Be Different or be dead

January 13, 2020

Why business process change should come before spending more money

Why business process change should come before spending more money.

Politicians are the most egregious offenders of believing a problem can be solved by simply throwing more money at it.

Their strategy is to capture the hearts of voters by promising to throw billions at a problem they feel is important. If the number one voter priority is health care, for example, the candidate-in-waiting promises to double spending on it as the solution.
Obviously, if you double down on health care spending you’re going to make epic improvements, right?

Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way.

Most difficult problems can rarely be solved by more spending; they’re systemic issues at play that need to be fixed before deciding how much resource to apply.

Throwing $250 billion at health care for example, without changing the way it is practiced and delivered, won’t solve the essential problems.
Nor will doubling the annual budget on billing eradicate the errors made on customers’ bills — in fact it will only multiply the number of mistakes made.

Rewarding ineffectiveness with additional resources is crazy — may as well put your money into a boat.

And the craziness isn’t limited to the world of politics; most organizations have a tough time avoiding the trap of trying to spend their way out of a problem.

Rather than creating a new system for some reason some people think that increasing intensity or muscle power will somehow make things right.

It won’t.

A current system that doesn’t deliver what is expected must be replaced with one that does and should never be the recipient of lavish spending.

Re-creation, rather than making incremental changes to an existing system, is vital and is the only real solution when it comes to problems that have persisted for many years.

The process involves these seven steps.

1. Dedicate ONE person to be accountable

System problems are not solved by committee; there must be single finger accountability assigned and it should be to a senior leader in the organization who has a reputation of getting tough things done.

Far too often a mid-level process or systems manager is charged with the role of making the required changes and they fail because they don’t have the influence and currency in the organization that’s needed to sell the change to all the people with a vested interest in not seeing any change through.

2. Ask the customer how THEY want it to look

What? What do they know about systems re-engineering; about what an efficient system looks like?

Well, they may not have specific academic credentials, but they definitely know how they want to be engaged with an organization.

THEY know how the systems should “feel” so if you care about making it easy to engage with customers, listen up.
Informal focus groups are great ways to get input to help shape your approach to reinventing systems and processes.

Ask the customer how they want to be treated and follow their answer — keep the systems analysts away until you have squeezed out all the customer advice that you can.

3. Define the desired outcomes

What does “perfection” look like in terms of the results that the system must produce? Define the key outputs — a hip surgery in 2 weeks; a product delivery in 24 hours; same day service repair.

Start anew and build the system with no preconceived notions that come from the way things are currently done.

And be cautious about benchmarking best in class and copying their solution to the problem you are experiencing.

Whereas their approach might have some applicability and thus redeeming value, make sure you are responding to what your customers are telling you and not a best practise that worked for someone else.

4. Flow chart it in a simple form

What is needed is an extremely dumbed down version of the new system; simple is good, simpler is better.

And the main criteria to follow is to minimize the number of handoffs as possible.

Obviously, the greater the number of handoffs, the greater the likelihood that mistakes will happen and desired outcomes jeopardized.
Systems experts sometimes overly complicate their work, so be prepared to hold them back.

5. Examine how components of the current system could play into the new one

Even though you are starting with a clean slate and building something new, look to salvage pieces of the existing system(s) that can be integrated and not lose sight of what your customer wants.

Where you can avoid reinventing the wheel do it. But be careful to not be guided by the way things are currently done; replicating components of the current system that may not be particularly effective wont solve your overall problem.

6. Create a ‘straw dog’ version of the new system

Synthesize the brand new elements you have created for the new system with the keeper elements of the current one to produce a draft version of the new system.

Rigorously evaluate what you have created. Beat it up and try to expose weaknesses using customer input and the desired outcomes as criteria.
If the customer satisfaction criteria is less than 10/10, go back to the drawing board to make system revisions until it’s 100% perfect.

7. Get customer approval

Finally, when you think you’ve got it right, take the new system back first to your frontline teams and to the customer for their sign-off and approval.

How many organizations would even think to get customer acceptance? Right. Very few if any.

Internal stakeholders are usually consulted as the system acceptors and are expected to speak on behalf of customers, and whereas they might have a useful opinion on whether customer expectations would be satisfied by the new design, there is only one way to know for sure.

Engage them in the decision making process and ask them point blank if they approve the work; if it’s a “NO!” go back and revise it again.

Systems that don’t work should never be candidates for additional funding, they should be put on the chopping block and axed in favour of new vibrant approaches with a heavy dose of customer input and control of the outcome.

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

• Posted 1.13.20 at 04:09 am by Roy Osing
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January 6, 2020

6 proven ways to make a unique successful culture

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6 proven ways to make a unique successful culture.

Successful and sustaining organizations invest heavily in creating a culture that constantly renews itself in the face of unpredictability and chaotic change.

This adaptive organization is built to not only succeed in the short term by absorbing and successfully responding to unexpected market forces, it relies on being different to survive in the long run.

It’s one thing to have a product or service that is unmatched by the competition, or provide customer service that is a level above others, but it’s quite another to have an entire organizational culture that is build on being different than everyone else.

An organization that strives to achieve a be different culture, and use it as their strategic advantage, is known for their competencies and capabilities in these key areas.

1. Execution outranks planning

The strategic game plan of the different organization places greater emphasis on execution rather than the perfection of the plan itself.

This leadership team understands that it’s not the business plan developed in the image of the academics and planning experts that produces wins in the marketplace; rather it’s how well business planning initiatives are implemented that determines success.

Planning sessions here apply 20% of the time available to developing a strategy that best meets the challenges foreseen over a 36-month planning horizon; 80% of the attention goes to creating the implementation plan to bring the plan to life.

The intent is to get the plan just about right; detailed attention is applied to execution — who does what by when to make it happen.
Get it done and change it on the run describes the priority of this organization.

2. Every employee knows their role

Standout organizations invest heavily in ensuring that every employee has a direct line of sight in executing the organization’s game plan.

If, for example, you’re in customer service, leadership conducts workshops to define precisely what new priorities you need to adopt in the way you serve customers. And what specific behaviours you must display during every customer interaction. In the call centre environment, is the emphasis to be on processing as many calls as you can, or dazzling the customer once they have reached you?

This is different than the way other organizations deal with the implementation of their business plan.

Most leaders declare the intent of their game plan to employees and expect them somehow to know what actions they need to take to successfully execute it — never works; results in dysfunction and inconsistency.

3. Their leaders serve

Different cultures are led by individuals who ask “How can I help?” constantly. They see their role to make it easy for people to do their job.

They bash barriers and eliminate the rules, policies and procedures that get in the way of effective performance.

These leaders serve rather than command; they understand that high performance is a function of how well people behave and what they produce day in and day out.

Taking care of people is the key to capturing their hearts and minds and this can only be achieved through servant leadership.

4. They are unique

Most organizations’ describe their competitive advantage by using words like “best”, “number 1” and “market leader” — “We are the number 1 provider of quality internet service in Canada” is an example of the type of declaration that is often used.

These types of claims are aspirational at best; they are difficult to easily prove and therefore lack the credibility to be effective. People generally don’t believe these types of statements; they are viewed as hollow and are mostly ignored.

Unique cultures search for how they can be the ONLY ones that do what they do.

They strive to claim a position in their market that is unmatched by others. The ONLY Statement — “We are the ONLY ones that…” — is the expression they use, backed up by evidence to prove their point.

5. Their sales people don’t sell

In fact they don’t push their products and services at people; flogging is what other organizations do.

The special organizations spend 99% of their time with a customer determining the problem they need solving and the remaining 1% actually offering a solution. 

Incomparable sales organizations are all about building deep relationships with their customers realizing that sales and revenue come from intimacy without having to overtly sell anything.

6. They live in the be different moment

They treat every moment as an opportunity to be different; it’s the lens through which they that govern what they do and how they do it.
In these organizations, being different is more than a mantra, it’s an operational and planning trigger for every employee.

And people are measured on how they apply the concept; it’s integral to the performance planning process. Individuals must display the desire to be different; the more they achieve from this directive the more successful they are.

What about benchmarking and adopting best practices? These concepts are persona non grata in be different organizations. They may be employed to make operational improvements but are never used to achieve strategic advantage.

By being different, amazing teams strive to BE best in class.

Cultures built to be different don’t do normal things; they practice what they preach.

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

• Posted 1.6.20 at 04:03 am by Roy Osing
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December 16, 2019

Why executing your business plan is more important than the plan

Why executing your business plan is more important than the plan.

Too much planning

We spend far too much time planning what we intend to do as an organization and not enough time figuring out how we will get there.

The challenge is expressed a number of ways but Peter Drucker nailed it when he said “The biggest challenge for most businesses is executing well - not devising helium-filled plans for reaching the next level.”

How true. But this has been said over and over forever it seems yet organizations toil on believing the essence of their strategy will ‘deliver them from evil’; the pursuit of the perfect plan leaves little or no room to toil at implementation.

Not enough execution

The fact is, the perfect plan is worthless unless execution gets recognition as the true driver of success. And as long as the plan is given the priority we will continue to witness the underperformance businesses.

Results are a function of execution and that requires a disproportionate amount of time be spent on this element of the business planning process.

Spend 20% of your time to determining the essence of your plan and 80% of your time on the detailed implementation plan — who needs to do what by when to breathe life into what you want to achieve.

Sooner or later your brave idea must degenerate into a number of crude deeds. Make it a cultural change objective.

Execution hero

Assign a strategy hawk to lead the execution process. Select the most senior person with the most tenacity and currency in your organization to do the job.
And make sure the person you select has a high tolerance for pain because they’re going to need it!

Make it the most important item in their performance plan and hold them accountable to deliver the results expected of the strategic plan.

And communicate openly and regularly on progress made. Recognize execution heroes — find the people in the organization who are truly committed to execution; lavish praise on them. Hold them up to the rest of the organization as examples to be aspired to.

‘Head west’

Get your plan just about right and execute it with tenacity and perseverance through the hearts and souls of turned-on people.

Perfection is an illusion and heading west is a valid direction to take.

Winning is more than the brilliant idea, it’s about doing stuff and keeping your feet moving in the face of unrelenting change.

That’s change leadership.

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

• Posted 12.16.19 at 06:49 am by Roy Osing
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December 2, 2019

2 easy tasks that will make you an astonishing leader

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2 easy tasks that will make you an astonishing leader.

I know it’s almost impossible to reduce all of the qualities of an amazing leader down to two, but in my 40-year leadership experience there are two actions standout leaders take to distance themselves from the herd of leaders out there.

Task #1: Stop doing stuff

Kinda goes against traditional thought but most leaders think winning is about performing the incremental miracle; introducing something new that will take people’s breath away.
And the academics and pundits add to this belief by talking about innovation as being exclusively reserved for creating something new.

“Product innovation is the creation and subsequent introduction of a good or service that is either new, or an improved version of previous goods or services.” — Wikipedia

So the common perception is that to be innovative you must deliver something new or at least a significantly improved version of something that existed before.

Value creation is missing

The problem I have is that innovation by the common definition is silent on value creation; there’s no expressed connection.
An entrepreneur could introduce a new product that flops in the market but the act would still be tagged as an innovative move.

Innovation without value creation is useless because the purpose of innovation IS to add value. Introduce a new product that sucks value from the organization — because it’s unprofitable — is not innovative by anyone’s definition.

In my experience, there is one innovative task that rarely gets mentioned. It’s a task in most organizations that isn’t treated as a high priority yet it produces amazing value.

Decrement to create space

And it’s the antithesis of doing new incremental things — it’s doing new decremental things; removing old things in an organization that no longer add value and creating space in an organization to do new things that do add value.

No organization has unlimited resources to continue adding new activities with added costs; decrementing frees up resources and cost to do something new.

Great leaders treat removing stuff as a high priority and they treat it as a core competency of their organizations that contributes vitally to their competitive advantage — most others don’t focus on it and hence are more challenged to maintain healthy cash flow margins in the face of having to innovate to offer new stuff.

And decrementing is much more difficult to achieve than motivating people to do new exciting things; it’s simply not viewed as a “sexy” thing to do and people aren’t salivating to get on with removing the grunge that everyone knows is there.

CUT the crap

Not only is it difficult to get people to sign on with cutting the crap in an organization, it’s even more tough to actually remove the activities, programs, products and systems that have outlived their usefulness.

Why? No one likes to give up anything regardless how unproductive it is. They don’t like their familiarity with anything being disrupted even though it makes perfect sense to do so.

So employees who work on products with a small unprofitable market don’t want to lose their product work and analysts who maintain an obsolescent system would like to keep doing it.

When the cut the crap champion shows up there’s not a whole lot of willingness for owners of crap to give it up easily; they fight to hold on to it.

Task #2: Stop reading books on leadership

The Unmatchables get to their lofty position by NOT following the prescriptions of others — they don’t read their sh** — they find their own way in the morass and complications of dealing with humans of all types.

It’s not that text books and pundit readings are wrong necessarily, it’s just that they’re not good enough to make a leadership difference.

There’s no formula for being an incredible leader. There are tons of things you can do to be an average one but the secret sauce to greatness has to come from the individual not parchments with ascribed opinions from “experts”.

My experience has taught me that there are many actions The Great One’s take that are rarely found in a text book.

Head west

They believe that “heading slightly west” is a valid strategy despite the fact that the experts try to get you to believe that if you follow a precise process you will create the “perfect” plan.

Rather, what is needed is an imprecise view of the direction that should be taken with modifications made based on what is learned through execution.
How many plans have you had that turned out the way you originally intended? Yup. Same.

Try a lot

They believe that the more tries you make the greater the likelihood you’ll succeed. Their mindset is that if they get lucky and hit a home run on the first try, GREAT! but don’t count on it.

The odds of getting it right the first time are too low given the uncertainty and unpredictability of the markets we serve. If you’re not ready to try something else other than your first choice in times of chaotic change you’ll be unprepared when chaos strikes and you will fail.

The Distinguishables know that the text book might be helpful in choosing a direction, but eventual success comes to those who have made more attempts than the rest of the crowd.

Do the opposite

The Look-Up To’s have the natural instinct to go in a 180 degree direction against the flow of whatever is the current trend and give it a go. They understand that momentum and trends aren’t their friends when they are trying to garner a competitive advantage.

▪️If the market trend is toward lower calorie food products they do a 180.

▪️If the trend is to exceed customer service expectations in the hostel business they do the opposite.

They don’t bet the farm on such moves but they are willing to make an investment that captures the attention of onlookers.

In my experience, these two gems were instrumental in vaulting average leaders into really successful ones. I’m thinking that if you want to be a standout leader you might want to give them a try.

What do you think?

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

• Posted 12.2.19 at 04:26 am by Roy Osing
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