Be Different or be dead

April 19, 2017

4 proven ways to execute your business plan better

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4 proven ways to execute your business plan better.

With so many experts around, running a successful business is complicated.

There are finance experts who promulgate principles for having a healthy balance sheet; sales wizards who describe what an effective sales funnel looks like; inventory management specialists who define the level of product turnover required to drive optimum operating margins and leadership pundits who prescribe the fundamentals necessary to maximize employee engagement and loyalty.

Each discipline brings their own specific area of expertise to the table to help organizations enhance their performance, but how does leadership determine which specific tools are key to improving their organization?

It’s too complicated.

There are numerous moving parts involved in how an organization operates, and determining how each component part should be synchronized to optimize overall effectiveness is an extremely difficult challenge.

It’s like a golfer trying to improve their game.

There are lessons in how to address the ball, grip the club; the backswing; the ball impact; shifting body weight; and the follow through. The golfer focuses on the grip and can’t assimilate the rest of the swing fundamentals; their game doesn’t improve to the level they expect. They are frustrated.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

Business can be simplified; it can be boiled down to a single crucial focus that drives sustaining levels of remarkable performance and growth.

Leaders should be building organizations to execute brilliantly; building execution as a core competency and applying it to any strategy they create

And if they do, they will outperform their peers and outpace their competitors.

Pay attention to these four execution fundamentals.

1. Planning — Ease up on planning. The most critical element of performance is how well the strategy is carried out.

The biggest challenge for most businesses is executing well - not devising helium-filled plans for reaching the next level. — Peter Drucker

Yes, a meaningful plan with a sensible direction for the organization is required but if execution falters the plan is worthless.
An average plan brilliantly executed produces far better performance than what people might consider to be a brilliant strategy with mediocre execution.

Invest 80% of your time on planning to execute and 20% on strategic planning

2. Serving — Lead by serving those in the trenches. Serving leadership cultures unleash individual executional effort and lead to unexpected and amazing results. Leadership presence in the workplace engaging with frontline people is an incredible motivator to execute better.

“What can I do to help?” is the question serving leaders pose to reduce the grunge employees face when trying to do their job, and to eliminate internal barriers — rules and policies for example — that prevent things from getting done in a smoothie efficient way.

3. Recruiting — Recruit people ’lovers’. Customers are loyal to an organization when they feel cared for by employees who invest honest emotional energy in taking care of their wants and needs.
Execution prowess demands that millions of mind blowing moments of truth occur seamlessly between an organization and its customers 24X7X365.

This happens only when employees have the innate desire to serve another human, so your hiring plan needs to be driven to discover these folks who serve in their DNA.
And remember you can’t train people to love people; you can train ‘em to grin but that’s about it.

If your employees don’t love one another, they can’t possibly love the customer

4. Selling — Stop selling; start serving. Flogging products and services tries to advance the organization’s agenda, not the customer’s.
This one-sided dynamic may result in a single short term transaction but does nothing to create an annuity stream of revenue over the long haul.

Execution genius looks out to the horizon, so organizations need to be mindless about building and deepening rich customer relationships by serving them; marching to their agenda; subordinating the interests of the business to their interests.

Remarkable execution is vital to grow a business, so build an execution machine first and then fuel it with each strategy you have.

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

• Posted 4.19.17 at 12:06 pm by Roy Osing
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March 19, 2017

How the useless clutter in your business can be taken out

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How the useless clutter in your business can be taken out.

If your new strategy development process does not deal with the CRAP you need to eliminate, it will surely fail.

Strategy is just as much about what you’re NOT going to do as it is about what you are going to do, but less attention is paid to the CRAP elimination activity.

CRAP is the enemy of progress. It’s the stuff that may have been a priority at one point, but is now no longer relevant to achieving our strategic goals.

If it isn’t expunged from your organization the ‘old’ will continue to have a significant role and the ‘new’ will be hampered. The major source of bandwidth for taking on new activities is the time currently being spent on thinks that really don’t matter.

CRAP will keep you stuck and prevent you from moving forward.

How to eliminate the CRAP?

▪️ Assign a Cut the CRAP Champion to be responsible for inventorying ALL projects and activities going on in your organization;

▪️ From this inventory, create a KEEP category. Make it short. Bear down on the projects to make sure each one of them is 100% aligned with your new direction;

▪️ Create a CUT category. Make it long. Gather all questionable projects. These will be the eventual source of bandwidth for new activity;

▪️ For each CUT project, note the person who is currently working on it. — the project prime. At the end of the day, people will have to be re-assigned to the ‘new’;

▪️ Have a CRAP critical assessment meeting. Involve the senior team responsible for the execution of your new strategy. Trot each CUT Project Prime into the room and have them explain in detail how their project relates 100% to the new strategy. Side benefit: you will see how well they really understand your new strategy;

▪️ Decide which CUT projects will be terminated and the resource savings that will result;

▪️ Develop a resource re-assignment plan. Be prepared to exit people who either don’t have the skills to take on a KEEP project or who don’t want to support your new direction;

▪️ Communicate the results of your work. KEEP Projects and CUT Projects and why certain projects were terminated. A great opportunity to talk about your new strategy. Involve the team accountable for executing your new course.

CUT projects have momentum. They need to give way for the keepers.

Tough work. Critical to your success. Get on it today!

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

• Posted 3.19.17 at 06:18 am by Roy Osing
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March 13, 2017

6 ways a leader can easily kill innovation and creativity

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6 ways a leader can easily kill innovation and creativity.

Innovation is crushed.

Creativity is stultified.

Employees are reduced to cogs.

Fresh thought is constrained to a minimum.

Barriers to new ideas are erected.

These results are often the product of leadership behaviour even though they are completely at odds with what leaders openly espouse to employees as the culture and values they seek to establish.

These six actions will effectively kill any desire for individuals to freely express themselves; they will suck every morsel of originality from their bones.

▪️Constantly say ‘That’s not the way we do things around here’ whenever someone presents a new idea.
This is the hold-on-to-the-past move that will shut out people from even thinking about new ways of doing things. It’s ok for a leader to honour the past, but they must say goodbye at some point to enable the organization to continually renew itself and survive.

▪️Measure employees on how well they follow internal policies. If you manage performance and compensation on how well people ‘Colour inside the lines’ and conform to existing rules they will be be solely internally focused and unlikely to advance changes to keep pace with the dynamics of the external environment.

▪️‘De-reward’ people for making mistakes in the pursuit of excellence, quality and perfection. Emphasize the importance of ‘getting it right the first time’ rather than trial and error. Communicate examples of employees making mistakes to show what is not ok.

▪️Insist on arduous analysis of every change being contemplated regardless of complexity. Impose a strict business case process that emphasizes analysis methodology rather than enabling fast and easy decision making.

▪️Recognize people for the ways they relentlessly practice the internal rules of the organization. A ‘Best Rule Follower’ award program always gets the message across that doing what the rules say is more important than using individual judgement and expression.

▪️Never allow people to step beyond their immediate role boundaries. Focus everyone’s attention on their job description. Keep their blinders on; never allow them to think beyond to discover the NEW art of the possible.

Do you witness any of these actions in your organization?

If you do, you are witnessing the annihilation of original thought.

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

• Posted 3.13.17 at 04:16 am by Roy Osing
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January 23, 2017

7 proven ways to keep your competitive advantage

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A competitive advantage is hard enough to create; it’s even more difficult to keep.

It’s inevitable. Once you carve out your uniqueness in the market, the ‘competitive hordes’ see it and copy what they like.

Everyone loves benchmarking the best, so once you step out and lead the pack, expect others to dissect what you’ve done and pick out their favourite morsel.

There is no preventing this. It’s one of the few things in business that can be predicted with certainty.

Once you’ve done your work, it’s not over. You have to keep your feet moving.

You need to put in motion actions that will sustain your market position.

These 7 tactics will help.

▪️Monitor the execution of your strategy monthly. Be obsessed with your performance. Dig into the revenue numbers. If you fall short, determine exactly why. And then take immediate action to resolve (and monitor that).

▪️Assess the value you provide. Is your value proposition still relevant? Are you continuing to address a real compelling need your target customer group has expressed?

Many companies have died by becoming complacent and assuming they continue to be relevant. They see margins decline and see it as a cost problem. It rarely is. It’s a revenue problem. They slash and burn their organization but spend no time assessing relevance.
They often cut out service and marketing capabilities that are sorely needed to rebound.

▪️Create a strong social media presence to monitor what people are saying. Act immediately on any concerns raised over your performance.

▪️Test your competitive claim with both customers and employees. Successful organizations have a clear statement of how they are different than their competitors. They answer the question “Why should I buy from YOU and not your competition?” in a compelling way.

Your positioning statement must meet the test of “Is it relevant?” (does it continue to address the high priority needs of the target group) and “Is it true?” (do you actually do what you claim?).

▪️Stay close to your main competitors. Their actions in the market are useful in assessing if there are actions you need to take to sustain your momentum. Look for any activity they have had with your customers.

▪️Continue to bear down on delivering memorable experiences for your customers. Competitive advantage is more about how people FEEL about you than the cleverness of your product.
Emotional experiences produce unforgettable memories which translate into your customers never wanting the exit door to find someone better.

▪️Review your marketing plans and programs to ensure you are moving inexorably to ’ME’ and away from flogging to the masses. A focus on the individual drives you to create unique solutions for them personally. Catering to the masses dilutes your customer attention rate and your brand; heroes for people earns the right to do business with them for a long time.

Keep the move to ME going!

Driving your competitive stake in the ground is merely the beginning of a never ending journey of continual renewal.

Stay with it.

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

• Posted 1.23.17 at 04:49 am by Roy Osing
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