Five Reasons Why Your Company is Learning Disabled

When it comes to operating in a complex environment, we all suffer from a learning disability. Look at this way—nobody learns how to fly a 747 by sitting down on the flight deck and randomly pushing buttons. Learning the intricacies of a complex system requires a great deal of training. Experience alone might just get you killed.

“Functional retardation” refers to our inability to learn from experience in a complex system—and just about every organization is a complex system. If it seems like the biggest organizations have the most difficult time learning, you might be right. Size and complexity tend to go together.

Learning requires the ability to connect events and outcomes in a way that reinforces behavior. Placing your bare hand on a hot stove, for example, provides an immediate sensation that reduces your likelihood of doing it again. Delay the feedback, however, and you might never figure out why your hand hurts.

Here are five reasons why we have such a difficult time learning from experience in a complex system. Feel free to add your own observations in the comments section.

1. Time is Not on Your Side

The first problem is that in a complex system there is inevitably a response time. In other words, there is a delay between the event and the outcome. Think of how you adjust water temperature in the shower—turning the handle doesn’t produce an immediate response. Even a short delay in the response time may leave you frantically twisting knobs in the hopes of hitting the right mark. Once this cycle starts, it’s hard to break. If the delay is more like weeks and months, the odds are that you will never connect the outcome to the event that triggered it.

2. Life is Like a Smoothie

Smoothies are great when it comes to a healthy living, but they are a bit more challenging when it comes to unraveling a complex system. Think of taking all the events and outcomes that occur in a typical business and putting them in a blender. When all the ingredients are thoroughly mixed, you can no longer tell where the bananas start and where the berries end. Likewise in a complex system, isolating specific causes and effects is a little like trying to put the banana back together again. You are inundated with effects from an assortment of causes, but how can you possibly figure out which goes with which? Our tendency is to look for a cause that’s proximal to the effect—in other words, we associate the most recent action with the most recent result. This is usually wrong.

3. Can You Hear Me Now?

Imagine trying to talk to a friend on the phone while you’re standing next to a passing freight train. Odds are the background noise will make it more difficult for you to understand what your friend is saying. Likewise in any system there is a certain level of noise that obscures the signal and makes it harder to understand what the process is saying. If noise is the dominant feature of your data, learning can never take place. In fact, you may make the mistake of treating noise as if it was the signal. This is one of the most common mistakes that occurs in process control. The result is over-control—which only makes the problem worse.

4. Good Times Come and Go, But Trouble Lingers

Many of our choices produce a combination of good and bad outcomes—and as they say, timing is everything. Short-term decisions tend to be reinforced by short-term benefits (e.g., a reduction in the monthly cost of production). The negative effects of a short-term decision may take quite a bit more time to develop (e.g., the backlash from canceling preventive maintenance activities). You can certainly save a few dollars today by postponing that oil change, but when the car finally breaks down it’s going to take a lot more than an oil change to repair the damage.

5. By the Time the Storm Hits, I’ll be Somewhere Else

Life in the business world is a little like sitting in class long enough to cover the course material, and then leaving to start another class when it’s time to take the final exam. You had a good time in the class—and might have learned a little—but the guy who takes your place is handed the test when he walks in the door. His experience of the class will be a little different since he has no time to figure out what’s going on. He walks into the storm that you created, and unless you stick around to the end, there’s little chance for you to learn from your own mistakes.

Does any of this sound familiar? I bet it does—and it helps explain why organizations tend to make the same kinds of mistakes over and over again. What else would you add to this list?

J.R. Dickens

Copyright © 2016 Woodland Park Research Group, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

 

Git-R-Done!

Larry Whitney’s signature tagline is more than just a clever marketing slogan–it’s a management philosophy.

“Git-R-Done” is the philosophy of do-something-right-now. It looks like this:

• Activity is more important than tangible results. One of the worst things you can do in this kind of organization is not to be “busy” doing something–no matter how trivial or counterproductive.
• Firefighting is a way of life. The important thing isn’t solving problems–it’s working on them! Besides, who has time to work on actual problems when all you really need to do to look busy is to work on symptoms?
• Shortcuts are the way to get things fixed. The more you get fixed, the more successful you appear to be. Never mind that your solutions only last a few weeks. The threshold for success is ridiculously low.
• Projects all tend to look alike with the same people working on the same things year after year with the same lack of results. (Any apparent improvement is just a reflection of random variation in the system–you can be sure that it won’t last long.)
• Project deadlines are an important form of window dressing, but are completely arbitrary. Just pick a date. No one actually expects you to finish on time–but you’ll be viewed as “ambitious” for setting an impossibly short deadline.
• “Team” is any random collection of people who probably don’t want to work together and have no idea what they’re actually supposed to do. Not to worry–meetings can make any team look busy.
• When you’re not having meetings, your time is occupied with reading reports of useless information and writing reports that no one else will read.
• Budgeting is another great way to look busy without producing a useful product. This process can take months and requires the time and energy of people at many levels. Later on, the budget tells you what’s wrong so you’ll know what to fix. You’ll always be busy because the budget numbers don’t bear any resemblance to reality.
• In the midst of all this useless work, you still have to make something you can sell. The more the better. In fact, your next big capital project might be an expansion of the warehouse.
• Employees who are successful “getting things done” will be promoted into management positions where they can get even more done through the busywork of other people.

Unfortunately, the Git-R-Done management philosophy doesn’t really get much done in the long run. I hope this doesn’t describe your business!

J.R. Dickens

© 2015 Woodland Park Research Group, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Where Do I Start?

Getting started on the improvement journey can be a daunting task–especially when you have the impression that it takes lots of training in tools and methodologies for you to get the ball rolling. Let’s take a step back from that in order to see how simple it can be.

Improvement begins with a new way of thinking. Mindset is, by far, the most important aspect. No matter how well you may know the tools of improvement, without the right mindset nothing really changes–you end up using the tools to do exactly what you’re doing already.

If improvement is indeed a new way of thinking, then asking the right questions will be the key to unlocking opportunity. Questions reveal assumptions–and assumptions are often wrong. Whatever your job happens to be, you operate according to an assortment of assumptions that are largely unchallenged. “This is the way we do things around here.” I bet you’ve heard that before. Or worse, “This is the way it’s always been done.” Perhaps you’ve noticed that these statements carry a bit of a threatening tone–if you ask too many questions you could get yourself into trouble.

“Why rock the boat?” Just a few days ago one of my peers dropped this platitude on me as a way to brush off a simple change that I suggested. My reply was simple and firm: If we don’t rock the boat, nothing ever changes. And if nothing ever changes, nothing ever improves. I’ve often stated it this way: You can have change without improvement, but you can’t have improvement without change. The problem is that change often requires a degree of confrontation, and we’d prefer to avoid that. In other words, when you rock the boat, someone is liable to get wet.

This is precisely why improvement requires strong leadership. “Management” is about preserving and optimizing the status quo. “Leadership” is about changing the status quo. Management is easier by far, and it tends to keep us in our comfort zone. Leadership can be extremely uncomfortable precisely because it takes us out of our comfort zone to a place we’ve never been before.

So, if you want to improve, it’s going to take a different mindset and a desire to lead change. The good news is that anyone can do it with a bit of effort.

This is how I would suggest getting started. Begin where you’re at right now and ask the following questions to uncover the assumptions that may be limiting your success.

What is your goal? What is it that you’re in business to do? Start by clearly defining the end result or end product.

Who are your customers? Who buys what you are selling? What is it about your product or service that is of value to the customer? (If you’re in a service industry, that value may simply be the experience of what you offer.)

What makes your customers unhappy? What mechanism do you have for getting reliable feedback so that you can be sure your efforts are aligned with the customers’ requirements? How are you using this feedback to build stronger rapport with your customers and improve the customer experience? (Remember that whatever kind of business you run, it is built on relationships.)

What do you measure? How do you know if you are meeting the customer’s needs? Measurements are a good indicator of what the business believes is important. However, there is a tendency for businesses to measure what’s easy to measure–not necessarily what is most important to the business or the customer.

Where do you make mistakes–and how do you know when you’ve made a mistake? Most organizations spend more time correcting errors than they spend on actually providing the product/service the customer wants. You may be surprised to discover how much extra work is required to find and fix mistakes–and how this may be viewed by your organization as perfectly normal.

Why don’t you get the same results every time you do a certain task? This question is intended to help reveal the variation in the work. If you have a well-defined and well-controlled process, you should produce the same results in the same amount of time and at the same cost, every time. Otherwise, you may find yourself relying on a lot of “hope” that everything will work properly.

What is the work your customer is really paying you to do? This sounds like the dumbest question of all. Surely we know what the customer is paying us for! But once you start to unpack this question you’ll discover–perhaps to your horror–that the vast majority of the work you do is not contributing to the customer’s needs. Much of it is rework, some of it is necessary, but only a fraction of it is truly value-added.

If you’ve started thinking about the answers to these questions, you may feel a little bit overwhelmed. This is both normal and good–it’s an indication that you’re already starting to see your business differently. The next step is to get your thoughts on paper and start organizing a plan of attack. What area could you work on that would make the biggest impact to the organization? It might be advisable to start with something that impacts customer satisfaction.

Bottom line: Don’t wait to start your improvement journey. Ask the right questions, and as you go along you can pick up some tools that will help you solve the more complex problems and opportunities.

J.R. Dickens

© 2015 Woodland Park Research Group, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

 

Leading Against the Crowd

It’s time to confront the myth that leaders always have followers. Leadership means going out first. Sometimes, no one follows.

This point came to the surface after I attended a popular leadership event last year. At the end of the day, I found myself feeling that something critically important had been left out of the discussion. It finally occurred to me that none of the speakers dealt with the hard realities of leadership. The leadership event didn’t “speak” to me because it did not address the real difficulties I’ve experienced in various leadership roles.

This is what I refer to as the “hard edges” of leadership. Real leadership often means going against the grain of the organizational culture in order to bring about transformational change. While it’s easy enough to be a leader when everyone is cheering for you, it’s considerably more difficult when everyone thinks you’re crazy.

The leadership event I attended was more like a pep rally than a real primer on leadership. For someone who might be moving into a leadership role for the first time, the event would have felt like a bait-and-switch gimmick—the reality of leadership is altogether different. For those already serving in leadership roles, the event was a sanitized version of reality that offered little other than a slap of encouragement to the troops in the trenches of leadership.

Leadership requires, first of all, considerable strength of conviction. This is no small matter in a fickle, trendy culture that increasingly can’t seem to discern right from wrong. Secondly, leadership requires a vision of what the organization can and should become. Thirdly, leadership requires the tenacity to hold to your convictions while moving the organization in the direction of its potential—often against internal and external resistance.

My mentor Bill Conway used to refer to uncommitted leaders as “toe-stickers”—the kind of people who would test the water before jumping in. These are the “leaders” who will check the wind of public opinion and/or wait for someone else to take the risk of going in first. They only act when peer pressure finally overcomes their inhibitions and it would be too uncomfortable to remain behind. Followers like this draw their courage from the crowd—they have no confidence in their own convictions. Hence, followers are not necessarily a reliable bellwether that you’re doing the right thing. They might eventually follow the crowd off a cliff.

If you find it necessary to rely on the security and affirmation of a large and adoring crowd, you might not have what it takes to be a leader. There are times that you have to be willing to go out all by yourself and stand your ground in the face of certain opposition.

J.R. Dickens

© 2015 Woodland Park Research Group, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

The Perils of Cost Cutting

Trying to improve profitability by cutting costs is a lot like trying to lose excess weight by starving yourself to death. While it’s certainly true that you can lose weight by starvation, you’ll quickly discover that starvation has a host of undesirable consequences (including death). The same is true for cost-cutting when it’s employed as a primary strategy for improving the bottom line. Cost-cutting has the potential to produce a short-term gain, but the long-term consequences are inevitably negative.

What’s wrong with cost-cutting? The basic problem is that it’s based on the assumptions that costs are known and can be controlled directly. In reality, much of the cost of doing business is hidden—which means we’re not even aware of it because there’s no way to measure it. What’s more, the costs we measure on a financial report are the outcome of a series of decisions that often have little obvious connection to money. In other words, the aggregate financial outcomes we do measure can be very difficult to connect to the individual sources (cost drivers).

Another common assumption is that individual costs can be controlled individually. In reality, costs may be interdependent in ways that are not immediately apparent. While one might be able to push cost down in one area, some other cost component goes up in its place (often with a delay in time that makes it more difficult to connect the two events). For example, we might reduce the cost of packaging by switching to a lighter box, only to see an increase in the cost of warranty claims three months from now. Then, a few months later, repeat sales decline as customers begin to switch to a supplier that causes fewer headaches resulting from excessive shipping damage. Hence there can be a long-term ripple effect that obliterates any short-term financial gains from the cost-cutting action.

To use the old expression, we are shooting ourselves in the foot. And the simple reason is that we aren’t able to connect the event of pulling the trigger, and the pain that follows afterward. Instead, we treat the pain in our foot as an independent event, and try to fix it without taking into account why it started to hurt in the first place.

Cost-cutting ends up becoming a vicious cycle, because each round of cuts will create unintended consequences (often in the form of higher total operating costs) that must now be dealt with as the crisis du jour. To put it a different way, the fires we fight today are the result of the decisions we made yesterday. And it’s a very difficult cycle to break because the dots are hard to connect.

This article only begins to scratch the surface of the problem. In future articles, we’ll explore how the cost-cutting mindset is detrimental to things like human capital management and long-term business growth. We’ll also consider how the budgeting process can be a significant catalyst that fuels the cost-cutting merry-go-round.

J.R. Dickens

© 2015 Woodland Park Research Group, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Three Keys to Lasting Success

What does it take to survive in the world of business? Among other things, it takes unswerving integrity, a commitment to excellence, and thoughtful innovation. Take away any one of these three elements, and the company’s days are numbered.

Integrity

Business is built on relationships, and relationships are built on trust. Destroy trust in the customer relationship and watch your customers go somewhere else. Likewise, trust is the ground for every other business relationship–employees, investors, partners–you name it. Trust is the stuff of loyal relationships and enthusiastic referrals. Your business grows when happy customers send you their friends and colleagues. The reverse is also true.

Trust flows from the core values of the organization. As an illustration, Chick-fil-A is a company grounded in the kind of strong family values that drive its strategic and tactical decisions. Can Chick-fil-A achieve the same level of success without its core values? Not likely. The company with fuzzy values will tend to quickly lose it way.

Consider the current plight of NBC in the wake of revelations that news anchor Brian Williams fabricated stories of personal heroism. The manner in which NBC handles this breach of credibility will speak volumes about the company’s commitment to journalistic integrity.

Excellence

Over the last couple of generations, the quality movement has raised the bar of expectations to the point that excellence is now a feature and not an extra. This applies in both product and service industries. As a result, if you do your job poorly, there is someone waiting to take your place.

Toyota stands out among automakers for its role in developing many of the quality methods that manufacturers take for granted today. “Lean” manufacturing methods make it possible to achieve flexible, high-volume production with high quality and low cost. Even products that are traditionally viewed as commodities can be economically tailored to meet each customer’s requirements. Consequently, we have entered the age of mass customization.

Among fast food chains, Chick-fil-A stands head and shoulders above the competition because of its commitment to good food and great service. The long serving lines are actually a sign that this company is offering something that’s worth waiting for. And companies like Chick-fil-A tend to raise the expectations for everyone else in the industry.

Innovation

If you want to keep doing what you’ve always done, roll down the window and wave at the competition as they pass you by.

Innovation of the sort we’re describing here is not necessarily technology-based. Trying to adopt the latest technology–especially in the early stages–can be debilitating if it doesn’t make sense for your business. Rather, innovation describes your ability to anticipate change and build flexibility into your business model so that you can stay on the “leading edge” where the competition is thinner and the growth potential is high. (Think “blue ocean” strategy.)

Many large companies can string out success by virtue of the inertia from past success (and the commanding market share that often goes with it), but as the technology economy increasingly shows, product life cycles are getting shorter. Even established products have to show something “new and improved” to sustain the interest of the consumer.

Walmart is the 800-pound gorilla of retail, and yet they are responding to the trend away from big box stores. “Neighborhood markets” offer many of the same products, but on a scale much less intimidating than the massive warehouse outlets.

McDonald’s is a company trying to innovate in the wrong way by doing too much of everything. In the process, McDonald’s is confusing its brand image–and the financial results are beginning to show. When was the last time you had a Big Mac with fries and a shake?

Southwest Airlines has been unconventional since it started almost 50 years ago. The major carriers have never been able to adopt Southwest’s strategy, and the small carriers which try to imitate Southwest are always playing catch-up. Innovative strategy (coupled with a customer-focused culture) have been a winning combination that continues to set Southwest apart from the competition.

A couple of additional examples include Radio Shack, which tried repeatedly to reinvent itself before finally declaring bankruptcy, and Target, which is embarking on an effort to reinvigorate its brand image in the highly competitive retail space.

Are There Any Exceptions?

Examples of success and failure abound. Can you think of any company which survived in the long run without paying careful attention to Integrity, Excellence, and Innovation?

J.R. Dickens

© 2015 Woodland Park Research Group, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Culture Rules the Day

Anyone who has been engaged in the business of Lean Six Sigma (LSS) can tell you how difficult it is to change organizational culture. When LSS meets culture, culture wins almost every time. That is because our default business culture is actually opposed to LSS improvement at almost every point.

Take production for example. On the typical shop floor, productivity is measured in terms of machine output. This is because the driving metric in a conventional manufacturing operation is the unit cost of production. The goal is to minimize unit cost of production by maximizing output. That happens when every machine is running at 100% capacity. More widgets means that we spread the fixed cost of production over more units, thereby minimizing unit cost. Think of it this way: in a conventional manufacturing environment, efficiency is measured from the viewpoint of the machinery. More is always better. Improvement efforts consequently tend to focus on those things that have the most direct impact on machine output.

The LSS approach to production has a drastically different focus—time. Efficiency is measured not in terms of how many widgets are produced, but how much time it takes to produce a widget from start-to-finish. In other words, efficiency is measured from the viewpoint of the widget as it moves through the manufacturing process. The conventional approach to manufacturing includes the high hidden costs of excess inventory and long cycle time. LSS eliminates these hidden costs by producing only what is needed. In conventional manufacturing, machine downtime is to be avoided at all costs. In the LSS manufacturing system, excess production is to be avoided at all costs. This contrast helps explain why LSS is not easily accepted in a conventional manufacturing culture. In fact, from the point-of-view of conventional manufacturing, LSS makes no sense at all. Why would you intentionally make less than what you can make—knowing full well that it will drive up the unit cost?

Notice that even conventional manufacturing is keenly interested in improvement. More machine capacity means lower unit cost. Bigger warehouses mean more space to store more stuff. By contrast, the LSS approach eliminates the hidden cost of production and focuses on flexible capacity—making only what is needed, in small batches, every day. With this kind of flexibility, Just-in-Time production and Zero Inventory are within reach. Notice that LSS is just as concerned about cost of production, but approaches it from a different standpoint by recognizing that cost is reduced by eliminating process waste.

The road to improvement starts with culture. We will continue to explore the relationship between culture and improvement by considering maintenance practices in the next article.

J.R. Dickens

© 2014 Woodland Park Research Group, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

What is Your Creative Process?

Cultivating creativity amidst a hectic schedule can be quite a challenge. But it is a challenge we must embrace in order to keep from stagnating in a routine of busyness and/or crisis management. Without creativity, we can neither make sense of our present challenges nor gain insight into our future opportunities.

Each of us is innately creative, though we often lose sight of our creative impulses. Even a toddler with a box of wood blocks can express his creativity by arranging and stacking his blocks into some new thing of his own imagining. While children naturally explore their creative impulses, as adults we tend to get sidetracked with an assortment of responsibilities. And yet, the desire for—and the need for—creativity is no less than it is for a child. The creative process is one of the most satisfying experiences of life because it gives expression to an essential part of our human nature.

Creativity takes time, energy, and patience. While we can take steps to cultivate creativity—as we will discuss in this article—the creative process is mysterious enough that we can’t “plan” that next big moment of insight. We can, however, prepare for it expectantly and wait patiently as it unfolds. Let’s consider the following elements that help us cultivate creativity.

Creative Space

One of the most important steps is to find your creative space—someplace away from the kind of distractions that tend to clutter your mind. Where do you get your best ideas? My creative space is at the kitchen table—which happens to have a nice view of the mountains, and which happens to be a long way from the internet and the email box. What relaxes you? Find that environment. Conversely, avoid the kinds of stressors that tend to stifle the creative process. My creative time is usually over the moment I sit down in front of the computer.

You’ve probably heard that we often get our best ideas in the bathroom. One of my acquaintances used to have a roommate who kept a grease pencil in the shower to literally write his ideas on the shower wall. That’s what I call a creative way to use one’s creative space.

Creative Time

As well as a creative space, think in terms of a creative time. When do you get your best ideas? For me, it is usually early in the morning. By the end of the day, I am much less likely to be in the creative “zone” —and that’s the time I am more inclined to look for a way to unwind.

Creative Process

Think of your creative “process” as the way you cultivate ideas and the way to express and capture them. I find that reading and reflecting is a good way to cultivate ideas—using the thoughts of others as a way to organize and expand my own thoughts, and then capturing those thoughts on a writing pad. What stimulates your creativity? More than likely it involves a variety of senses. (I shouldn’t forget to mention the importance of coffee in my early morning creative process!)

Your creative process is most likely rather solitary, but at times it may include others. Perhaps you have a friend or family member who acts as a sounding board for your ideas. For this to work, the individual has to be someone that you trust implicitly. As we will see later, ideas are fragile things.

Creative Expression

We are all naturally creative and express that creativity in a variety of everyday ways—cooking a meal, organizing a closet, planting a garden, choosing what to wear each day. Beyond that, many of our leisure activities are creative—sewing, painting, playing an instrument, woodworking, home improvement. You might notice that most creative activities involve both mental and physical exertion—e.g., designing and building a new flowerbed. Often, your creative activity requires a great deal of physical dexterity (such as drawing, painting, or woodworking) in order to give an idea its full expression. With these ideas in mind, we can consciously cultivate our creative impulses by engaging in a variety of mental/physical activities. Take up a new hobby or try a new skill—the effort needed to develop this skill will help you in unexpected ways because creativity tends to be a “whole body” experience. For example, photography is the kind of skill that helps you notice details like structure, color and contrast. After a while, you begin to “see” the photograph that you can capture with the camera.

Cultivating Ideas

The common theme of creativity is the use of your imagination to cultivate ideas that you can bring into reality. This process can be aided by consciously exploring a variety of interests and activities, from which you can make unique connections. Allowing your thoughts to wander between seemingly disparate areas of interest is one way to begin making new connections. Creativity is often aided by paying attention to minor details that most people tend to overlook.

Synthesizing Ideas

“Synthesis” is a process of putting together ideas from an assortment of sources. We can do this by looking for commonalities and differences, and then making connections. If my graduate work in wood products resulted in any kind of breakthrough, it was made possible by noticing the similarities between wood products and man-made composite materials. As far as I could determine from exploring the literature, no one else had ever made that connection. That simple connection formed the basis for two years of research.

Nurturing Ideas

Ideas are fragile things. As you explore the creative process, be careful not to filter ideas before they’ve had a chance to develop. Make a point to use new ideas to challenge your assumptions about the way things are, rather than dismissing the idea as too difficult or impractical. Remember that many of your assumptions will turn out to be wrong when examined more carefully, especially in light of the question, “Why?”—which may turn out to be the moment of breakthrough you’ve been waiting for.

J.R. Dickens

© 2014 Woodland Park Research Group, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Doing More by Doing Less

This morning I came across an article that offered some unusual and seemingly contradictory advice: how to be more productive by doing nothing. While most articles on productivity offer an assortment of suggestions on how to be more productive with your time, this article took a contrary stance in order to help us take a step back from the usual way we approach the idea of productivity.

Borrowing on this idea of achieving more by doing less, let’s consider the how and the why of doing less.

Why do less?

The first question is why we should strive to do less. In a word, the answer is burnout. Trying to do too much at any one point in time is overwhelming and impossible—which leads to fatigue and frustration (short-term burnout). When you get to this point, it’s time to slow down.

What is even worse is trying to do too much on a sustained basis. Some people have the energy to maintain this kind of pace for years—but eventually, they will hit the wall. The analogy is fitting, because when you hit the wall, you don’t slow down—you come to sudden and painful stop. This is the point of burnout where the damage may be irreversible and the only solution is to walk away and never come back.

How to do less?

The next question addresses how to do less. Perhaps like me, you’ve fallen prey to the “yes” syndrome of taking on too many things at one time. While it’s hard to say no—especially when we’re asked to help with a worthy cause—the simple fact is that we can never do everything we might be asked to do. And the tendency to say “yes” all the time—coupled with a high level of competence in your work—only tends to attract more noble causes to your door. The solution to your “yes” problem is twofold: (1) know your limits; and, (2) prioritize your time and energy. Not everything can be equally important, so make a point to order your commitments according to what’s most important—and then know your limitations so you can say “no” when you reach that point.

What does it mean to be “productive”?

Finally, consider the important question of what it means to be productive. At this point, it is important not to confuse activity with work. Sometimes your most important work involves the least amount of activity—for example, when you take time to think about the future of your business, or you work through the mental process of creating a new concept or solving a difficult problem.

When I was in the corporate world, one of the worst things you could do was have the boss walk by your office and discover that you were doing “nothing”—which is to say, nothing visible. In this kind of work environment, the emphasis is on looking busy even when doing nothing of value. By contrast, your most important value may be the time you are not busy with tasks like reading, writing, talking, or listening.

Less work and more focus

The value of doing less is apparent when we can begin to focus more time and energy (especially the best part of our day) on doing fewer things—and doing them better. This is particularly true for creative kinds of work which are easily stifled by the effects of frustration and fatigue.

Make time for nothing

While there are times when circumstances require an intense effort, it’s important to pull back and rest on a regular basis. Taking time to do nothing will help you bring a new level of energy and creativity to your work.

J.R. Dickens

© 2014 Woodland Park Research Group, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Do You Want to Make More Money?

Money is the lifeblood of your business, and you know that if it’s leaving faster than it’s coming in, the end is near. The goal of making money–or making more money–is on every business owner’s mind. Today we’ll explore several ways to improve the financial health of your business.

Reduce waste and rework

The unfortunate truth is that non-value-added work is the rule rather than the exception in most organizations. And one of the most insidious forms of non-value-added work is rework–doing something again because it wasn’t done right the first time. Rework easily becomes part of the routine when your processes produce errors and defects. Only by focusing on the source of the problem can rework become a thing of the past. Unfortunately, the tendency is to focus on treating symptoms rather than causes–with little or no long-term improvement.

Outsource and focus on your strengths

Some years back, “outsourcing” became the code word for layoffs in the world of big business. This is unfortunate, since it represents an organization’s efforts to focus on core competencies and let someone else handle the routine tasks of doing business. In fact, outsourcing goes hand-in-hand with the goal of doing more value-added work, which is the reason you’re in business in the first place. Routine work can be outsourced to someone who will free your time to focus on your strengths–which is where you make your money!

Build long-term relationships

Long-term success is built on long-term relationships. When customers trust you, they will keep coming back. Make a point to build relationships rather than simply trying to make a sale.

Keep customers engaged

The most valuable customer is the one you already have. There are an assortment of tools at your disposal that will make it easier to stay connected to customers over the long-term. Social media and email marketing are particularly helpful tools.

Market by “pulling” instead of “pushing”

Let your marketing message focus on benefits rather than features. The old way of selling involved a lot of persuasion on the part of the seller. The new way of selling is to provide your customer with the information he needs to make a decision. When you know your customer well enough to find his “pain points,” you can create content and messaging that focuses on solutions.

Expand your reach in the marketplace through customer referrals

Back in the days of the Yellow Pages, the expression was, “Let your fingers do the walking.” Today, a better expression might be, “Let your customers do the talking.” Referral leads are invaluable because the new customer comes in the door already trusting you. By making sure your existing customers are happy, they will be inclined to send more business to you.

J.R. Dickens

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