Huge Horizon-vs-DeepThinkers

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.

 

The Leadership Principle

"In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence" (Dr Laurence Peter, 1919-90, Canadian academic, from the 1969 book, The Peter Principle, written by Dr Peter and Raymond Hull - Peter was the academic; Hull the writer)

Far from being an indictment of people, Laurence Peter's ideas were mostly focused on the weaknesses of typical organisations, and the threat that they present to the well-being of their people.

Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull's 1969 book The Peter Principle is a study of hierarchies (Peter coined the scientific term 'hierarchiology') and how people behave within them in relation to promotion and competence. Laurence Peter also asserted that, "Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence", although he places the blame on organisations, not employees, and urges people to prioritise their health and happiness rather than struggle to meet the unhealthy demands of a promotion-too-far, in an uncaring hierarchy.

Although written in 1969, The Peter Principle contains perspectives that resonate even more strongly today.

Notably Laurence Peter observed that bosses who are competent in their roles tend to assess employees according to their output and results, whereas incompetent bosses tend to assess employees according to their input and adherence to rules and policies, etc. This remains a feature of poorly managed organisations and hierarchies.

Peter also suggested that 'super-competence' in an employee is more likely to result in dismissal than promotion, which again is a feature of poor organisations, which cannot handle the disruption. A super-competent employee "...violates the first commandment of hierarchical life: [namely that] the hierarchy must be preserved.." which again is symptomatic of poorly run modern organisations, just as it was back in the 1960's.

Peter also says of leadership in poor organisations: "Most heirarchies are nowadays so cumbered with rules and traditions....... that even high employees do not have to lead anyone anywhere, in the sense of pointing out the direction and setting the pace. They simply follow precedents, obey regulations, and move at the head of the crowd. Such employees lead only in the sense that the carved wooden figurehead leads the ship.."

Also included in Laurence Peter's study was his analysis of a survey of general practice doctors who were asked to list the most commonly encountered medical complaints among 'successful' patients. The survey results could easily be found in a modern survey, and included ulcers, colitis, high blood pressure, alcoholism, obesity, hypertension, insomnia, cardiovascular problems and impotence. Peter interpreted such complaints as evidence of 'constitutional incompetence' associated with what he termed 'final placement syndrome'. At the time, Peter bemoaned the fact that the medical profession failed to see the connection between over-demanding work responsibility and people's well-being. Today of course we understand that there is a connection, although the challenge remains for most organisations, and society as a whole, to focus seriously on dealing with the situation. As Peter himself says, "...Truth will out! Time and the increasingly tumultuous social order inevitably will being enlightenment.."

Laurence Peter's ideas of 1969 were keenly perceptive then, and remain so today.

© alan chapman 1995-2010

Leadership

First, here is a deeper more philosophical view of effective modern leadership which addresses the foundations of effective leadership, rather than the styles and methods built on top, which are explained later.

A British government initiative surfaced in March 2008, which suggested that young people should swear an oath of allegiance to 'Queen and Country', seemingly as a means of improving national loyalty, identity, and allegiance.

While packaged as a suggestion to address 'disaffection' among young people, the idea was essentially concerned with leadership - or more precisely a failing leadership.

The idea was rightly and unanimously dismissed by all sensible commentators as foolhardy nonsense, but it does provide a wonderful perspective by which to examine and illustrate the actual important principles of leadership:

1. Always, when leaders say that the people are not following, it's the leaders who are lost, not the people.
2. Leaders get lost because of isolation, delusion, arrogance, plain stupidity, etc., but above all because they become obsessed with imposing their authority, instead of truly leading.
3. Incidentally, leading is helping people achieve a shared vision, not telling people what to do.
4. It is not possible for a leader to understand and lead people when the leader's head is high in the clouds or stuck firmly up his backside.
5. That is to say - loyalty to leadership relies on the leader having a connection with and understanding of people's needs and wishes and possibilities. Solutions to leadership challenges do not lie in the leader's needs and wishes. Leadership solutions lie in the needs and wishes of the followers.
6. The suggestion that loyalty and a following can be built by simply asking or forcing people to be loyal is not any basis for effective leadership.
7. Prior to expecting anyone to follow, a leader first needs to demonstrate a vision and values worthy of a following.
8. A given type of leadership inevitably attracts the same type of followers. Put another way, a leadership cannot behave in any way that it asks its people not to.
9. In other words, for people to embrace and follow modern compassionate, honest, ethical, peaceful, and fair principles, they must see these qualities demonstrated by their leadership.
10. People are a lot cleverer than most leaders think.
11. People have a much keener sense of truth than most leaders think.
12. People quickly lose faith in a leader who behaves as if points 10 and 11 do not exist.
13. People generally have the answers which elude the leaders - they just have better things to do than help the leader to lead - like getting on with their own lives.
14. A leadership which screws up in a big way should come clean and admit their errors. People will generally forgive mistakes but they do not tolerate being treated like idiots by leaders.
15. And on the question of mistakes, a mistake is an opportunity to be better, and to show remorse and a lesson learned. This is how civilisation progresses.
16. A leader should be brave enough to talk when lesser people want to fight. Anyone can resort to threats and aggression. Being aggressive is not leading. It might have been a couple of thousand years ago, but it's not now. The nature of humankind and civilisation is to become more civilised. Leaders should enable not obstruct this process.

© alan chapman 1995-2009

The Echelon Value Office

Some time ago I challenged my Deep Thinkers to release a short blog highlighting some of the things that they do for Echelon and our clients. Their counter- challenge for me, to short blog on the Echelon Value office. The “Value Office” is a truly different operational office environment that most of our clients have never been exposed to, so here goes.

First, understand that almost everything that happens in the “front office” is non-value added. Companies spend about 20% of their operating budget on the “front office”. And, also understand we’re not just talking about people and their compensation packages; think about the non-value added cost of paper, printers, shredders, toner, furniture and the cost of maintaining the property. There is the cost of time, time to print, time to talk on the phone, time to set up meetings and with a heavy manned front office, there are a lot of meeting. None of this is value added, so that means its waste-right?

As any focused business owner should know, there is a difference in an expense and an investment. Financial software can handle AP, AR, invoicing, quoting, company P&L reconciling and you can even set up some customized applications to fit your business = 1 person. Messaging, handling social media updates, scheduling and departmental interfacing (ex. production to engineering) = 1 person. Handle incoming mail (snail and electronic), scan snail mail into the correct files and shred, answer incoming calls and forward messages via speech to text in real time = 1 person. Does your company really need a person sitting in a fancy reception area greeting people when the person that they are supposed to meet can meet them there? And why did someone travel to your company when they should have scheduled a meeting online and saved your employee some time. I could go on, but you get the idea. How huge would some of these changes be for your company? Not just in the business of running the business, but in the amount of money that would be saved (value)? There is the one time investment of software and training and there is the continuing expense of a non-value added Front Office. How you spend your money is key to how valuable your company is.

Words Matter

It’s true, I mean just think about it. The words we use to deliver a message really determine the effectiveness of the message. If you know that you’re going to have a conversation with someone that is quite and somewhat reserved, you need to understand that they are listening, probably better than you realize. The key to having a value-added conversation with someone is understanding that what you say is just as important as how you say it. And, one of the best ways to know for certain that you’ve effectively delivered a message is to ask a question or two about the subject. Example, “Did I explain the initiative completely?” or “Do you have any questions that I can answer about that?”

So, words do matter. Try to watch for body language clues, and be careful about the body signals you send. Most people feel threatened, or feel as if you’re in their space if you lean forward, brow furrowed. Also, when people feel comfortable around you, making a statement or delivering a message is much easier. So, look for listening cues; one hand on the chin, direct eye contact and asking questions. If they’re asking questions, they’re truly engaged in the conversation, and that’s VALUE!