Huge Horizon-vs-DeepThinkers

NPR’s Newest BFF

Sometimes I wonder just what it takes to open the eyes of the American voting public. I not talking about the dead people and convicts that helped vote President Hussein Obama in office, I mean just plain folks like us. And, who didn’t see this issue of NPR’s train wreck getting the attention and interference by Obama. When a business owner has a division that is problematic, and not making any moves to improve itself, then the owner takes action. That’s what has happened to the major players in the month’s long debacle that began with the firing of Juan Williams.

NPR has long been losing in the game of “fail and balanced” reporting and commentary, that’s reality folks, not my opinion. Also, I’m not surprised that the conversation has turned to the validation of NPR, that is, why does that organization even exist, where’s the value? The bar for NPR has been to become the American version of the BBC, but when compared, the BBC beams true news and commentary around the globe, and not everything that everyone hears on the BBC they agree with, but is there a secret agenda there, I think not. Does NPR still exist just because the funding is there, and it’s a good place to park left leaning cronies that have a track record of making poor management decisions? It would seem to me, that if the President of the United States truly wanted the very best for this country, he would be looking at NPR sideways, making tough decisions about where best to place hard working American’s tax dollars. No, he feels the need to throw good money at a skunk, and NPR has really been stinking up the place.

Question, does the President belong in the debate over the validation of NPR?

Deep Thinkers (DT) talking points;

•   Once again NPR has shown almost every wrong management move that there is. No plan, no internal communication (about the plan they don’t have), no team cohesiveness (managers not singing the same verse from the same page), no accountability, except in cases (handled very poorly) where accountability was wrongly placed (Juan Williams).
•   If an organization is to be managed, competent MANGERS should be hired and tasked to do that. As we’ve seen, placing cronies that didn’t exactly make it rain with their previous employers in high places with much responsibility is a recipe for failure.
•   DTs think that the American people would be better served with a President that would focus on the important business of the people, but it’s too late for that. President Hussein Obama is much more concerned with the (rights) of the unions, and with his re-election campaign and with giving even more money to NPR, than the needs of the country.

We have a President that is more focused on just being President that doing the work of our President. That is, maybe he should take the time to actually meet and know the name of 60% of his cabinet members. DTs think that instead of sending thousands of paid pro-union protestors to the Wisconsin capital, the President should apologize to Israel for treating them like a three legged dog. On March 9^th, White House spokesman Jay Carney said that President Obama considers increasing the appropriation of funds to The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports NPR from $420 million to $451 million as “worthwhile” and an “important priority”.  Increasing funding to NPR, instead of cutting them off during a time when the national deficit is 14 trillion dollars, is reckless and indicative of a President that has never had to meet a payroll. It’s pretty evident that the strong sense of enablement and lack of concern for getting the right things done for the right reasons from the current administration will end in 2012.

 

How to Implode like NPR

Currently there are fourteen tabs open across the top bar of my browser, all are about NPR.

Three points first;

1. NPR is not a client of Echelon Value Consulting LLC.
2. It’s a big honkin monitor (the 14 tabs thing), I’m a monitor snob, and size does matter.
3. NPR is NOT a client of Echelon Value Consulting LLC.

Recently the Deep thinkers did a piece titled “How to Screw up Like NPR”, the focus was mainly on the Juan Williams debacle and how Ellen Weiss and Vivian Schiller completely did everything wrong with it. As the owner of a consulting firm that teaches clients how to handle public issues the right way, the train wreck that is NPR gets a strong blip on my radar.

So, let’s deal with some real world stuff, and keep in mind that all of the following is relevant to all of us, with the singular exception of career politicians. Accountability; we should all be held accountable for our actions, let’s not assume that just because we’re hearing a rep from NPR speak about how “liberals today might be more educated, fair and balanced than conservatives” or “white, middle-America gun-toting…  They’re seriously racist, racist people.” that’s a one-time brain slip. Ron Schiller believed it when it came out of his mouth, and he should be help accountable for what he said. Below is the recipe for implosion at NPR.

• 10/2010, Juan Williams is fired from NPR allegedly for a comment he made on Fox News Chanel. Created a firestorm of controversy over how the termination was mishandled and how flippant both, Ellen Weiss and Vivian Schiller were in statements concerning the termination.
• 01/2011, after an outside investigative group releases its findings, Ellen Weiss is forced out as Senior VP for News at NPR.
• 03/07/2011, Vivian Schiller responds to questions about the Williams firing, “We handled the situation badly, we acted too hastily and we made some mistakes. I made some mistakes.” About the need for federal funding she responded, “We take [federal defunding] very, very seriously...It would have a profound impact we believe on our ability…to deliver news and information”
• 03/08/2011, Conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe releases a video secretly capturing Ron Schiller, the head of NPR’s nonprofit foundation (as of this posting) and Betsy Liley, NPR’s director of institutional giving (as of this posting), during a lunch with persons they believe are members of a Muslim Brotherhood front group. In the video, Schiller says he’s “very proud of” how NPR fired Juan Williams. Plus, on the matter of federal funding, “Well frankly, it is clear that we would be better off in the long-run without federal funding,”, “Yes, NPR would definitely survive and most of the stations would survive.”
• 03/09/2011, Vivian Schiller is forced to resign as President and CEO of NPR. On the other side of this fire storm what does NPR look like? Probably not much different, this skunk is always going to smell. For Schiller it’s probably a hit to her ego at most but she’ll be ok, I mean when her predecessor, former NPR CEO Kenneth Stern resigned, he received $872,189 in severance payments.

Lessons learned here; building cohesive value added teams…people that say and do the right things at the right time. Using transparency and clarity as tools to win, always telling the truth, not hiding agendas. And displaying positive professional values and integrity rise above the crowd and be proud to be seen as someone special. But are these lessons being learned by the list of characters listed above? I don’t know, but I hope so.

 

Why Not?

 

If there’s one thing I want to accomplish before my career comes to an end, and I’m not as young as I used to be, I want to reach an agreement to do business with a company that encourages its senior management to ask ‘Why Not’.

No-one understands the hesitancy of management to resist change better than me. Check this out; I was told one time by a senior manager, that he didn’t like the type of assessments we were using because ‘I didn’t think of it first’, I watched a playback of a security film as a senior manager has a security guard take the managers executive assessment for him, as this goes to publish, I know of a Human Resource Manager that has a ‘no appointment policy’ (supported by the CEO).  Now, this goes far beyond the idea of an enabled workplace and being a VP, Pres, CEO, CFO, absolutely does not give you the right to advocate enablement to the point of a perceived total lack of professional ethics and integrity for yourself or the organization as a whole.

What causes people that have talent and value to become brainless pinheads to the point that they become; afraid of new ideas, afraid to ask the question ‘Why Not?’ and afraid to develop an organization that has be enabled to be proactive, to problem solve and return value to the organization? It’s simple really, CHANGE. Organizations love to embrace the idea of LODO, you know-Lights On, Doors Open. As managers walk down the halls (if they choose to get out from behind their desks), the lights are still on, everybody’s still doing the same old things, the same way-just like yesterday, and last week, and last year…  As long as we’re still open and we still have our jobs and nobody’s rocking the boat with any new ideas, yeah- we’ll be just fine. And I may just give my job to my son when I retire, or maybe my brother in-law, yeah they won’t rock the boat.

Why Not? Well, I’ll tell you why not. Business trends are constantly evolving, I mean just look at what I’ve seen in my lifetime. As a young boy, it was the downtown business district- Main Street and all it had to offer. Then it was the malls and urban sprawl. Then we went to the big boxes, Home Depot, Wal Mart and the like. Now, Barnes and Noble wants to be THE online bookstore, and we can order pizza for delivery, have the dry cleaning picked up/dropped off and make sure that poochie gets walked, all online. Change is a good thing, so maybe we’ve just done a poor job projecting the future, maybe when we said to our clients-‘Your competition has an on-line presence (F/B, Twitter) and can ship a product as good or better than yours from China, in the same amount of time as you can make it,’ maybe we weren’t clear. Well…maybe

So, Why Not? Oh, I don’t know if they aren’t listening or if we’re saying it wrong, and at the end of the day it really only comes down to one thing. We have a commitment to our client’s that we will show them how to add value to their organizations and their customers and their employees. We will never stop giving everything we’ve got to that commitment. We too have had to evolve, now its live internet presentations instead of PowerPoint, its internet video meetings instead of rubber on the road or wheels up, and Cloud Echelon, a live Learning Management System available to our Tier One clients 24/7.  I really do have a blast doing what I do, and I’m thankful for every client…but man---I’ve got some stories.

 

Houston Huggins

Doing the right thing-v-Doing things right

Yesterday I wrote a post about top-down versus bottom-up thinking. There is a corollary to that advice, which is “doing the right things is more important than doing things right.”  Sounds simple but in practice I promise you most organization fall into the latter trap.

Here’s how it goes:

You have a business development group with two people.  They are tasked with “getting deals done” so they race around talking to tons of potential partners inking anything from channel sales deals, product integration, international distribution agreements, co-marketing arrangements, M&A discussions, etc.  You can often measure how many deals were achieved but there often doesn’t flow a steady stream of revenues / profits from these deals.

You have a marketing department with three people.  They’re tasked with doing … marketing.  So they create a task list of all the marketing activities an organization can do: press releases, web site updates, customer case studies, blog posts, daily Tweets, Facebook fan page, attending conferences, etc.  You get a lot of traffic – not always results.

When you hire people in functional roles they want to show that they’re achieving results and results are easiest to measure by tasks accomplished.  But many CEO’s and management teams fail to set clear guidelines on what the company objectives are and make sure that everybody is driving toward the same goal.  It’s actually quite hard to lay out an annual company strategy that is articulate and underpinned by facts. So many CEO’s just carry on being … CEO’s –>  fund raise, get media attention, attend conferences, hire staff, “set direction”, whatever.  But this leads to organizational drift because staff will continue to produce “work.”

 

 Let me give you an example.  Let’s say you have a marketing department with an incredibly talented leader who knows SEO, SEM, social media and how to hit the cover off the ball on press coverage.  So you generate a ton of traffic to your website.  If the traffic is unfocused you actually can be doing a disservice to your company rather than a benefit.  Your sales department has to have somebody has do deal with these inbound inquiries.  If the people who wind up at your site are not high quality leads, you either piss people off by not responding to them or you respond and burn up your critical resources trying to be helpful to people who are not likely to convert to become customers.

It’s why I’ve often start when running marketing campaigns the most simple of questions:

- with whom are we trying to communicate?
- what messages are we wanting them to receive?
- what is the best channel to reach these people?
- if they receive our message what actions (if any) are we hoping for?
- how will we handle those responses

And the reality is that you might be better off doing less activity but doing “the right” activities really well.  To do the right activities you need to start with a top down assessment with what you’re trying to achieve with your marketing.

 

Similar with product features.  One of the most important movements in software design in the past few years has been a return to simplicity – a move away from the Microsoft era of every release adding a new 150 unused features.  One of my favorite sayings in this area comes from a portfolio company, RingRevenue, who like to say “ease of use = use and use = revenue.” I love that saying.  If you don’t know WHY you’re adding features don’t do it just because you have a development team.  Better that they work on new initiatives, performance improvements, operational features to help internal management or anything other than just cranking out features for the sake of it.

But the counter case is equally ineffective.  You sometimes find CEO’s who want press coverage, want to speak on important panels or want features that their competitors offer without knowing whether their customers care about these features.  So they direct staff to meet these objectives without considering what the purpose of activity is and what the end result will be. People will certainly follow orders and do the things you ask of them.

Smart people produce high quality work.  As management your job is to make sure that everybody understands how their initiatives tie into the overall company strategy.  Do the hard work and try to define your company’s objectives and get them on paper.  Everybody should be able to answer the question, “why am I doing this?”  Otherwise they’re likely to be doing things right, but not the right things.

Thanks Mark Suster!

 

Top Down-v-Bottom Up Thinking

 

For the first 5 years of my career I was a “bottom up” thinker and worker.  I assembled tons of data, grouped things, found results and drew conclusions.  It was difficult to make the transition to a “top down” thinker but as a senior executive – and as an entrepreneur – you’re far less effective without this skill in your arsenal.  You need to be able to structure problems / solutions at the appropriate level to communicate effective and drive decision-making. The difference is in formulating hypothesis then testing conclusions / data vs. assembling data and finding patterns.  I know it might sound a bit esoteric so let me explain:

I started my career as a programmer.  We did big, boring but necessary implementations for large companies.  I started by doing billing systems. In billing we literally started thinking about all of the types of bills that would be generated for customers: full payment, partial payment, split payment, senior discount, student discount, level pay plan, etc.  We then made groupings of the common features of each piece of logic so we could figure out what “shared services” we could build so that we could have reusable code.  This is bottom-up planning.  It is useful in many situations and was useful to me in this situation. I next moved into system design where I designed computer systems to deal with large industrial natural gas customers and telecommunication companies.  I had to understand their business requirements and document them all.  I had to understand all of the normal business rules as well as all “edge cases.”  Again, I grouped them into related functions and then designed systems to handle the rules. I spent the first 5 years of my career as a “bottom up thinker.”  It was appropriate for my job and stage of career. Post MBA I went into strategy consulting where my job was to problem solve for clients.  Often I had a very limited time.  Clients wanted to see “preliminary findings” in 4-5 weeks and final results in 8-10.  This is a problem for a strategy consultant because you are, by definition, a generalist that is thrown into new problems again and again.  I struggled on my first few assignments.  It took too long for me to get around to speak to every departement, get data, assemble it, analyze the data to formulate conclusions and then communicate it to executive staff.

The wisest mentor I ever had was Ameet Shah, my partner on several projects.  He taught me much that I know about critical thinking.  He coached me that I had to start with the answers.  WTF?  How can I START with the answers?  How can that be effective?  ”Well, we know the basic structure of the problem we’re trying to solve and we have hypotheses about what some of the answers will be based on our experience.  You need to put this all down into a structured diagram from the first week with the answers that tie to the logic of the problem we’re trying to solve.” Heresy. But he had more insight, “once we know the structure of the problem and our solution we can plan the data that proves or disproves our theories.  The key is not to be wedded to our original answer.  But by problem solving in a ‘top down’ manner we can be much more focused about what data we collect.  We can also begin to socialize our answers with people in the company to get their reactions.  That alone will help us solve the problems.” It was very difficult to get used to it because I didn’t think I had it within me to do this kind of top-down structured thinking.  I bought the most popular book on the topic, “The Mind of the Strategist” by Kenichi Ohmae, who is ex McKinsey.  I found this book very useful but still a little bit hard to implement.  I’m glad I read it though.

 

I later took a course with Barbara Minto (who taught McKinsey people) and bought her book “The Pyramid Principle.”  This was a breakthrough for me.  It is about structuring your thoughts, presentations and communications.  You group items into component parts in a top-down manner.  The book is expensive but for me personally this helped me enormously.  This and frankly a lot of practice. But I approach problems in a different way now.  I start with answers and structure what I think the organization of the problem is.  I then try out my solutions by interviewing people to “prove or disprove” my conclusions.  I’m never right the first time so I spend time adjusting my frameworks.  And if data is required then I apply actual data to my conclusions.  The process is bankrupt if you simply tweak the data to support your hypotheses. But applied correctly and this is golden. I often go into meetings with portfolio companies with a structure worked out of what I believe the critical issues are.  I structure it top down so we don’t get bogged down in the details that are irrelevant.  To give you an example it might go something like this, here is a made up situation that a portfolio company might face:

-          We currently sell through channels.

-          We’re the market leader in signing up our channel partners.

-          But not enough volume of business is yet going through the channels.

-          Our three options are: spend more time helping the channel sell, spend more time with customers bringing them into our channel partners or sell direct.

-          My guess is that we aren’t prepared to sell direct because that would require a broader team and more capabilities than we have.  So the real question is – do we spend more of our time and limited resources helping our channel or educating and marketing to their customers.

-          On a less critical path we should evaluate the capabilities required to serve customers directly if we ever needed to and know what the channel’s response would be.

If I framed the issue incorrectly I haven’t done my job.  If it requires minor tweaks we change the discussion on the fly.  But we have the roadmap for our discussion and don’t have to wander on the back roads of unstructured conversations.  I needed no data for this discussion.  It is at the appropriate level.  It drives the conversation to what matters. I know it sounds exceedingly easy.  It’s not.  And few people in my experience do this well so many board meetings wander. I challenge you to consider whether you’re top-down or bottom up.  In analysis there are always circumstances for each approach.  But in leadership and entrepreneurism the top-down approach will be the right solution more often than not.

Thanks Mark Suster!

What Toyota Got Right

As we all know, Toyota is a very visible company, a company known around the world for making quality products priced for almost any budget. Toyota’s approach to building quality automobiles has changed very little in the past sixty years; quality only comes second to safety, compare that to the disgusting reputation of what used to be known as ‘The Big Three’. However, the process of assembling automobiles has changed significantly in those sixty years. Way back in the day, car companies used to build their product on their assembly lines from the firewall to the finished product. Today, the process of putting a car together involves building a family of support companies that manufacture the many parts of a car, to the car company’s specifications. Most automakers depend on a large pool of Tier 1 and Tier 2 suppliers for many components that the car companies assemble in their plants. In this regard, Toyota is no different. So, for the assembly of a Toyota vehicle, Toyota depends on their suppliers to provide high quality and safety critical products to Toyota plants that are manufactured to the high standards of the Toyota Quality System.

So, with Toyota’s high profile safety and quality issues still fresh in many people’s minds, let’s do this one differently, let’s consider the things that Toyota got right:

 

•  From day one, Toyota got right out in front of the quality issues. Understanding ‘where there’s smoke, there’s probably fire’. At a time when a company is under fire for anything specific to safety and quality, it’s time to stand up- and stand tall. If there’s accountability to consider, then accept it and move forward. Toyota problem solved immediately so that the consumer could know that current product being released to the markets met all specifications. Toyota stayed visible, talked to their markets, letting them know that the issues were at least as important to Toyota as to their customers. Toyota began releasing regular press notices and recall notices in order to shore up consumer confidence.
• Toyota went straight to the source. Tier 1 and two Tier 2 suppliers are expected to meet Toyota’s high quality standards for every part manufactured, and every system assembled. For everything that these suppliers do, there is a policy and procedure in place. However, procedure sometimes is not followed; policy gets forgotten and when that happens there should be accountability. For a company that has set the bar worldwide for safety and quality, and is the model for so many companies for lean manufacturing and value stream management, Toyota has left no doubt with any of their tiered suppliers that there are no exceptions to the expected quality of safety-critical part.
• Toyota didn’t lower the bar for quality or safety, and in an act of true class, Toyota didn’t do any finger-pointing, but they did do a lot of problem solving. If a car has a Toyota badge, and that car is proven to be unsafe in any way, Toyota issues recall notices immediately, problem-solves their processes specific to the issue, and accepts complete responsibility and issues accountability where it belongs.

It’s not often that the rest of the automobile industry gets to take shots at Toyota. In truth, all manufactures have their issues and their crosses to bear. The best thing to come out of this was that Toyota’s management got a wakeup call. From time to time people tend to get slack, make too many assumptions that everything is always going well. The “Toyota Way” teaches about observing the value stream, getting out from behind the desk (go see) and looking for what can go wrong. You can bet that for Toyota its back to the basics, back to doing the things that propelled them to being the best car builder in the world.

 

How to Screw Up like NPR

There are about as many employee manuals and books on how to hire and fire as there are workers in the news and information industry. One of the things that we focus on with our clients, is when and how to fire an employee. In this ‘litigation happy’ society, all it takes is one high level executive releasing an employee for gray area reasons; over the phone, without the employee given the opportunity to meet face to face, using statements like ‘the decisions already been made,’ or (and this is one of my favorites) ‘It’s above my head-the deals done’, and you’re in court and no-one wins. Now enters Ellen Weiss the Senior Vice President for News at NPR and Vivian Schiller the President and CEO of NPR, fine people-I’m sure.

It was Lord Acton, the British historian, who said: "All power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely." Well, in the left leaning much enabled environment at National Public Radio, this quotation was in play in the course of the firing of Juan Williams. As I posted a few days ago, you just about have to have been on Mars while this was going on to not know about it. I have listened to Juan for many years on NPR and, although I didn’t always agree with some of his ideas; he was concise, well spoken and he stayed on subject. Imagine my surprise when he showed up on Fox news channel. If NPR didn’t want Juan on Fox, the idea should have been quashed before it ever happened. Check out a few points below about the firing of Juan, from a business owner’s view, the top of the chain.

1.       The consideration that while at Fox, Juan might say something that would clash with the hard left leaning NPR should have been considered before Juan ever went with Fox. Any half brained middle manger would have recognized how difficult it would be to put that genie back in the bottle. Since the decision was made to allow Juan to play in the ‘fair and balanced’ sandbox at Fox, he should have been left alone to speak as he chose, after all-Fox left him alone.

2.       Typical for many executive managers that are really good at doing as told, and not known for independent thinking, Weiss just makes the phone call. For not questioning the decision, for not calling Juan in to have a face to face, for not negotiating Juan’s contract for more clarity on the boundaries, Weiss placed shame onto herself. Shame that everyone that may work for her will be aware of, constantly. After all, if this is how Weiss handles her business, how secure can her directs feel about their jobs?

3.       Schiller must have felt that NPR needed the press, as bad as it’s been. It’s the only thing I can think of that would have remotely registered in her head when she made the decision to can Williams. During fund raising week, having it done over phone, and the comments that she followed up with at the Atlanta Press Club. Schiller must have felt that NPR didn’t need a black male on the air, she also mentioned that Juan should share his thoughts ’…with his psychiatrist…’ Schiller must feel the need to share the sense of elite executive enablement with the 900 or so public radio stations and their listeners with no concern for accountability.

It should be said at this point, that incompetent bone-head managers make important business decisions every day, with no concern for the fall out. So to say that NPR is the only organization to ever do something like 'the Juan thing' would be completely wrong. But, Schiller and Weiss broke almost every rule in the book, and the only concern that Schiller has shown is that this happened during fund raising week. This event will go full circle for Schiller and Weiss, it will come back to hurt them and in my opinion they deserve it. However, as a teaching moment, this is a great example of the incompetence and ineffectiveness that results from putting the wrong people in the wrong seats on the bus.

 

Why Simple Works

I was spending some time in the “war room” yesterday, this is the central hub for Echelon, gosh was I surprised! Several things hit me; just look at how far we’ve come in 2 short years and listen…you can hear the voices, but not the equipment(more on that in a minute)—so let’s run this down.

In just 2 short years, Echelon’s gone from a casual conversation between my wife and I, to a company that has gone global. Echelon Value Consulting LLC was created with this mantra: “If you can see it in your mind, and you believe it in your heart, then do it with your hands”. It is my goal to make Echelon the most effective, value added consulting group anywhere. Our teams’ collective experience is over a hundred years of value added activities that are aimed at making our clients more financially fit. Ok, the commercial is over, let’s talk about the equipment I mentioned earlier.

Echelon Value is a paperless company, well almost. All of our information that other companies would print and put in a file folder, we mange electronically. So, what you won’t hear in the “war room” are printers, what you will hear are shredders. We scan every document into an electronic file and then shred it. We have continuous backup systems running and maintain an electronic master copy offsite.  I never “heard” the phone ring once, but hold on a minute. Most of the distance communication we have with our clients is voip, that is that we have our conversation and we can see each other. Also, we can file share with them, use an electronic dry erase board and our distance conversation has significantly more value. Wow, sounds complicated, but it’s not-but it is change. Change from the days when companies had 10 people working in accounting, a receptionist out front, managers for other managers that had managers, 39 four drawer file cabinets, more printers than trash cans, and someone on payroll just to manage the 39 four drawer file cabinets-oh and a manager for the person working the cabinets. Understand, there is NO VALUE in that, none. We can accomplish the tasks of 60 people…..ready?…..with 5 people.

But, why wouldn’t we be good at this, after all—it’s what we teach. The days of having a front office loaded down with non-value added people are gone. If you still do it, you are way behind the curve, and more importantly, your company is throwing money away. Assess your condition, use the data that a loss of effectiveness index will give you and make the transition. Once you’ve done that, use the extra people, don’t lose them. Start a new line in the factory; add a new product, or start a new value added project. This isn’t about throwing people out of the workplace, it’s about being more efficient, being more effective and adding value to you company and your customers.

Change Management, Day Four

If you are ever give the job of 'troubleshooting' or investigating (apparent) poor performance, perhaps in another location or business belonging to your own organisation, or perhaps as a consultancy project, here are some simple tips:

Actually 'troubleshooting' isn't a great word - it scares people. Use 'facilitator' or 'helper' instead. It sets a more helpful and cooperative tone.

On which point, you could well find that the main issue will be people's resistance and defensiveness to someone coming in to their organisation do what you are doing. When you overcome that challenge, then you can start comparing what's happening with what the organisation sets out to do (mission, values, goals, priorities, targets, key performance indicators, processes, measures); how the people feel about things (staff turnover, retention, morale, attitudes); and how customers and suppliers feel about things too (actually go out and visit customers, and ex-customers particularly).

You must observe protocols very diligently - introduce yourself properly to people and explain who you are and what you are doing. Don't assume that your task gives you the right to be secretive, or to have access to anyone or anything without permission. Ask for help. Ask for introductions. Ask for permission. Be polite and courteous. Respect people more than you would do normally, because they will be sensitive, understandably so.

Look at the Sharon Drew Morgen facilitation method, which helps with the style and approach you should use. You must aim to help, enable and facilitate discovery and clarity, not work in splendid isolation, as an outsider, who's come to 'sort things out'.

And then be led by the people there as to what can be improved. You should adopt the role of a researcher and enabler rather than a problem solver.

Plan lots of questions that will help people to tell you how they feel about things - customers and staff and suppliers - and what they think can be done to improve things.

Avoid asking 'why' unless they're really trusting you and working with you. Used early, 'why' puts people on the defence and you'll not find out anything.

Look at the customer relationship materials as well - customers will tell you what's best to focus on, and will give you an early opportunity to facilitate some improvement responses. Also look at the employee motivation survey material.

It's likely that you'll have to write a report and recommendations afterwards, in which case try wherever possible to involve the people in what you say about them. Let there be no surprises. Be constructive. Accentuate the positive. Be straight and open with people.

Enjoy the experience. Be respectful and helpful to people and they'll be respectful and helpful to you.

© alan chapman 2005-2010

Change Management, Day Three

Planning, implementing and managing change in a fast-changing environment is increasingly the situation in which most organizations now work.

Dynamic environments such as these require dynamic processes, people, systems and culture, especially for managing change successfully, notably effectively optimising organizational response to market opportunities and threats.

Key elements for success:

• Plan long-term broadly - a sound strategic vision, not a specific detailed plan (the latter is impossible to predict reliably). Detailed five years plans are out of date two weeks after they are written. Focus on detail for establishing and measuring delivery of immediate actions, not medium-to-long-term plans.
• Establish forums and communicating methods to enable immediate review and decision-making. Participation of interested people is essential. This enables their input to be gained, their approval and commitment to be secured, and automatically takes care of communicating the actions and expectations.
• Empower people to make decisions at a local operating level - delegate responsibility and power as much as possible (or at least encourage people to make recommendations which can be quickly approved).
• Remove (as far as is possible) from strategic change and approval processes and teams (or circumvent) any ultra-cautious, ultra-autocratic or compulsively-interfering executives. Autocracy and interference are the biggest obstacles to establishing a successful and sustainable dynamic culture and capability.
• Encourage, enable and develop capable people to be active in other areas of the organization via 'virtual teams' and 'matrix management'.
• Scrutinise and optimise ICT (information and communications technology) systems to enable effective information management and key activity team-working.
• Use workshops as a vehicle to review priorities, agree broad medium-to-long-term vision and aims, and to agree short term action plans and implementation method and accountabilities.
• Adjust recruitment, training and development to accelerate the development of people who contribute positively to a culture of empowered dynamism.

© alan chapman 2005-2010