time to think about making some core changes to your business culture. At the Small Business Advisory Network we like to say that we influence decisions, improve performance and inspire change. That’s what our consulting, workshops, web site, weekly articles and The Small Business Hour Radio Show are all about.

Failing to Fail

Are you doing the same things you did a year ago? Are you doing things the same WAY you did them a year ago? If so you’re bound to fail. Not that failure is bad mind you. The sooner you fail in fact, the better off you’ll be. So raise a glass with me and let’s toast all of our failures past, present and future! Ahhhh drink deep. Now wasn’t that thirst quenching? No?

Let’s face it, our culture doesn’t reward failure. We condemn it. Our condemnation is so prolific that most folks do whatever they can NOT to fail. They shudder to even speak of a failure to associates. They train themselves in fact to not even THINK about failing. It’s not an option! We walk around telling everyone who will listen to us about all of the great successful things we have accomplished in our lives. We have convinced ourselves that we must continue to succeed and more so, that we must become innovators.

Innovate or Die
In fact innovation has become kind of a buzz-word in our society. We hear, “innovate or die.” What about “innovate AND die?” All the excitement about all things new has obscured the fact that most new ideas fail while most old ideas are still with us. With hundreds of breakfast cereals introduced every year how could it be that Cheerios and Wheaties still outsell them all? Why are Beanie Babies a faint memory yet Play-Doh is still a best seller? Evolution? Survival of the fittest? Maybe.Is there a way to combine innovation with proven methods? We’re all familiar with the old Rudyard Kipling quote: “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing the same way time after time and expecting a different result.” In this shrinking economy, it stands to reason that we need to do things differently. We all know we have to get creative, but how? How can we harness our creativity to create success rather than failure? Or better yet how can we train ourselves to endure our failures yet remain focused on the hope of a successful outcome?Not Creativity but Productivity
The truth is that creativity is less about wild talent and more about productivity. To find a few ideas that work you need to try a lot that don’t. Successful people don’t have a higher success rate. They just do more and they do a range of DIFFERENT things. Research shows that the success of individual geniuses like Mozart, Shakespeare, Picasso, Einstein, and Darwin himself, is best understood from an evolutionary perspective, where excellence results from “a range of differences.” These famous creators generated a wider range of ideas and completed more products than their contemporaries. They also followed proven methods in order to accomplish them. They didn’t succeed at a higher rate than others. They simply did more. So they had both more successes and more failures.An Example
A similar philosophy helps explain the success of Capital One, which has been called the most innovative credit-card company in the world. Just a few years ago, all credit cards were pretty much the same; you could have whatever you wanted as long it cost $20 per year and had an interest rate of 19.8 percent! Capital One has been the leader in offering thousands of different credit cards, with varying rates, and limits, which are targeted at people with different beliefs, hobbies, and affiliations: “They tinkered with credit lines, mileage awards, with the design of the cards, and with the color of the envelopes of their mailings. They tried different ways of retaining customers and pursuing deadbeats. Essentially they made Capital One an endless experiment.” The company tried about 45,000 experiments in the year 2000, for example. Capital One has succeeded by targeting smaller and smaller audiences for these experiments, like a “platinum MasterCard for middle-income hikers who drive Saturn automobiles.” Most of these ideas fail, but the constant experimentation with one variant after another, and constant learning, are big reasons why Capital One has over 30 million credit-card accounts.Repackaging the Old
The other thing about innovation and creativity is that success is not usually the result of totally new ideas as it is the repackaging of old ideas in new ways, places and combinations. IDEO which is probably one of the most innovative companies in the world, has developed more than 4,000 products for firms in all kinds of industries. Their designers are constantly mixing and matching technologies to produce creative new solutions. One IDEO development group got the idea to create a “slit valve” for a bicycle water bottle out of a heart valve that was made for a medical products company. Henry David Thoreau said, “The question is not what you look at, but what you see.” When you look at your product or service offerings what do you see? What do your customers see? Better yet what should they see?Challenge Accepted Practices
Often times ideas that are born from this kind of haphazard creativity are diametrically opposed to “accepted” practices. Entrepreneurs start new companies partly because they are purported to be more innovative, free from the pressures in established firms to follow ingrained precedents. Yet entrepreneurs can fall prey to ingrained habits just like managers in big firms. Don’t be afraid to challenge accepted practices. I’m not talking about a free-for-all but rather controlled experimentation in order to cultivate innovation. Some of the greatest inventions in the world were a result of an extra component here and there pieced together. Thomas Edison said, “To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.”Here’s some advice that will help to promote creativity and innovation:

Expose yourself to new ideas. Increase the variance of your available knowledge. Study other industries that face the kind of challenges you face.
See old things in new ways. Don’t just get OUT of the box. Walk around it. Look at the top. Don’t be afraid to pick it up and look at the bottom.
Break from the past. Stop talking about your past successes and hoping the history will repeat itself. We stand in a new place today a place we have never been and will never be again.
Understand that creativity as all about productivity. Be willing to turn the focus to more rather than better at times.
Embrace failures. Reward failures. Plan to fail – knowing that success in just one more failure away.
Challenge accepted practices. Become a tinkerer.

Play with these ideas in your mind and experiment with a few in your company. Treat them like toys that you might buy to mess around with: Try to break them, try to take apart the pieces to see how they work, try to improve them, and mix them (or parts of them) with your other toys. I offer these ideas not as immutable truths, but as methods that have helped other companies produce beautiful and profitable mutations, and that just might help your company as well.

Decisions, Decisions

It’s no wonder decision making is so difficult for people today. We’re inundated with overchoice.

I’m not a big cereal eater. In fact I rarely have cereal in the morning. I usually opt for egg whites and some turkey. But that has become a bit boring as you can imagine so this week I thought, what the heck I’ll try some cereal. I went to the local market to get some and told my wife I’d be right back. I was shocked at what confronted me: an entire isle filled with different types of cereal. How could there be so many different types of cereal? Why? For what reason?After staring open mouthed at the shelves filled with every type of cereal imaginable I thought, “OK I’ll just stick with Tony the Tiger.” You know the old standby, Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes. I became numb when I discovered that there are actually three different types of Frosted Flakes. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I realized I said aloud to the dismay of a fellow shopper. “Come on is this necessary?”After 15 minutes of weighing the nutritional daily allowance, fiber content and comparing the grams of NutraSweet, saccharine and fat for each, I opted for the box with the coolest looking cartoon and of course, the one with the prize (a throwback to my kindergarten days).Sound familiar? And its not just cereal, its everything! Why do we have so many choices? Because we are barraged with so much information that it makes every choice more difficult than ever before. And more time consuming. Companies must respond to information by making choices and ultimately decisions. Yet time after time they freeze. Too often their choice is INDECISION.Today making decisions is the most important skill for any entrepreneur and small business owner. Did I say SKILL? Is decision making really a skill? I think so. Can good decision making be learned? Yes! Decision making is a skill that can be acquired with practice.There are some basic precepts to good decision making. I say follow the six basic rules of good decision making:

Get all the facts and weigh the assets and liabilities to each course
Get professional advise and opinions
Make decisions quickly
Don’t make a habit out of reversing decisions
Accept the risk, stress and conflict that comes with making decisions
Make decisions that produce change

Why don’t people like to make decisions? Most would say they DO make decisions. But ask them if they make decisions quickly and they would say, NO WAY! This is true. Most people are conditioned AGAINST making decisions quickly. They associate making a fast decision with a bad decision. They delay and the opportunity slips away.Consider this… When you delay a decision you never have the same decision to make again because in this information-intensive culture, the facts are different the next day and the next week. But people often delude themselves into thinking that they can wait to make a decision and that nothing much will change. Time passes and so does the opportunity. Don’t get me wrong I’m not talking about making snap decisions. I’m talking about getting all the facts, weighing the assets and liabilities to each decision, getting professional advise and opinions and then making a decision.Good managers make decisions quickly and change slowly. We are all looking for the “risk-free” decision Let’s face it all decisions involve risk. Most people, unfortunately are risk adverse. We want to wait until “all the data” is in. We want the decision to gently rise to the top in an unmistakable fashion. The problem is that we will never get all the data in. The decision simply will not rise to the top. The data is changing from minute to minute. “All the data” is a concept like infinity. You can approach it but never get there. Risk can no longer be eliminated from the decision making process.Decision making needs to be redefined as an exercise of risk management. But how do you eliminate the stress that comes with change? You don’t! When you make a decision you create change. When change happens people go into stress. It is undeniable. Unfortunately, however, people view stress today as a negative feeling and try to eliminate it from their lives. What we should all be working on is not eliminating stress but coping with the stress that change produces. If you think about it people NEED to be in stress.We’ve all heard the stories about the poor guy that retires and within a month or two, he has a heart attack and dies or falls prey to depression. Why? Because he’s removed all of the stress from his life. He’s stopped changing, stopped being productive and consequently his lack of decisions, change and stress has cause a lack of meaning in his life.The opposite of stress is not comfort and health, it’s apathy and atrophy. Back in the old days when I was working for the man (or the woman in this case) I would often say to my boss, “Man, I’m stressed.” And in her infinite wisdom, good old Sue Schneider would tell me, “Mark stress is good, distress is bad.” Thanks Sue. Just look up the meaning of these words in the dictionary.Distress – pain, suffering affliction, state of trouble.Stress – mental or physical tension, urgency, a force that is exerted.Which sounds healthy? Look at the stress that comes with change as a catalyst for growth. What can we do if our decisions produce conflict? This is a natural course. Our tendency is to second guess our decisions and quickly reverse them if they produce conflict. Unfortunately most people begin to regret their decisions and take steps at reversing them rather than deal with the conflict. Indecisiveness destroys credibility! Employees attitudes become, “this too shall pass” and view our decisions as just a wave that will roll back to shore. They become cynical and see no reason to adapt to change. Don’t fall prey to this deadly sin.Deal with the conflict that decisions ultimately will cause and watch change occur around you. This is precisely what I focus on in my consulting practice… bringing about change within small businesses by helping management make better decisions. I help business owners and managers to make a habit out of making good decisions. I also try to fold this strategy into my classes and workshops.Give yourself every opportunity for success this year. Check out our web site for our next Entrepreneurial Workshop and get pre-registered. If nothing else I guarantee that it will be a great way to start the year with a positive first step.Those of you that have attended any of my classes know that they are energy packed and you walk out motivated and cranked-up!

Standard of Care

For several years many small business owners have asked me the same questions:

“How can I grow my business without significant capital investment?”

“What can I do to stabilize the trends in my business?”

“How can I out-market my competition in the midst of price erosion?”

“How can I maintain a consistent level of revenue to ensure a consistent level of profit?”

“Why are my people loyal one day and turncoat the next?”

“What can I do to motivate my staff to invest more time and effort in effectively selling or delivering my product or service?”

“How can I eliminate excuses and inspire commitment?”Because these are the most frequently asked questions, I have invested considerable time and effort in seeking out the EXPERTS and learning their methods in dealing with these challenges.I have made it my mission to vigorously study the masters in management, sales and marketing. The philosophy that I espouse is an amalgamation of what I have learned DIRECTLY from the leaders in business, such as: Tom Peters, Jack Welsh, Stephen Covey, Peter Drucker, Zig Ziglar, Tom Hopkins, Jay Abraham, Tony Robins, Morris Shechtman and many others. I have found that while these business gurus have different approaches, they all seem to agree on six absolutes of successful business management in the 21st Century:1. We are entering an age of uncertainty, expanding knowledge and unrelenting change.
For these reasons, what worked in the past will no longer work in the future. Even the most successful companies must commit to continuous improvement. Uncomfortable introspection must become a habit – -a willingness to eliminate dysfunctional behaviors, and a determination to model a culture that can tolerate unpredictability, uncertainty and vulnerability. Old methods must be torn down and new paradigms constructed.2. “WHO we are” is far more important than WHAT we do.
The increase in knowledge and change has created an “Intra-personal Revolution.” Individual performance and quality of life will reach new heights by focusing on the internal frontier within each person. A good product or service is no longer adequate. We must leverage relationships and personal values to gain cooperation and market share. Leaders must first change BEFORE they can expect their team-members to change.3. Business leadership will be rendered impotent without deep commitment to a pre-defined, consistent value set.
This focus allows organizations to clarify and act on core values, which will ultimately serve to create a tangible and unified culture. Corporate mission or vision statements will be useless without clearly articulated and non-negotiable boundaries that are enforced and protected. Values without boundaries are merely platitudes. There also must be value consistency between decisions. Strong leaders never have two sets of values to choose from. It is more important to make “value-consistent decisions” than it is to make the “politically correct” decisions.4. Accountability must precede profitability.
Accountability does not exist outside of a relationship. People must be accountable to “someone.” No one can be accountable to himself or herself. This will produce conflict and confrontation but that is not bad. On the contrary conflict avoidance must be eliminated. In fact confrontation is the highest expression of love. Leaders must move from “taking care OF their people” to “caring FOR their people.” In this new culture to demand less from our employees is as unfair to them as it is to our customers and ourselves. There will be no consistent profitability without accountability.5. Peak performance must replace adequacy.
Mediocrity, which has become the standard of performance, must become intolerable. Successful leaders should set expectations high enough so they are just barely within reach. They should demand greater effort, invest more time “inspecting” performance and be willing to confront damaging behaviors and attitudes. This will inspire individual growth. Companies cannot grow unless the people in them grow first.6. Companies must become “learning organizations.”
Leaders and their employees who develop the capacity for self-analysis and adaptive learning will have a remarkable competitive advantage. They will win the battle for mind-share and market-share. This includes quantitative as well as analysis both for internal as well as external elements of the business. When the people within the organization resist learning in place of simply performing job functions, stagnation begins.I have seen what can happen when these six absolutes are satisfiedâ€¦. Businesses become stable, client loyalty improves, revenue and profits grow, employee turnover drops, new initiatives can be launched quickly and effectively, market differentiation occurs, employees give not out of obedience but out of discretionary effort and there is cooperative, harmonious teamwork. People go BEYOND what is expected of them.This is not a dream. It can be a reality. I have seen it with my own eyes. It is important to understand that this is NOT exclusive to my consulting practice. I know several consultants, like myself, who employ similar tactics with similar positive results. You see, in business, as in medicine there is a new standard of care. It is a standard that focuses on preventative maintenance and improving health rather than merely treating symptoms and constantly fixing aches and pains.But as in medicine, the patient must believe they need to become healthier in order to accept treatment. You may be making money, but this is not the only measure of health. Ask yourself these questions:

Are your sales erratic – up one or two months then down for the next few months
Are profits unstable or is there a lack of natural growth in the business?
Is there a high employee turnover rate?
Is there political infighting, blame shifting or a lack of accountability among your employees?
Is there an absence of discipline or self-centered attitudes?
Have dysfunctional behaviors like dishonesty, insubordination or emotional outbursts occurred in the workplace during the last six months?

If any of these symptoms are present in your business, its time to think about making some core changes to your business culture. These changes begin with the ability to cope with the unrelenting daily change in our economy. They are an outgrowth of our ability to change ourselves first BEFORE expecting others to change. They are interwoven with our commitment to a pre-defined, consistent value set. And they are an example of our ability to hold others accountable for peak performance rather than just mediocrity.

At the SBA Network we like to say that we influence decisions, improve performance and inspire change. Let us know how we might be able to assist you to inspire change in your organization.