Posted by jpayne on February 3, 2009 under Business Growth | 
What Big Businesses Can Do Differently
10 Strategies for Business Growth
Strategy 3:
Short Sightedness
Let’s understand some basics about human nature in corporate culture.
By their very nature, short-sighted people are unable to see into the future and therefore must practice caution. Their lack of long-term thinking means they have more time to focus on immediate profits.
Short-term thinking about immediate profits is dangerous because it causes people to place less emphasis on the importance of customers and ignore the bigger picture of corporate longevity.
We all have ‘negative experience’ stories about wanting to return a product to a store only to get caught up in a battle of principles. Every shop has at one time or another lost future revenue due to their insistence of hanging onto a few present-day pennies.
This lack of long-term, big picture thinking is utter commercial suicide and it frequently spills over into other areas of business. Short-sightedness with regard to forming strategy, developing high performers, listening to differing opinions and opening channels to market are just a selection of what, I am sure, we have all experienced at some point in our career.
It’s important to remember that not everyone is good at seeing the bigger picture. If you can, start to try and encourage others to. It may be with small steps within your own department or function. When people see change occurring at grass roots level, it can quickly have an effect and open new avenues of thinking and ultimately, action.
Action:
Focus on long-term thinking. Eliminate short-sightedness. Remember the importance of the customer. Encourage others to see the bigger picture.
Julia Payne Associates provides consultancy and coaching to SME’s and FTSE 500 companies. Contact us to discuss solutions that make a clear difference.
Posted by jpayne on February 2, 2009 under Business Coaching |
The behaviour of a company’s leader is crucial to the entire organisation.
The behaviour of leaders set examples that communicate more than anything else. A leader’s greatest tool in leading others is the combination of their personality and behaviour.
While a leader’s greatest contribution is how well they communicate ideas, influence those around them, demonstrate the behaviour they talk about, and inspire others to join together in accomplishing a common goal.
It is a fact that the further up the ladder a leader moves, the greater the risk of loss of constructive feedback.
Giving constructive feedback to anyone is difficult at best for most people. Coaching helps to fill this gap. When done well, coaching accelerates the development of both managers and leaders.
The attraction, retention and development of qualified staff are also key concerns as organisations adapt to an ever changing and challenging world around them.
Executive Coaches work with leaders to develop leadership skills, encouraging them to lead by example and how to best support their teams to engage in ongoing professional and personal skill learning programmes and to be motivated and committed.
Direct Benefits of Coaching:
It is increasingly recognised that individuals and groups perform better with coaching and this performance translates into business results. Some of the specific ways in which coaching is beneficial include:
Coaching for leadership. Impacts companies through increased productivity, improved communication, increased staff commitment and loyalty and decreased levels of stress and tension.
Coaching assists individuals to remain loyal and committed to the company in the face of demanding global business hours, language barriers, differing work ethics and economic fluctuations.
Coaching can help prevent executive derailment, which, as some studies suggest, can be as high as thirty-three per cent for senior executives.
Coaching helps managers develop better interpersonal skills. Some common reasons for interpersonal conflict include executives being too abrasive, too controlling and too isolated.
Coaches work with executives to explore these behaviours, to recognise and regulate their self-defeating beliefs, assumptions and actions.
Coaching helps leaders to think and plan more strategically, to manage risk more effectively, to create and communicate vision and mission.
Coaching aids in developing a culture of trust, commitment and personal responsibility both internally and with the external world of clients and customers.
Coaching enables the executive or manager to leverage his or her personal power more effectively.
Coaching can develop those leadership qualities that have been empirically proven to be associated with success.
These include: cognitive capacity, social capacities, personality style, motivation, knowledge and expertise.
Julia Payne Associates provides consultancy and coaching to SME’s and FTSE 500 companies. Contact us to discuss solutions that make a clear difference.
Posted by jpayne on January 26, 2009 under Business Growth |
What Businesses Can Do Differently
Strategies for Business Growth
Strategy 1:
Build a Complimentary Team and Organisation
Look around your organisation. How many people are there from the same university, the same MBA class and at a senior executive level, the same club? Does this approach truly benefit your company or is it limiting the scope of growth and progression?
Adopting this more traditional approach is what I call the ‘chummy mentality’. Recruiting people in your own image, who evidence a similar educational background, hold a similar viewpoint and come from a similar background.
Whilst this approach may provide continuity and a pleasant working environment, is it really benefitting today’s leading companies?
Recent events would seem to suggest that a like-mindedness is not what is required. Consider the integrity of some of our largest corporations. Highly intelligent people at the helm, but also at the centre of every controversy. We must ask ourselves were those voicing a differing opinion listened to? Where was the challenge? Where was the compromise?
Fresh ideas and values, people not afraid to express their views and a new way of doing things are essential and to be encouraged if the creativity and objectivity of an organisation are not to be diluted. Diversity is to be celebrated not sidelined.
The prized ceos will surround themselves with people who compliment their skill set, not those who match it. They will seek to be challenged. There is a line of thinking which says that the ceo should be the stupidest person in the room. Whilst this may sound bizarre, in essence it is sound common sense. No one person can have all the ideas or be abreast of the latest thinking . A smart executive will recognise this and build a team that has an individual yet complimentary skill set.
Action:
Build a complimentary team. Look for different skill sets and fresh ideas. Embrace challenge.
Julia Payne Associates provides consultancy and coaching to SME’s and FTSE 500 companies. Contact us to discuss solutions that make a clear difference.
Posted by jpayne on January 16, 2009 under Credit Crunch Strategy, Strategic Planning |
Julia comments: A great article which provides practical and down to earth advice. The advice is applicable to owner managed businesses and corporate alike.
The First-Time CEO’s Recession Survival Guide
by Glenn Kelman
This article is written by Glenn Kelman , the CEO of Redfin, an online real estate broker . His industry went into recession a year ago, so he’s had a little more time than most startup CEOs to think about how to deal with the current downturn. Below is his advice to his fellow entrepreneurs.
Startups can be the most conservative organisations in the world. We spend so much energy nurturing our delicate egos against naysayers and self-doubt that we can hardly admit mistakes. This is especially true of first-time CEOs. Thousands of new web companies were born in the last few years, and many of us just got the job.
We set off with the same directions: tackle a big problem, listen to customers, work hard, pinch pennies, hire slow, fire fast. Still good advice. But I think we’ll have different advice for one another once we’ve come through this downturn, about how we had to change to survive. Since real estate crashed before the overall market, Redfin (my online real estate company) has had a year’s head-start sorting out which changes seem to be working for us.
Not that we don’t still have a long way to go. We’re still on track for our first profits in 2009, but we’re going to have to fight to make it.
The time we have left to succeed or fail is really just the measure of how long it took to adapt to our downturn. If I had been more experienced, we’d have adapted faster. Here’s the survival guide I’d give my former self, the one just starting to face the storm:
1. Compete With Your Successor
I often think about what my replacement will do after I’m fired. She won’t have emotional commitments to decisions that I already regret. She’ll look at everything as an outsider-as a customer-refusing to tolerate problems that have lasted so long I’ve forgotten they’re there, re-considering initiatives we already passed over for want of imagination or energy. And she’ll have nine or even twelve months of leeway to build the business, so she can think long-term. Worst of all, she’ll get credit for turning Redfin into a successful, thriving business. I think, “I hate her! I hate her!” And then I try to be her.
2. Act Like an Owner
You’ve probably spent most of your life hating your boss, pleasing others (so you can blame them later) and spending other people’s money. These are hard habits to break. When I was still settling into being a CEO, I wasted a lot of time driving initiatives designed to please others, acting as if someone wouldn’t let me do what I wanted to do with Redfin. My moment of clarity came when a board member said, “as far as I’m concerned, you’re the owner of this business.” And he was right: you won’t own all the proceeds if the company succeeds, but you’ll certainly own a failure in its entirety. This sparked several reptilian impulses:
- “I can’t blame anyone else if this sucker goes down.” This made me feel powerful and savage, like Arnold at the end of “Predator.”
- “If it were all my money, I’d invest it in Redfin today - but there’d be some big changes around here.” We’re making those changes now. (This is about focusing on the part of the business that you really believe in.)
- “If we had to get our wallet out every week for that expense, would we?” (This is about focusing on the part of the business you don’t believe in.)
3. Get a Board You Connect With (Not Just One With Connections)
Startups have so much size anxiety that nothing can stop us from recruiting big shots onto our boards. But first-time CEOs need someone we can talk to about practical details, too. So in our case, Redfin chairman Paul Goodrich recruited Marc Singer for his experience with businesses run out of the cash register: restaurant chains, bean-bag manufacturers, installers of electronic animal fences. I used to be dubious that we had anything to learn from these companies. Not anymore.
Now I catch myself gazing at a parking-lot coffee cart and thinking, “what a great business” (it’s more profitable than most venture-funded startups). Marc has cultivated a nuts-and-bolts, make-money-now execution focus at our company. But there’s another benefit to working with him: it was easier from day one to think out loud with someone I wasn’t so anxious to impress.
Where I’d always imagined my board conversations would be like Richard Gere’s in “Pretty Woman” or even Willem Dafoe’s in “Spiderman” - conversations with Marc were more like telling a guy on a Greyhound bus about a bad breakup, where it all just came pouring out. In tough times, you need a board you connect with more than a board with connections.
4. Run Weekly Revenue Meetings
A job applicant from Amazon suggested holding a weekly revenue meeting, which has been an immediate hit. We focus on what we can do to drive revenue from week to week-tactical stuff, like hiring another field agent or changing a call to action on our site. We catch glitches that could otherwise last all month.
5. Automate Bad News
Bad news travels slowly-or sometimes just sits in your stomach-unless you pump reports straight out to the board, on revenues, traffic, customer service. Add spin if you like, but in a separate note so you don’t hold things up. This helps you avoid the-dog-ate-it board meetings.
6. (Just Ask to) Meet Your Peers
My natural tendency is to avoid meeting people outside of Redfin. I tend to measure my own work in keystrokes, and I begin to miss my computer after I’m away for 30 minutes. In hard times especially, it’s easy for a startup to become like a teenager’s basement bedroom: insular, stale, reeking of dude. Yet there are very few hours that have raised Redfin’s value as much as meetings with other entrepreneurs. A year before our cash-evaporation date, one CEO told me to start raising money. Another told us to get on the stick about our Google search rank. For someone wary of most consultants and experts, these meetings are one of my only sources of new information. And it’s important to gather new information: line managers have to focus on the jobs in front of them, but executives should be awake to what’s happening in the larger world. Anyone will meet you if you just ask for her help.
7. Create Simplicity
When Obama first heard the proposed slogan “yes we can,” his reaction was: “too simple .” But a leader’s job is to create simplicity. Over the past year, our real-estate executives slogged through ambiguous data on conversion rates, close rates, tour fulfillment. Decisive meetings felt like a math test where we ran out of time. Yet it never occurred to me to stop, step back and be precise and insistent about what we needed to know to make a decision. When something is hard to explain, you don’t understand it and you make mistakes. It’s a cliché to “keep it simple, stupid,” but the real challenge is to make it simple, mastering complexity instead of ignoring it. Entrepreneurs instinctively want to speed things up. What’s really hard is knowing when you have to slow them down.
8. Go on the Attack
Your competitors are hurting too. Be the aggressor, not the victim.
9. Be a Roman
What disgusted the ancient Romans about barbarians was their lack of discipline. Oxford Professor Peter Heather writes , “As far as a Roman was concerned, you could easily tell a barbarian by how he reacted to fortune. Give him one little stroke of luck, and he would think he had conquered the world. But, equally, the slightest setback would find him in deepest despair…” This is why, 2,000 miles from home, several hundred Romans could slaughter several thousand barbarians.
Startups are founded by barbarians. But to survive the ups and downs, you have to make yourself into a Roman. The most talented entrepreneur I know nearly self-destructs on the 18-month birthday of each of his ventures. By that point a startup isn’t brand-new anymore, and it isn’t Google either. The closer you get to becoming a real company, the less glamorous reality seems: you’re grimy from clawing for money and breathing hard now from exertion, which would be fine if you could convince yourself you’re not the only one struggling. Everyone struggles . Keep fighting.
10. The Journey is the Destination
Startups alternate between nostalgia for the garage and millennial longing for a lucrative exit. But what I always keep in mind is how disconnected and purposeless I felt before Redfin or my earlier startup, Plumtree. All I ever wanted was to get into a situation where I could win. Everybody has that dream. Even though you’re a second-string Little Leaguer, you dream that you’ll find a way into the World Series, that, with the game on the line, you’ll manage to hit just one major-league pitch. And if you do hit it, I promise you won’t be as happy as you were the moment before you swung. If you’re still playing, you can still win. And playing’s the thing. Enjoy it.
Julia Payne Associates have been providing consultancy and business coaching to SME’s and FTSE 500 companies for the past 20 years. Why don’t you contact us to discuss solutions that make a clear difference.