Be Different or be dead

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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February 27, 2017

7 easy ways leaders can think creatively to achieve their goals

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It’s not good enough to rely on traditional methods; leaders must think differently to create value for their organizations.

The “silver bullet” for leaders is to loosen up on the process for setting business goals and tighten up on execution required to achieve them.

Organizations are trapped in the traditional business planning process of lengthy analysis, subject matter expert presentations and application of theoretical strategy-building precepts promulgated by consultants and academics.

What theoretically makes sense rarely works in the real world where people, technology, changing priorities, regulations and the unpredictable all collide in a “perfect storm”.

I come from the practical side of business.

I believe that if you can’t execute the strategy in a world of imperfection, the strategy is useless. After all, results are more interesting than the theoretical brilliance of the plan and the extent to which it conforms to pedantic norms.

Here are 7 ways leaders can think differently to achieve their strategic goals.

▪️Spend 20% of your time on WHAT you want to achieve; 80% on how you intend to achieve it. Execution detail is generally given the short shrift.

For some reason leaders assume they can pronounce a new strategy to the organization and miraculously it will get implemented. Nonsense. The granularity of your implementation plan will determine your success.

▪️Get comfortable with not getting it exactly right. We have this phobia about getting the business plan perfect. We spend an additional 4 weeks of planning time trying to make it more perfect.

It’s a ridiculous notion for two reasons: first there is no such thing as a perfect anything so stop trying to chase the illusion; second, as soon as your strategy is put to bed, it’s obsolete as unpredicted environmental events are felt.

▪️A strategy really understood is one that can be broken down into a handful of objectives intended to successfully execute it.

An action plan with 25 things to do suggests that the team that created the strategy doesn’t clearly understand it well enough to focus on the critical few actions necessary as opposed to the many possible actions that could be taken.

Focus on the must not the possible.

▪️Beware of the yummy incoming. Yummy is my way of describing over-the-transom demand that might be fun to chase, but it’s off strategy.

Ignore off-strategy demands on your time and resources, you can’t afford them. Stay on strategy and have the guts to turn away opportunities that suck you dry.

▪️Establish role clarity for everyone in the organization in terms of what they have to do execute flawlessly.
Dysfunction occurs when direct line of sight for people hasn’t been defined and included in performance plans.

▪️Cut the Crap! Stop doing the unnecessary so you can execute the necessary. It’s impossible to take on the new stuff when you won’t let go of the old stuff.

You don’t need more resources, you need to get rid of stuff that may have had relevance yesterday but not today.

▪️Kill the stupid policies that make your customers and employees go nuts. Customers won’t engage with dumb rules in their face which frustrate them when they engage with you.

Cleanse your inside with policies made to control customers; free them to transact with you on their terms.

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

• Posted 2.27.17 at 05:31 am by Roy Osing
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February 6, 2017

5 simple ways employee incentive programs can work more effectively

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5 simple ways employee incentive programs can work more effectively.

Incentive programs are capable of achieving not only improved operating and financial and performance, but also “fun” in the workplace with an accompanying boost in employee morale.

But there’s a HUGE caveat: to be effective incentives must be driven by the strategy of the organization; they should never have a “life of their own”.

To make incentives an effective tool, follow these 5 rules:

▪️Introduce a strategic filter to evaluate the worth of any incentive proposal. If a proposal can’t pass the strategic alignment test, modify it so it complies or don’t introduce it.
An incentive plan not directly linked to the business plan will create dysfunction and confusion in the workplace.
Incenting sales to flog products, for example, when the strategy is to build intimate customer relationships might make sales happy but it produces zero return on investment as a tool of strategy.

▪️Don’t copy what others do. Me-to incentives are boring and show employees that your not really interested in creating something special for them.
Morph what “the incentive herd” is doing into an approach that ONLY you provide.

▪️Use one-time contests liberally in the workplace. They surprise employees and encourage greater participation. I introduced ‘dumb rules’ contests to identify internal rules and policies that customers hated. It worked; employees had a blast, we made significant progress “cleansing our internal environment” and customer service results improved.

▪️Communicate the achievers far and wide in your organization. You want to maximize involvement and realize the corresponding benefits.

▪️Measure and track the benefits of each incentive program. Learn from how they perform; eliminate the losers and keep the winners.

Avoid jumping on the incentives bandwagon unless you put the discipline in place to reap the benefits.

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

• Posted 2.6.17 at 05:27 am by Roy Osing
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