Be Different or be dead

March 16, 2020

Why the most important ingredient to a successful career is ‘doing it’

Source: Unsplash

Why the most important ingredient to a successful career is ‘doing it’.

There has been much written about how to be successful; how to build a résumé that will knock the socks off a prospective employer, how to manage conflict, how to “dress for success”, how to develop amazing interpersonal skills, and how to make yourself indispensable are examples of the angles the experts present as the ingredients to a rewarding future.

The problem is there are too many slices of success advocated by too many pundits; an individual looking for help and guidance doesn’t know which expert to listen to one and how to prioritize the many opportunities to improve they have in front of them.

And they’re all looking for that ONE slice that will make them successful; the silver bullet that explains why one person succeeds and another doesn’t.

The other problem I see is that everyone wants to spend a lot of time studying the slices of the success pie. They want to be absolutely sure that when they decide to act on any specific course of action, it is the right course of action for them in terms of their future.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard “How do I know this opportunity is consistent with my long term career goals?” from a young professional asking for career guidance.

They want a guarantee that if they take a particular action that it will end up being the exact ingredient they need to be successful in the long term.

And of course while they ponder the answer to the question, precious time passes and others take the opportunity.

In my experience, there is one thing that has a major influence on whether someone succeeds or not, and it’s pretty simple.

Do something, learn from it, do something else (and repeat).

1. Do something

First of all, pondering and intellectualizing the possibilities in front of you doesn’t accomplish anything other than burn precious time and energy cycles that you can ill afford to waste.

Performing detailed analyses and trade-off assessments on the number of options you have available may make you feel like you’re making progress, but you’re not.

All you’re doing is trying to make a perfect decision which is pretty well impossible in today’s environment of rapid change, uncertainty and unpredictability.

The best way to see if a course of action is right for you is to take it (if it feels right for you) and find out.

If, for example, it seems right to take a lateral move into sales for the experience, then do it. Sooner or later you’ll discover if it was the right call — you will never be able to predict the outcome if you don’t.

Or, if you’re wondering whether or not taking a course in the environmental sciences will help you, take it; eventually the wisdom of your decision will reveal itself to you.

2. Learn from it

If you don’t learn from every experience you have, you’re depriving yourself of what is needed to move forward.

I have observed throughout my career many people who were exposed to opportunities never learned from them.

They accepted a temporary assignment as a member of a new product introduction team, for example, and failed to take away any new insights on how to manage conflict.

Or they were enrolled against their will in a finance course (as part of their personal development plan) and got buried in how to construct an income statement rather than see how the elements of it could be used to diagnose organizational problems and therefore help improve performance.

In my experience I have never found an adventure that didn’t teach me something; there is always some redeeming value in anything we are exposed to.
We just need to be open to the possibilities and absorb them when you discover them.

3. Do something else

Learning must inform action.

The secret is to figure out what the new found knowledge means in terms of the next step you take.
To be meaningful learning must either reinforce that you are on the right track, or cause you to change your course in some way.

But learning needs to force something to happen, not linger as an emotion and then evaporate leaving no trace that it occurred — learning must leave a trail; an imprint on your journey’s pathway.

“What are the implications of what I have learned in terms of my next steps?” must be asked at the end of every new adventure if learning is to have a productive role to play in your success.

Do something, learn from it, do something else (and repeat) — the one thing you need to know about success.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 3.16.20 at 06:47 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

March 9, 2020

4 great ways to be different and easily beat your ruthless competitors

Source: Pexels

4 great ways to be different and easily beat your ruthless competitors.

If you’re looking to be unmatched in the marketplace, follow these simple proven tactics…

1. Be relevant and unique — in the business plan for your organization.

Dumb your strategic game plan down and answer the three fundamental questions to capture the essence of what you have to do to WIN. Create your ONLY statement around requirements that both matter to your target customers and which you and only you provide.

And, focus on execution recognizing that a plan that can’t be implemented is worthless.

2. Be holistic in your approach to customer opportunities — to create value in your marketing function.

Provide value-based packages for your chosen customer groups based on a customer learning competency your organization adopts.

Look at the total customer in terms of their broad attributes and requirements and not a thin slice of their product needs. Discover the secrets of your customers and use them as the driver of your marketing strategy.

3. Be dazzling — in how you serve your customers.

Treat creating memorable customer experiences as a critical priority. Vary how you treat your customers to enhance their loyalty.

Adopt the elements of a dazzling service experience plan:
▪️hire human being lovers
▪️empower frontliners to say yes
▪️kill dumb rules that make no sense to your customers
▪️ recover from your service blunders —  fix the problem and do the unexpected by leveraging the customer secrets you have discovered.

4. Be intimate — in your sales strategy building strong relationships with your customers.

Avoid product flogging that does nothing to generate loyalty and makes you the same as everyone else. Strong deep relationships encourage your customers to buy stuff over the long term; product flogging is short term thinking at best.

There you have it, the essential elements of establishing a winning strategy and healthy culture in your organization.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 3.9.20 at 07:46 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

March 2, 2020

6 stunning reasons why you can’t complete your project successfully

Source: Pexels

6 stunning reasons why you can’t complete your project successfully.

This is an issue I am often asked by the young professionals I try to help develop their career.

And it’s an important one, because unless someone is proficient in delivering results in their current position they won’t likely get serious consideration for other opportunities to advance.

They can’t understand why results aren’t forthcoming — they can’t deliver what’s expected nor are they able to meet the deadlines imposed on them. And yet they put in countless hours on their projects and they feel they work harder than their peers.

Throughout my career I was assigned project after project with numerous objectives, and learned how to consistently complete each one of them on time and on budget.

These 6 factors I learned were critical risks to the success of any project.

1. There’s too much noise around you

There is so much noise and clutter out there waiting to distract you from your prime purpose. A text from a friend or colleague to help them out with a project they are working on or a request from your boss to take care of something that suddenly came up.

Over-the-transom activities that you get pulled towards that redirect your attention and consume time that otherwise could be spent on your project.

Project success comes from being focused on what you have been asked to deliver, which means filtering out the stuff — the smoke — that will divert you.

2. The client hasn’t been clearly defined

Quite often it is unclear who the main client — the project acceptor — for the project is. Or there may be a number of stakeholders and the primary one isn’t defined for you.
The result is that you are dragged in a number of directions due to the different interests and agendas of the various interest groups.

To successfully complete a project, the acceptor of the deliverables must be defined and agreed upon before the project work begins; never launch into action before this is done.

And get it in writing. I always had a terms of reference document prepared for every project I was assigned, and an integral component was the signature of the project acceptor (as well the signatures of other stakeholders who agreed to provide support to the project but recognized who the owner of the results was).

Lack of senior ownership of the project results will not only jeopardize the results, it also provides others with the opportunity to blame the project manager if results don’t meet expectations.

3. I’m trying to do it myself

Sometimes there is a tendency to try and do it all yourself rather than reach out and take advantage of the expertise and interests of those around you.

After all, it’s time consuming negotiating with others what their specific role will be and it’s a sensitive matter when you are in a position of attributing the good results of the project to your peers and colleagues as opposed to receiving all the glory yourself.

Very early on in my life as a project leader I realized that success only comes through engaging others — it needs to be a team effort.

My blueprint for any project was to get the brightest and the best on your team, help them play their role and lavish them with praise when they delivered what they promised.

4. The deliverable isn’t clear

The expected output of the project must be specific and granular; lack of clarity generally means the project is dying from its launch.

The success and value of any project is directly related to the specificity of the expected outcomes.

So spend the time upfront with the project acceptor on EXACTLY what constitutes success — specific deliverables and timeframes.
Document these in the project terms of reference and have them signed as agreed upon by both you and your acceptor.

If this work isn’t done well enough at the start of a project, generally what happens is that acceptable deliverables are defined (and revised) on the run as the project is in motion.

The result: the project team is run around wasting their efforts, the acceptor is not satisfied because they’re not seeing the results they want (but didn’t identify accurately up front) and the project team takes the hit.

5. I’m relying on my text books

When I began doing project work, I relied on my education for guidance on how the problem should be approached and what the appropriate solution could be. I dug out my text books on statistics, probability theory, economics and business planning and tried to pull from them any insights that would help me derive the right solution to the problem I was given.

To a young professional just starting their career in business, this was the only way to attack the challenge I was given, as specific direction from a project acceptor on HOW to proceed was rarely handed out — you had to figure it out yourself.

What I learned a few years into project work, however, was that success — defined by outcomes that could actually be implemented in the organization — was more a function of CULTURE than theory.

I discovered that results that were grounded in solid academic theory didn’t work if the people in the organization didn’t accept them as having any personal benefits. The best result “on paper” I learned was not a solution at all if it ignored the cultural context of the organization.

So my project approach changed to one which took into consideration what good theory suggested, but which concentrated on finding a solution that fit the culture of the people in the organization that has to live with it.

This process worked amazingly well because the receivers of the project outcomes not only understood the solution proposed, they embraced its implementation because it benefited them personally and as an employee group.

6. I don’t have a backup plan

A project never turns out the way it was originally intended; it’s an amoebic “beast” that is always under pressure to morph to a different form.

The organizational environment changes, internal policies change, markets change, customer demand changes, competitors attack and project team members move on.

Even though you did the right thing and developed a signed terms of reference document for your project, things will happen during the course of your work that will change your agreement in some way.

And when this happens, the wrong action is to stay the course; stick to the original project plan even though you know the changes that have occurred are significant enough to warrant a project “time out”.

The right action IS to take a time out and review the project in its entirety — intent, expected outcomes, team membership, ownership and timeframes — and reset the terms of reference for your work.

A successful project is one which produces value to the organization in the current set of circumstances it faces; when those circumstances change the project must as well if it is to succeed.

Perhaps there are other reasons why certain projects succeed — luck and serendipity perhaps — but if you manage to address these 6 factors, your performance dashboard will show many more winners than you could have imagined.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 3.2.20 at 04:48 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

February 24, 2020

6 simple ways ‘CRAP’ can be cut from your organization

Source: Pexels

6 simple ways ‘CRAP’ can be cut from your organization.

The world is a noisy and cluttered place to live; so many choices and so many people exercising them.

Resources available are scarce and limited but demand continues to grow.

How can organizations — and governments for that matter — achieve their growth objectives with limits on the available time and money necessary to achieve them? And in some cases, not just holding the line on resources but reducing their availability?

Obviously productivity gains will offset the need to add some resources.
If the organization can realize a 10% increase in productivity, and growth requires a 5% increase in operations expenses, growth goals can be more than achieved assuming the targeted productivity savings are realized and are allocated to growth projects — spending productivity gains elsewhere is a waste and results in added costs being necessary.

But there are limits on how much should be mined out of expenses from productivity to fund growth.

Doing things more efficiently has its limits and it’s trade offs

Changing operational processes to drive cost out can impact customer service.
Costs of a re-engineered process might decrease but customers could be dissatisfied with the resulting way they have to engage with the organization — it’s less customer friendly.

And they express their dissatisfaction by buying less or by moving to another supplier.

Outsourcing call centers to remote regions of the world, for example, may reduce costs but could also reduce customer loyalty due to the new experience that customers have to endure.

And of course when productivity benefits are calculated, the opportunity costs associated with impaired service and lost revenue are rarely part of the analysis.

In my experience, the bigger play is not to focus on how to do things right — seek more efficiency — but rather to do the right things — be more effective.

Effectiveness is achieved when the right set of new programs is selected and is flawlessly executed to achieve the long term strategic intent of the organization.

Effectiveness is not just deciding on the new things you need to do

A huge part of effectiveness is not what additional to take on, but what you decide to give up — the current activities in motion you decide to stop.

It’s forced obsolescence — productivity applied on a macro scale (large projects or blocks of activity) as opposed to eliminating smaller pieces of the operations (a call center or product fulfillment process).

Forced obsolescence — cut the CRAP — is consciously eliminating yesterday’s relevance for tomorrow’s necessity.

Examples of forced obsolescence initiatives could include marketing programs established in the past to enhance a product line that are no longer in the crosshairs of the strategy. Or a planned HR system built to support acquiring skills and competencies that are no longer considered essential.

This is my step-by-step process to force obsolescence out.

1. Assign a senior champion

Appoint a respected and trusted senior person with a high tolerance for ‘pain’ and whose compensation is based on how much savings is actually realized by the cut the crap activity.

Avoid the mistake that most organizations make by assigning a mid level manager to the task. This communicates that forcing obsolescence out isn’t really all that important and like many other corporate programs, “it too shall pass”.

2. Take inventory

Inventory all current initiatives in the organization. It’s important that the list be complete in order to capture all of the activity consuming resources. I suggest that you set an annual expense threshold — say, $100K — and identify only activity that exceeds this amount.

The point is to isolate activity that consumes a material amount of resources and a threshold criteria is a meaningful way of doing it.

>3. Create a ‘keep’ list

Create a list of those initiatives that should remain because they all directly support the organization’s strategy.
Make keep list short, as there is a tendency to try and justify everything that is currently going on as vital to the future of the company.

This, of course, is hogwash and is merely an attempt for people to protect their position in the organization. If you end up with 100 major initiatives on the list, walk away. You are wasting your time.

4. Create a ‘cut’ list

Create a list of yesterday’s work that is no longer needed because it is not relevant to the strategy the organization has chosen.
Make the cut list long; make it tough to keep doing activities of yesterday.

As a guideline, you should have at least 3 cut activities for every keep activity; on a threshold of $100K that means you are cutting $300K in expenses for every $100K you keep — a 3:1 payback; not a bad place to start.

5. Finalize keep and cut lists

With both lists in hand, the senior leader must present and get input on both lists throughout the organization to get as much buy-in as possible.

Forced obsolescence will never get 100% support so don’t bother fretting over it. This is a challenging step as no one wants to give up what they’re doing. They have too much emotional equity in what they’re busy with.

So debate and listen then make the call on what needs to stay and what needs to go.

6. Prepare the CRAP execution plan

Develop a 6 month action plan to execute the cut list initiatives. Include firming up the annual savings and the organizational units that will realize them.

THE key step — close the loop by reducing their operating expense budgets and place savings in a special account that can be used to fund new initiatives.

This fund should be available to anyone responsible for introducing a new strategic program that is a priority.

And beware of those who possess the CRAP.

These ‘custodians of the past’ are people who are comfortable handling past activities; they enjoy them and they don’t want to change.

They are managers of irrelevance and are critical to the CRAP elimination process. If they are permitted to continue to do their thing they will infect others in your organization and prevent them from taking on the new direction.

Identify these folks and manage them: either reassign them or, if they are unwilling to move to the future, exit them with dignity from your organization.

Cut the CRAP will save the world. If we don’t expunge today’s unproductive and wasteful activity, we won’t have the resources to take on the new initiatives necessary to advance organizations and societies.

Taken to its ultimate conclusion, the obsolete will rob the world of growth and limit our possibilities.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 2.24.20 at 06:33 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink