Do More By Doing Less

Courtesy Huffington Post

Susan Howington, founder and CEO of Power Connections, hosts a meeting of top level business executives from around Orange County. At these round tables she raises a topic of interest and executives discuss and share their points of view. It’s very interesting and engaging and all of us learn from each other.

Recently, Susan brought together a dozen executives with backgrounds in general management, operations, sales, marketing and human resources. Susan started off by reading a recent Wall Street Journal article from January 2018 entitled: How to Succeed in Business: Do Less. That article basically said that it’s best to do fewer tasks and obsess over getting them right. Another study of 5000 executives referenced in the round table, provided insight into how top producers work. In this study, the key to success revolved around mastering selectivity on what was to get done and saying NO to bosses.

It was unanimous within the group that FOCUS is critical to executive success and to a company. It was no longer the norm to work harder. The goal is to work smarter and by working on fewer “priorities” success would follow. This doesn’t mean you forget about everything that is on your list of 50+ activities that need to be accomplished. Rather, this list is maintained. Select the top three activities and then as one is complete you add another to the top three list. Focus is critical. I remember an employee at one of my companies that came to me with a list of more than 100 items and was overwhelmed. I sat down with her and tried to prioritize those 100 into some sequence to get her to focus on the most important. I cannot say it was a perfect success, but we did agree by eventually using pairwise comparison, which activities were on top of the list. And then I told her I would only evaluate her on the top three activities and when those were complete we would modify her objectives and add the next priority. She was not happy but she acquiesced.

During the round table discussion, some attendant questions were addressed:

1. How do you prioritize personal needs with business needs?
2. How do you find what is the most important in the corporate world?
3. How do you say no to bosses?

How do you prioritize personal needs with business needs?

• Executives must balance both personal and corporate needs. We hear about work / life balance and millennials especially want to ensure this balance is maintained.
• Ensure you know what you want to do. Start with a personal vision/mission statement. For example, mine is to build businesses and build the next generation of business leaders. Make sure there is time set aside each week to do one or two things that help support your self-vision.
• On the corporate side, ensure you understand the business strategy and the metrics the business will use to determine success. Then make sure you develop a maximum of one to three things and make sure your results support those corporate metrics.

How do you find out what is most important in a corporate world?

• On the corporate side, ensure you understand the business strategy and the metrics the business will use to determine success. Then make sure you develop a maximum of one to three things and make sure your results support those corporate metrics.
• Market research can be used to determine what is important to focus on. Notwithstanding the corporate strategy and business plan, market research can obtain information on what is important to the customer and how well the company performs on that attribute. The results can be plotted on a Quad map. (See my prior blogs for a detailed description.) Priorities should be given to those attributes that are important to a customer and which are performed well (leverage and maintain those activities) as well as those that are important yet not performed well. Those have to be corrected and might form strategic initiatives for the company.
• Once you determine what is important to do, you have to determine how that task or activity fits on the importance/urgency scale. Certainly if something is urgent and important, it has to get done. However, the key to success is to determine what is important and NOT urgent and prioritize those activities so you have time to do them right.

·     What happens when you have a boss that says, “We will work from morning til night until everything is done,” and then keeps adding more activities and chores to the list? I know I have had those types of bosses. Sometimes you have to say no and it is how you say no that may be critical. Of course you can try to quote Warren Buffet who said: ”The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.” In my opinion, you can do this only if you have succeeded in prior projects and earned that type of respect. But what happens when the boss is adamant?

How do you say no to bosses?

• Develop your list of activities and work with your boss to determine the top three things that need to get accomplished.
• Use the concept of SMART (specific, measurable, accountable, responsible, time limited) goals or management by objectives to set up the goal, metric for success, and time when the objective will be accomplished.
• Ask for more time or help to accomplish projects or activities that are important to the boss.
• Note: the participants at the round table suggested that if the boss will not agree on prioritization and other negative cultural habits crop up, that environment could be toxic and it might be time to find another job. Most bosses will listen to reason – at least we hope.

Once these three questions are addressed, you have to execute. Here are some prescriptions to help execute your priorities:

• Use your calendar to block specific time slots, making a meeting with yourself, to accomplish your priorities.
• Answer emails only at selected times during the day, e.g. first thing in the morning, before lunch, and before you leave for the day. Many of us hear the little email tone signaling “you’ve got mail” and we respond immediately.
• Select a personal advisory board to help you keep focused on the important tasks both personally and for business.
• Develop a corporate battle rhythm to focus on those important activities and plan them out on a calendar with the right people in attendance. As a correlate, don’t have meetings without a clear agenda and expected outcomes and don’t invite people if they are really not needed at the meeting.
• Develop executive alignment on strategic initiatives through the strategic planning process. Use a facilitator to help define the priorities. Market research that provides input from customers on importance and performance can be used as the basis for that alignment and the executive team can multi-vote on the most important strategic initiatives.

This blog is only meant to touch the surface of what we discussed and the answers in many companies are probably more complex. Yet the round table discussion was a great start to get us to think about how focus and prioritization will make us more productive. And saying NO to bosses, while scary at times, is the right way to help you, them, and the company to be more successful in the long run.

If you have any questions or want to continue the dialog, contact me at dfriedman@clevelpartners.net or Susan Howington at susan@powerconnectionsinc.com. 

4 Strategic Tools for the StreetSavvy Business Executive

In my last blog we shared some power tools that StreetSavvy Business Executives can use to help find the path for profitable revenue growth. I used this information in a talk I gave at UCI Applied Innovation to 100 plus budding entrepreneurs and sitting executives.

Now, I want to provide 4 additional tools to help with the direction and management of strategic initiatives which will help StreetSavvy Business Executives find their true north and set the stage for executing their plans.

Scenario Planning and Visioning

Scenario planning and visioning is a tool that has less structure than some of the other tools in this compendium. Yet is a powerful tool to be used by executives, department heads, and teams to construct the vision of where that organization is heading and the outcomes to be achieved. I started using this tool in the 90s when I was heading marketing at a wireless company. Given the competition that was coming about due to changing regulations and changing technology and due to the increasing use of the internet, it was time to think about where we needed to be heading.

Our visioning exercise was used to determine not only where we wanted to go, but also to ensure there was alignment among the executives in carrying out the strategic and business plans.

To do this correctly, each executive or team member has to address different questions including some of the following questions. They do this by visualizing a future state as if they walked in the shoes of their customers, their board, or other constituents.

1. What does the company look like in the next five or 10 years?
2. What kind of products will it sell and how will they be sold?
3. What will the customers look like?
4. What competencies will you need to put in place?
5. Who will the competition be?
6. What messages would you want to get across to the board of directors, to an investment group and to your customers?

Scenario planning and visioning is a tool that has less structure than some of the other tools in this compendium. Yet is a powerful tool to be used by executives, department heads, and teams to construct the vision of where that organization is heading and the outcomes to be achieved. I started using this tool in the 90s when I was heading marketing at a wireless company. Given the competition that was coming about due to changing regulations and changing technology and due to the increasing use of the Internet, it was time to think about where we needed to be heading.

Our visioning exercise was used to determine not only where we wanted to go, but also to ensure there was alignment among the executives in carrying out the strategic and business plans.

To do this correctly, each executive or team member has to address different questions including some of the following questions. They do this by visualizing a future state as if they walked in the shoes of their customers, their board, or other constituents.

The best parts of this exercise are listening to the answers, debating the vision, and then coming to a singular purpose and vision.

Product Innovation Charter

A product innovation charter is a format used by companies to determine the company’s (or team’s) product management or development strategy. What risks and returns do they want to take? What type of innovation will they consider- a new-to-the-world product will have substantially more risk than a line extension. It is used for products, not processes and sets the charter, i.e. the conditions under which the company or team will operate in making decisions.

The format of the charter is straightforward and simple, yet the end result is very powerful.

                                              Product Innovation Charter

Background: What the reason for this charter? What problems are you trying to address?

Goals: What are the specific goals that can be met? SMART Goals: specific, measurable, actionable, responsible party, and time frame should be defined.

Objectives: What is the overall objective of the charter? Is it to increase dominance in one area or to play catchup? Is the goal to develop breakthrough products or provide a specified risk/return ratio?

Guidelines: How does this charter fit into the corporate strategy? How much money is funded by this charter? What are the decision making capabilities of the leaders of this charter?

Boundaries: What are the rules of implementing the charter? For example, is this an entirely internal team approach or should partners be considered? Are there certain companies that are off limits to partnerships? Is this for consumption in the US or the entire world?

Balanced Scorecard

The Balanced Scorecard can be construed as a complete management system as originally conceived by Kaplan and Norton in the mid 1990’s.   The original structure of the balanced scorecard pointed to four elements as shown in the following diagram where each of the elements supported the vision and strategy of the company. 

Over time, the balanced scorecard has evolved and in our interpretation it provides a structure for companies to use and modify according to the priorities and needs of the company. In some companies, there is less “learning” and more growth oriented actions. In other companies, especially in the Internet world, the focus may be on replicable processes, or maintaining a specialized workforce, or even implementing strategic initiatives to maintain an edge in the market.

Such thinking doesn’t detract from the structure and use of the tool, yet the tool can to be modified to accommodate different companies.

Analytic Hierarchical Process

The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) was developed by Thomas Saaty, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh in the 1970s at which time, as a mathematician and engineer I fell in love with the methodology and have adapted it to fit my needs in corporate America and in our consulting practice.

It is a structured technique for organizing and analyzing complex decisions such as funding different product development efforts, selecting a leader of a cross-functional team, or determining which investment or partnership makes the most sense. The “most sense” is based on a combination of mathematics and beliefs – some supported by data – of different people and teams evaluating several options. What I like about it is the fact that by expressing answers in mathematical terms, you almost take out the emotion of decisions and can better evaluate disparate options. For example, you can use it for the classic guns v. butter decisions.

The strength of the process is that it helps decision makers find solutions that best suit their goal and their understanding of the problem. It provides a rational framework for structuring a decision problem, for representing and quantifying its elements, for relating those elements to overall goals, and for evaluating alternative solutions.

The users of the AHP first decide on the elements upon which decisions are based and the comparative weights of those elements. That would be a one-tier hierarchy. But the power of the system extends when each of the primary elements has a subordinate structure. Let’s say financials was one criteria and that weight was 25% as shown below. A second level hierarchy could be developed based on cash flow, capital and margin.

To us, the important part of the exercise is to give the different team members or decision makers the opportunity to debate and determine the correct elements, the hierarchy and the weights. Then, once complete, each case can be analyzed and an ordinal ranking can be determined based on a score. It still enables flexibility by the team to make final adjustments. What it prevents, though, is one dominant player swaying the votes of the others. Sometimes, in organizations, that is easier said than done.

Here’s what a two level system looks like for a company that was analyzing different product development opportunities. It can be applied in any business or industry or functional area.

With these tools, the executive can determine the direction of the company, ensure the executive team is in alignment, determine priorities and execute the plan. Of course, we at C-Level Partners are glad to help. Call me at 949 4394503 or write to me at dfriedman@clevelpartners.net to see if you qualify for a complementary one hour discussion of your business issues.