When General Dwight D. Eisenhower was first elected President in 1952, then President Harry S. Truman remarked:
He’ll sit here, and he’ll say, Do this! Do that! And nothing will happen. Poor Ike [nickname for Eisenhower]. It won’t be a bit like the Army. He’ll find it very frustrating.
As leaders, we have all encountered the same frustration. We clearly ask someone to do something. And it does not get done.
With all the meetings, E-Mails, objectives and communications in a typical company, staying organized is a never-ending task.
Yet, there are a few fundamentals to follow to ensure that you stay organized and focused on the most important tasks each and every day.
The key to finding a needle in a haystack is to have a smaller haystack. Continue reading
Following up on my blog from August 2017, Negotiation – An Overview, I summarize the excellent book, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It, from former FBI negotiator, Chris Voss.
I highly recommend that you read this book to gain deeper insights into negotiation.
My summary below gives some of the insights found in this book.
I summarize some of the key concepts from the excellent book: 2 Second Lean: How to Grow People and Build a Fun Lean Culture. Written by Paul Akers, 2 Second Lean is a quick and easy ready that will help all of us simplify and lean out our companies, whether they are manufacturing, technology, distribution or services company.
I recommend that you read it.
What is Lean?
Two foundational principles of Lean Thinking
“Waste is like gravity; it pulls at you 24/7 and if don’t have a method to overcome it, you will lose and waste will win.” Jeff Kaas
“Lean is hard work that makes everything else easy.” Paul Akers
The world and the customer are changing rapidly. To keep up with these changes and to truly differentiate themselves in the marketplace, companies need to innovate.
Yet, too many companies still rely on small updates, upgrades, or makeovers of their product lines as their “innovation.” That is just not good enough.
“We live in a world where the returns on incrementalism are going down and the returns on real innovation are going up.” Gary Hamel (Strategy Consultant)
Today, companies struggle to consistently increase sales and profits faster than the overall market.
In too many cases, these companies lack a unique strategic vision that would differentiate the company and its products and services from the competition.
Instead, their strategic vision is to do more – sell more products in more markets to more customers – and execute better than anyone else.
Strategy guru Michael Porter refers to this as the “Be the Best” Mindset. This mindset generally leads to a zero sum competition where everybody is going after the same customers with the same undifferentiated products; but, at lower prices. With this approach, everyone loses except the customer who now gets the same products and services at those lower prices.
To develop a true strategic vision, our companies must find a way to be unique.
Below, I list five steps that all our companies should take to create that unique strategic vision.
An ethical leader is someone dedicated to always doing the right thing for the employees, the business, and all stakeholders. Alas, this ideal for the selfless and driven leader clashes with the reality of who most of us really are.
So, how do we, as flawed human beings, become the near perfect ethical leaders that we need to be to drive our businesses to success?
The answer is simple… we cheat.
We create sneaky tips, tricks, reminders or work arounds that help us to live up to the ideal of the ethical leader. By following each of the three “cheats” below, we can all become more effective and more ethical leaders for our teams and in our businesses.
Many of us aspire to personally be as productive and effective as possible. We read articles and blogs (including some of mine – How to Be 10X More Effective…) and take classes to learn how to get more done in less time.
Unfortunately, as leaders, this goal of personal productivity is the wrong goal to pursue. Our goal needs to be:
How Can Our Overall Team Be More Productive and More Effective?
In helping make our teams more effective, we need to give them more time to do their jobs. This means eliminating as much as possible all the distractions, noise, irrelevancies, and trivialities that cloud the mind and waste the time of our team members.
To make change happen effectively (for our companies and for ourselves) requires daily attention and regular follow up.People don’t get better without follow up. So let’s get better at following up with our people.
The calendar says 2017. Unfortunately, far too many of our leaders are leading as if it is 5, 10, 20, even 30 years ago.
Old-fashioned leadership and work styles and out dated, time consuming, and all but useless leadership behaviors are preventing many of our companies from moving forward to be competitive in today’s day and age.
To assist those of us still living in the past and to remind the rest of us, I offer up a list of five behaviors that leaders (and everyone else) can do to be more effective at getting things done and driving our teams and businesses to success.
I welcome your additions to this list.
In their book, The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results, authors Gary Keller and Jay Papasan suggest that a laser-like focus on the most important is essential to realizing success.
Since the book dovetails so closely to my views of simplify…eliminate…prioritize…focus, I recommend it highly. Below, I give some quick notes on the key points found in the book. But, I do encourage you to pick it up, read it, and follow its ideas.
Crack Cocaine has three distinguishing features:
These exact three characteristics are found when business leaders feed their egos.
Let’s be honest, we all stroke our egos.
As leaders, we get hooked on feeding our egos in order to enjoy the ego-boosting high that comes from thinking that we are great.
I just finished listening to a Great Courses series entitled Your Deceptive Mind: A Scientific Guide to Critical Thinking Skills by Professor Steven Novella.
This excellent course offers insight and reminders invaluable to all business leaders trying to think critically and make excellent decisions in today’s world.
Below I share some ideas from the course. But, I do encourage you to buy the course, listen to it, and share it amongst your team. It will be worth your while.
Manufacturing still remains a vital part of the American economy. Many factors make America a great place for manufacturing: a large and nearby market, common language, good culture of business ethics, low cost fuel, strong design and engineering talent, robust distribution and logistics, reasonably low cost labor, and the overall trend to speed and faster turn-around time.
As such, manufacturing many products, when done best in class, can be done more cost-effectively in the U.S. than anywhere else.
But, how? How can we begin to improve our manufacturing plants to be the best that they can be?
In their book, A Complaint is a Gift: Recovering Customer Loyalty When Things Go Wrong, authors Janelle Barlow and Claus Moller discuss the inadequacies of customer service and the customer service departments at most companies.
The book begins with a quote from Confucius that sums up the mistake companies make when they do not listen to their customer complaints:
A person who commits a mistake and doesn’t correct it is committing another mistake.
Let’s face facts. Mistakes happen in companies, and people complain. But, we have to treat their complaints as gifts, listen to them, be responsive and speedily fix the mistakes. Or else somebody else will be servicing that customer.
Success…
A whole industry has sprung up around helping leaders and businesses get things done, make it happen, and be more successful. It is possible to spend thousands, even millions, of dollars getting advice from these consulting firms, gurus, and experts.
Much of this advice is complex and difficult to understand. While this might help the consulting firm polish its reputation as a thought leader, it does little to help us put the advice into action today, tomorrow, and the day after.
The book, World Class Selling, by Roy Chitwood (founder of the Track Selling sales process) is an effective and insightful sales book. It is well worth reading for both new and experienced salespeople alike.
Below I have summarized the key points from the book to give you a brief overview of the book. But, I do encourage you to pick up a copy, read, and learn.
What is selling?
Most companies still provide a tangible product or service. This means that companies need to have operations employing people to produce the product, deliver the product, or provide the service.
These operations are essential to great customer service and building business success. Without a strong operational capability, product will not be delivered, promises will not be kept, and the customer will not be satisfied.
So, what are the fundamentals that we, as leaders, need to keep front of mind, in order to drive operational success? Continue reading
David M. Shedd - Move Your Company Forward 