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Tag: efficiency

  • Time . . . The Scarcest Commodity Executives Have

    Time . . . The Scarcest Commodity Executives Have

    When we asked 150 senior executives from Marketing, Sales, Operations, Administration, and Human Resources, what one thing they wanted to make their day more manageable, the vast majority answered with the same response. It wasn’t great software or IT support, it wasn’t higher salary, it wasn’t free sodas or a ping pong table in the break room, or T-shirt day, or birthday cake for all . . . the most popular answer was just one word – Time.

    Executives are starved for time – time to think, to contemplate, time to digest and cogitate, time to reflect, time to delegate, to mentor, to research, to connect on more than a cursory level with their colleagues. Prioritizing of their schedules, maximizing time efficiency, finding ways to do more than one thing at a time or to parallel schedule so that multiple tasks coincide, are the number one mental activity on a daily basis for senior leaders.

    Their plates are more than full.

    Between their own business responsibilities, outside Board affiliations, community and charitable organizations, sponsorship obligations, professional association activities, speaking engagements, family commitments and personal networking, the 18-hour day is becoming standard for senior leaders of national and global firms. While many would intone “That’s why they get the big bucks,” and “should have known before they took the job,” no amount of money or foreknowledge would have compensated or prepared the normal individual for that level of constant activity and commitment. It’s a grinding pace, and it can only be sustained for so long before their personal health and often the health of the firm suffer as a result. The average tenure of a global level, publicly held firm CEO is less than three years, and it stands to reason that the schedule, and the hunt for unscheduled time, might have a great deal to do with that. While capricious boards, fickle investors, vague and punishing financial markets add their own land mines to an already dangerous traverse, the level of personal energy required is virtually unsustainable by the average human.

    Ari

    For those who need access to, and engagement from, these top C-Suite officers, this insight could mean the difference between productive contact and being put in the “pay no mind” column. Long, rambling voice mails, five-page e-mails, 9-lb promotional brochure bombs, 40-page white papers, are just not in these guys’ future, and will not only deny you the attention you need, but irritate the recipient for not respecting the limited time they have available for such activities. It’s not that they don’t want to engage with you, or that they’re ignoring you, it’s just that you’ve come in at the end of a very long priority string, and have to wait your turn. The more hurdles you place in the way of that turn being productive, the lower your odds of connecting in a meaningful way.

    Short, sweet, decisive, get-to-the-point type communications win the day for these guys – strong, direct images, simple, direct language, compelling offers, real business cases that apply directly, and have relevance to them, are the key to success. Think about it: if you have a line of people waiting outside your office, a full calendar, a charity dinner and speech to prepare, and are flying to a board meeting later in the week, the last thing you want to do is wade through a long, rambling memo, a multi-page brochure with a barely comprehensible letter, with a tentative, limp offer that barely fits within the company’s “needs” basket. Poor choice of activities at best, when there are that many other, potentially more lucrative things waiting in the wings. A short e-mail promising a viable alternative and offering lunch next week, a few sentences at best, is more likely to get some attention.

    Time is one of the few elements of a person’s job that they have limited control over. Time can’t be manufactured, can’t be augmented, can’t be stopped or delayed, bought, coerced, finagled, negotiated or bullied. It marches onward, unbidden and unaffected by your need for more, or to speed up or slow down to make room for more tasks. So, the main goal is usually just to prioritize the time you do have, to maximize the return on effort expended, and meet as many obligations as possible. Where those priorities are allocated, how they are parsed and balanced, is often the difference between success and not, over the long haul. A famous executive has been quoted as saying “I have time for the important things. The questions is, what is important at the time?” Pick the things that are important to you long term, and prioritize them above the rest – success can’t be far behind, however you define it.

  • Sometimes Business Growth Doesn’t Mean More Customers

    Sometimes Business Growth Doesn’t Mean More Customers

    In our daily consulting practice, we see the inside of businesses all over the country, and can make some fairly educated observations about how they run. Small businesses especially are having a tough time running smoothly, in a couple of aspects, operationally and financially.

    Smaller businesses, especially service businesses like landscapers, technology companies, contractors painters and other building trades, are having trouble securing loans from local banks to use for working capital or expansion, new equipment, bigger crews, more workers. This type of business often has ebbs and flows in cash availability, either due to seasonality of their business or the size and nature of their work and their customers. Occasionally they need some extra capitol on a short term basis to make payroll and keep good people on the employee rolls until they are needed for the next big job. If they can’t get that extra money, they are forced to cut other staff, benefits or worse, close down temporarily. This up and down cycle, when not mitigated by some cash flow injections, can eventually destroy a small business, even one that is well managed.

    1)  Qualified Staff Shortage. Operationally, this cash flow issue changes the dynamic among the core of employees, and causes the other problem this type of business faces: scarcity of qualified staff and an employee pool too shallow. If the threat of being laid off comes repeatedly to the rank and file, word spreads in the industrial community and you will have a hard time recruiting good employees. The stress caused by the impending downsize can negatively affect productivity, loyalty and other critical areas of performance.

    2)  Reduced Risk Profile Stifles Growth. That lack of cash flow can also have a negative effect on management decisions as well. If you’re not sure you can fill that cash gap, but have receivables out there and the next big job is in the pipeline, management will still be reluctant to hire additional employees even when they’re needed. This reduces risk-taking, limits growth and expansion, and slows movement among the employees. Mentoring behavior slows or stops, training dries up, and the whole works can come to a virtual standstill, largely out of fear of that “big job gap”.

    3)  Know When To Let Go.  The third but highly overlooked issue for small businesses these days is making the transition from founder-lead, to goal-driven enterprise. Usually smaller businesses are started by a single individual, who has a skill or a talent. They are successful using those skills and the business grows. They hire some semi-skilled workers to help in specific areas, but the founder still acts as president, chief cook and bottle washer, wearing a huge number of hats on the managerial and administrative side, and still doing the principal work at the same time. If they get caught in this loop for very long, performance suffers, crucial but routine admin work often gets missed or lies fallow for long periods, customer service suffers and eventually work quality will suffer.

    The way to break the cycle is for the owner to know when it’s time to find a trusted team to run the jobs and they move over to take a more strategic role. Its a different skill set, but one that can be learned. Finding that team is becoming increasingly difficult, and this is one of the biggest single issues facing small businesses and impeding their growth. Advice for job-seekers out there – look at your skills and experiences and frame them in such a way as to make you attractive to someone seeking a clone of themselves – make yourself appear trustworthy and indispensable, and you’ll get hired in a second.

    Growth from within, building a team, creating a chain of command, putting in place a management structure and policies that foster growth, innovation, initiative and empowerment are just as valuable as building up the customer list, and are a form of growth on their own.

    If you found this valuable and would like to find out more, pick up a copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

     

  • Time Off Is Not A Benefit – It’s A Necessity!

    Time Off Is Not A Benefit – It’s A Necessity!

    With the long holiday break just behind us, and if anything we’re all busier than before the break we took to help us relax, I stopped to ponder the value of doing nothing. Some of my best ideas have occurred when I was doing “nothing”. My mind was obviously active, but the body can be fairly inert and immobile, heart rate low, BP down, etc. What makes most people relax is the lack of stress, both good stress and bad stress. Bad stress is presented when there is a challenge presented for which there is no good solution. Good stress is what drives competition, performance, internal drive in search of praise or approval. Bad stress can do physical damage, good stress can drive new levels of achievement. Relaxation can be as simple as having nothing on the schedule for the next hour that is “required” of us.

    The conscious mind may be seemingly inert or inactive, but the subconscious portion is always churning, turning over the available data, mining the memory for connections, coincidences, angles and opportunities. Sometimes, driving the conscious thought pattern in a different direction can give the subconscious the room and resources to put more energy into solving the problem at hand. Not thinking about it can sometimes mean that you’re thinking harder about it, but in a different way, from a different direction.

    Creative endeavors can benefit from this type of approach as well, not just problem solving behavior. When presented with a new marketing challenge, sometimes it’s best to just absorb and the necessary data and see what shape it takes naturally, rather than force it. I’ve worked with several graphic designers and production creatives, who had a policy of not touching a piece of paper(in those days) or a computer mouse to start the project until three days after the project “began”, the initial assignments had been made and some of the preliminary research had yielded some initial results. This gave them time to let the information “percolate” for a few days, giving their subconscious mind time to study the challenge from a variety of angles. I’ve found the designers who employ this technique to almost universally bring something fresh, appropriate, useful and accurate to the table – often they hit a home run the first time out, rather than through evolution involving outside input.

    Doing nothing for some period gives us time to properly file the input presented during the day, assess it’s validity and value, maybe connect some of the pieces of data in a unique or different way. Many successful professionals swear by meditation for stress control and creative inspiration. Meditating forces you to stop everything else, calm yourself, clear your mind, focus on something amorphous or not relevant to the current challenge – precisely the same attributes as “doing nothing”. Maybe calling it meditation legitimizes doing nothing for workaholics? Whatever you call it, your mind needs time to rest, rejuvenate, recover from the daily assault of input from outside sources. Rest can be your sharpest tool for solving problems.

    Let’s take a few moments out this weekend, and take a few extra hours to “Do nothing”. You might find a few problems solved or that things look a bit more clear when you “come back”.

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  • Boss Got ADD? – It Might Be The Media’s Fault . . .

    Boss Got ADD? – It Might Be The Media’s Fault . . .

    Most people have what they think are busy lives, and most of us try to do as much during a given day as possible, to live up to expectations, either our own or someone else’s. That means we’ve figured out where we can cut a few corners and do more than one thing at once, like drive and hold a conversation on a cell phone. Some folks extend that to an extreme degree, adding feeding the kids, reading the paper, programming the nav, and more while driving, local laws and bans be damned – these folks are dangerous.

    At work, most people I know try to be as efficient with their time as possible, to maximize productivity, keep the powers that be happy, secure their position and keep on track. Some take this to an extreme as well, and the ones who suffer are their direct reports and subordinates. If you’ve ever had a boss that was trying to do too much at once, you know how much it drives employees to distraction, and the higher up the chain the ADD boss is, the more chaos they leave in their wake.

    I know of one boss that has reports clinging to every word, not out of extreme interest, but because he rarely ever finishes a sentence, and the object part of the sentence typically contains the “who” or the “what” of the directive at hand. Without it, no one knows what’s expected of them or who’s been assigned half the time. So they all have to listen to each directive to get the big picture, and then divvy up the work as they see fit since the “real” assignments are incomplete or incomprehensible. Ultimately everything gets done, but the time wasted figuring out what’s needed and who’s to do it is actually making the busy manager redundant. I know, there are lots of coping strategies and work-arounds that would work to curb, change or otherwise eliminate this problem. But the point is, the boss is so conflicted, consumed and otherwise easily distracted by new inputs, whether from other coworkers, colleagues, his boss or others, that he can’t stay on track long enough to function. Most of this comes as a response to a reactive culture. What I mean by that is the company culture is one of very high expectation in terms of level of service, both internal and external, to the point of mandated response times on e-mails and phone calls (ie, you must respond in some form to the sender of an e-mail within 2 hours of it’s origination). This type of thing typically evolves in response to a complaint at some point in the past, that people were not responding quickly enough to get their tasks completed in a timely fashion. The reason for the lack of response was never explored, but a policy was put in place to combat it, nonetheless.

    Under those circumstances, the ADD boss has trained himself to let go of what’s in front of him (ie the meeting in progress), and to return to the inbox, lest he miss something or not respond in a timely fashion. Meanwhile, his staff flounders, the meeting gains no momentum and nothing gets accomplished, yet at review time, the boss can say, “we held a meeting, told everyone what’s happening . . .”

    Sometimes, the ADD behavior is simply a response to media bombardment – the brain’s receptors get inundated with input from phones, e-mail, TV, the radio, music downloads, meeting reminders, other conversations, web pages and all the rest, and rebels by not lighting on any one media, including humans, for long enough to overload – it’s sort of like your computer skipping around from app to app to use the available processing power to best advantage, but slowing the entire machine down in the process. Small bites for limited amount of time, rather than longer, more focused attention to one thing at the expense of everything else. This makes the ADD boss “think” he’s getting things done, but it’s an illusion.

    Write in to tell us about your most rambunctious ADD boss . . .

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