What are your choices?

In my last blog update "Dreaming new reality" I emphasised the importance of creative thinking about your goals.

I guess the hackneyed phrase is "think outside the box". It is easy to dismiss the cliche. However, when you are searching for business growth it is useful to test many options.  It is probably unforgivable, given the risks, not to establish the options fully.

Classic examples include:

• only considering local markets
• not agreeing why a product or service is attractive to you (by what criteria, and what importance each has)
• only considering organic growth options

Failing properly to review the options is natural.  Decisions are often time pressured, and it can be hard to persuade colleagues to spend time on things that are not obvious. This can be especially the case if there is no established method for reviewing options more openly before selecting the key elements on which to focus. Who wants to argue against the flow and the status quo?

"Inside the box" thinking may well include the right answers, but there is a strong probability that it will not.  It is critically limited thinking, constrained by existing ideas and structures; by "the most familiar".

Here are some of the reasons why thinking gets constrained:

• attention is narrowly focussed and no-one on the board has the experience or wisdom to take a step back
• there is no "normal" process of debate that includes more divergent ideas
• creative thinking is thought of negatively; perhaps seen as "madcap", "unstructured" or "distractions" (which are also a result of poor thinking or process;  there is no inevitable logic to such attitudes)
• failure to notice any of the above happening

I suspect the last is the most common.  It is very human only to notice the weather as it changes, but I would be interested to hear your views.

At each significant point of decision, a balance of research, discussion and agreement is needed.  Good process can take you through all of these rapidly. 

Dreaming new reality

Dreaming new reality is a unique thinking process and an essential component for any successful venture.

I often see businesses fail because they do not know enough about potential development options even to consider them. They think about what they know about and are comfortable with, and ignore the infinite rest.

The trouble is, as Dr Daryl Cross says "the Juice of Life lies in your Courage zone."

So, who routinely gets out of their comfort zone to dream new realities and create more in the world? You are probably immediately thinking of the more successful companies and brands. You may not know about the many failures. This is business, and this is life.

Gymnasts put their bodies through new moves and then sit and imagine doing it for an hour before doing it for real, patients who have lost function, re-create muscle tone and body connection through imagining they can do it. Thinking about exercise or relaxing creates some of the benefits without the need for other action.

Do you find time for the unique and important process of dreaming into reality for yourself? Notice that you might be starting to now as you read and feel inspired about the power and control you do have to make your world.

....................

More than dreams are required of course; we test clients on D*V*P which stand for Desire, Vision, and Planning.

Score yourself now out of ten for each and multiply across. The total is out of 1,000 and you'll note that if you are failing on any of the factors your score (we call it change potential) will be well below 500. You need to hit 700 or more or 70% to make real progress towards the goal. Test it. It's true, right?

Come back and read my next blog to hear more, or post up a comment for me.

Business Sweet-Spots top 10

You know when you have a business sweet spot.  When you take a product to market and it just sells like hot cakes; when your management team hardly need to communicate, meetings fly by, and things just get done right, you are so on the same wavelength.

The vibes are right when you hit it sweet

We have been working through these and other "sweet spots" this year with clients and on my coaching blog you can find an article about combining this thinking into your SWOT analysis (you can read my other blog at http://coachingpartnership.blogspot.com/2011/12/sweet-swot-strategy-6.html).

Here are my top ten business sweet spots - a round up the reviews with clients in the last few months.

1. Personal flair
   Everyone has strengths - their personal "tap-dance", so to speak.  So often in business we find people focussed on process, risk and rule based approaches.  All good but do they take space and opportunity away from your people, preventing them from bringing you their flair?
   
   Remember Jim Collins exhortation, in "Good to Great", to work in the space where your passion and your skill touch the economic wheels of your business.  Our rule of thumb is that process is designed to speed up and perfect the chores, maximising the time available for people to do what needs to be done personally and that they are great at.
   
2. Special projects
   Where is the space in the routine of work for this flair to have a chance?  Special projects around improvement issues - with a few people drawn from across status, structure, and location, with real opportunity to fail and learn are fabulous for identifying leaders in your team.
   
3. Recruitment decision matrix
   Getting the right people into your team is such a crucial factor - this year's recruitment sweet spot has been working through the key attributes, running pareto to identify the top 5, weighting each relative to the others for importance and then grid ranking candidates as a super approach to improving recruitment accuracy.
   
4. Star product/service in the product portfolio analysis (ppa)
   To remind you, star products are those with high market attractiveness and where your business is strong relative to competition.  Maximise these and ensure you have pushed them as far as they can go, check in on them for lessons, use them to cross sell others.
   
5. Top Wildcat product/service in the ppa
   These are high market attractiveness, but your task is still to build your competitive strength.  Don't waste your time developing too many at once - ensure adequate "bat swing" is applied to ensure your best shot wildcats become stars.
   
6. Leadership beats process
   Process will get you so far and is essential.  Process is as much key to change as it is to being stuck - as it sticks routine activity into your business.  However, great leaders will always be able to draw more motivation and quality than process will achieve by improving feel good factor, learning and development of key people.   Leaders can layer processes and build businesses with great people.
   
7. Having the courage to discuss the cash
   Get the terms discussion out and clear at the start and then stick to it.  So much time is wasted mopping up after a sloppy start on your terms.  A clear winner of a sweet spot is having the courage to address up front your pricing and cash terms.
8. Double prices on the bottom 20% of your customers, and divert your time to the best 20% instead
   If you are working hard but not making money, look at your pricing and focus your market to the quality end.
   
9. Innovate with your best clients
   R&D/innovation that has worked best has been in the contract and with the clients rather than back in the board room.  Look to improve value right at the edge and you will very quickly hear what you need to do.
   
10. Leadership attribute matrix
    This is an essential point to end on.  The choice of investment partner and director team for a new venture is the essential initial condition for success.  So many businesses fail due to this team mix being wrong or going predictably wrong.  Mind-map the attributes you need for your crucial leadership team, select the top 5 or so and weight them relative to each other for importance and then realistically go through each partner/potential partner and rank them.  Take the problems seriously and talk them through.

A great investment and leadership team is the "business sweet-spot" I wish you for 2012 - with all the challenges, excitement and "rocks in the road" of business in the current economic realities you will find a close knit and capable team a real blessing for the next twelve months.

Feel free to contact me about any issues this raises for you.

Little failures

Here is a post about failure and risk.  Just what you all need!

I was reading Dawkins "the Selfish Gene" on the advice of a scientist friend and, well, it is a good and a compelling read.

Those gene sets that survive, do so through millions of machines and adaptations that failed.  It is almost as if it is the failure that is the crucial thing.   What I mean is, if the ratio of gene success is 1 successful adaptation for each 100,000 failures, then that tells you the "rate of failure" (ROF) in order to find success.  This is in the natural world, and I am not aware of gene's taking expert experienced advice.

Thinking about the underlying themes I was reminded of Napoleon Hill's commendation for each of us to have "the opportunity for applied failure", and of course Eddison's "I failed my way to success".  (If I have failed here in my quotations I am sure I will learn about it quickly!)

From a business point of view, Dawkins' billions of "gene machines" that dry out and die away unable to keep up with the changes in their world, are rather like the business failures that happen each day.   That's the metaphor at one level.  When you read the statistics on business failure, it's a pretty off-putting metaphor.

And yet although each failure contains a back story of some pathos (and some somewhat worse than getting a low grade essay score at school!) each also points towards success.  The key things here are to avoid allowing the negative connotations of the word to demotivate you, and to mine down to the learnings within each failure.  

What are the little failures?  What are the little learnings?

I am sure you are starting to get the drift of this post.  In my business experience, it is the ability to fail, without having to stop, that has taught me the most, probably because the immediate successes, few and far between, though welcome, were often surprising.  Hard won successes taught me things I was able to re-apply with similar effect, and keep in my kit bag of useful tools for life.

Napoleon Hill, unlike Dawkins, calls for unusual and compelling belief in order to create success.  He noted that most people don't have anywhere near enough belief to be successful.  I think he was right.  Most people are afraid of failure.  Fight or flight are fundamental reflexes.  We teach fear of failure from the first day.  Many cultures punish failure.  It's not a surprise that many people struggle with entrepreneurial-ism and have a reflex to blame others when failure arrives.   The blame game tends to suppress innovation.

Most new business ideas, whether a start up or just a new product or project, start in the mind; with an idea.  Then a huge amount of belief in the idea and the ability of the thinker to sustain them through the failures along the track.

With belief, available effort and gold are needed to sustain activity.  Like a scientist, entrepreneurs should then go looking for failures.  Small scale, obvious and quick are the best sort!  However any failure will do, and is just another fence knocked down on the way towards success.  Failure is interesting.   Like risk, the possibility of failure and consequences are one way in which we come to know life, and they keep us alert and sharpened to the possibilities.  Good marketing people tell you to do a limited but real test; the same idea is highly valued in new IT implementations, and in any profit and change projects.  Plan, do, check, act is an effective cycle that embraces failure in its design.

My post this week is designed to make you think about your organisation's approach to risk and failure.  Is the balance right?  In what areas so you need to reduce failure and in what areas do you need more?

We are all happy to think about return on investment, a calculation based on risk and return.  Perhaps one way to think about failure more positively is to develop an ROF, or "return on failure" measure.

Find your trade secrets

A client and I were discussing IPR and valuation recently over a pint.  The gist of it was this: in technology businesses a lot of know-how is created over the years.  Some gets used regularly, some gets lost a little bit, some is made deliberately and plenty comes about accidentally.  Frankly this applies to any processes that add to productivity, protect margin and enhance customer value, not just biotech or technology innovations.

In business valuation, the basic valuation is a complex mix of profitability, profit strength, timing and market interest.  Profit strength is about margin and sustainability and there are a number of ways to look at it - evidence can be seen in the stability of results, customer defection rates, product portfolio management and product development capability, etc.

Buyers can be very attracted to visible business strengths - for example easily controllable income flows (this can be model related or through contracts).  Intellectual property comes in many shapes and sizes; when it is technical know how, if it can be shown to be commercially valuable, then for the right buyer, the price will go up.

A big problem for CEO's is to know exactly what the lab has got in its kit bag.  Another risk is that, when know how is not fully recorded, it gets lost if key people go.

So here is the upshot:  An IPR matrix.  We thought it would be great to do this and let the lab or IT development team show their value.  Maybe you could encourage collection through bonuses.  It's a simple idea.

Step 1:  get the team to list all their unprotected intellectual property and know how.
Step 2:  table it out and in column two, link it to the products or processes that are impacted, live or canned (indicate this, so that great technology is not lost as products that it has powered but that are retired don't mean it is lost)
Step 3: describe what it does, and the key benefits
Step 4: where the files are kept and crucially
Step 5: any protection actually in place - patents, designs, trade marks
Step 6: finally go through and assess on a 1 - 10 scale, its commercial power (potential or known)

If you haven't got this in place or something similar, do it now rather than leaving it to chance when you're ready to exit.  Make it a key document during your routine product portfolio planning review.

I'd be keen to hear any thoughts, and shares of other "know-how" recording systems you all have in place.  Paper or wiki, locked away or shared.

What is so soft about "soft skills"?

"Soft skills", normally counterpointed against "hard skills" - with the latter defined as "occupational requirements".  There are other versions.

Jimmy Carr, speaking on Radio 4's "Museum of Curiosities" this week said [sic] "words are magic, and I'm like a drug pusher except the drugs are endorphins and they are in you - I just know the words that unlock them.  I say a series of words, and you get a dose of pleasure!"  Perhaps a typically "Carr" way of putting things, but all the same, rather a nice explanation.

Words are magic, in that they bring with them memories and meanings of great complexity.  I object therefore to the use of the word "soft"!  It can imply lots of things, which perhaps are not intended to be negative, however negative implications are included.  It can imply "easier", "unprofessional", "non-essential", "weak", "woolly", "undefined".  Etc.  You get my drift.

And yet, in my own business, the so called "hard skills" only take you to qualification.  As a general rule "occupational requirements" are about 20% of what the team need to gain real ability and impact.

Many firms will adopt a thoroughly strict attitude to the "hard" training provision.  It will certainly be done professionally and there is rarely hesitation in investing in anything seen as "hard".  How easy it is to be the "hard men" of training - with repetition, practice, assessment, and qualification; it echo's the successful models of our schooling.

Use of the word "soft" is a problem because for many, I believe, it primes the mind to think differently.  Typically, soft skills training is done in a very different way (suggested by the soft adjective?) in workshops, in one day sessions, with limited objectives, with limited practical application, without a course, without a test, without a measured outcome or qualification.

In my own firm (and I hope in many others - certainly in my clients) when we have overcome this attitude it has paid off big.  I like to ban the word "soft".  Training is training and I want to see it done professionally.

I am not really interested in buying a one day "people skills" training session, because I know from my own professional training skills that in order to create applied learning any programme needs the seven learning principles:

Feedback
Active learning
Repetition
Meaningful material
Multi-sense approaches
Over-learning
Primacy and recency

(E-mail me for expansion on any of this)

There are plenty of studies that show that skills practice, and moving from learning to teaching, rapidly increase the uptake of learning, and its move into long term recall.   This is what leads to changes in behaviour and real changes in approach.  In my own experience, the jeopardy of assessment  and qualification really heighten attention.  There are other ways to get high attention and learning - for example presentation to the group at the end of a learning process forces the learning to be used and demonstrated, even if no exam is present.

We did it at school!  Why should it stop for work?

Managing people for performance, selling, mentoring, coaching skills, presenting, leading, delegating, prioritising, planning, creative thinking, product development, managing a large workload, commercialism, working in a big team,  being a effective executive (director, partner, ceo), coping with major and difficult decisions and high levels of stress, managing the internal state for effect rather than being bowled along by life and emotion, writing and communication.  These are essential skills for life and for business.

The people who move to high levels of impact in an organisation are a long way ahead of their core technical skills, and most get there through the training of real life and experience.  They are largely unsupported by the wealth of highly professional experience and best practice material out there to get the improvements more quickly and more professionally.  There is a tendency to grab bits of insight from here and there in a haphazard way.  This is especially true of the small business sector.

A final reference to "soft".  If "soft" primes the mind to respond in a certain way, and the focus, motivation and goals of your team at the outset are an essential preparation component for successful trainings, why would you tell them to prepare for a "soft" day's work?

Run back over your training programmes.  Which skills are essential to your success?  Identify the top three and put serious and assessed programmes in place to develop your essential skills programme.   Put the soft stuff in the bin!

I hope this post inspires you to rethink the process you are running to develop yourselves and your teams.  If you are already there, post up a note and let us know what you do.

A game of two halves

"Part of me thinks it's a great idea."  Says the MD, looking pained, and you know there is a "but" coming.  "But another part of me thinks: it's just not us.  I really don't know what to do!"

Looking at the mirror
he was just not sure of the
rollkneck sweater 

I often wonder why there are disputes at work.  Sure some are about principle, but and over time my feeling is not many are.  I have gradually come to the conclusion that there are three main sources:

• People are over-challenged and panicking.  Response: attack!
• People are under-challenged and bored.  Response: attack!
• People are responding to being attacked (now or in the past).

Read up on Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi and flow to see one source of these ideas

Perhaps each of these is allowed to continue because of a lack of leadership.  I know many leaders who become demotivated and dissaffected by constant competitive arguing among senior colleagues.

Bored professionals creating and becoming absorbed by arguments and personal drama!  That's one way to up the level of personal challenge!

Perhaps it's not the source though.  Perhaps I am being too cynical.

Over the years I have begun also to realise that when I am helping organisations that don't have argument issues, the rows are still there.   They are just inside the head of the MD, rather like the character quoted at the top of this blog.  No-one to argue with?  Argue with yourself!

If you recognise this kind of internal dialogue inside yourself you are recognising my point too.

As a coach I have learned to treat statements about "parts" seriously and found it to be a very useful approach.  What I mean is:  treat it as real evidence about how the client works on the inside.

Professor Robert Winston's "The Human Mind" surveys fascinating material on multiple personality, revealing it is within all of us not just those with psychosis!  Epilepsy sufferers, are sometimes treated by having the connection between the two halves of the brain severed, to prevent the fit spreading.  Careful experiments afterwards found completely different personality expressions living in each part of the brain.  Each part would give a different answer to a series of questions and be oblivious to the answers given by the other half.  For example, one part wanted to be a pilot, the other a lawyer!  Read up on alien hand syndrome - genuine problem not just an Michael Caine horror movie!

If you are interested to follow through on coaching resources, I recommend Virginia Satir.  You can find some great stuff from her on YouTube and plenty of literature.

The coaching point is to realise that this is indeed true and these "parts" are genuine, fully thought out, different attitudes or personalities.  Just like an argument with two different directors, fully understanding the purpose and source of each internal "Part's" opinion is a good way to start trying to resolve the differences.  You may find this a little hard to believe, but just think back to the last time you were truly stuck on a decision.  You will probably find, there were two (at least) opposing forces slugging it out inside you, leaving you unable to move forwards.

So, what's my point?   Where there is lasting disagreement there is energy being wasted, and the organisation will be prevented from achieving its full potential.  Disagreement on strategy among leadership is particularly damaging. 

The same is true for the individual.  Internal debate can be useful, but more often it is debilitating and demotivating, and gets in the way of both personal success and happiness. 

I look out for incongruence like this and help get it resolved.
Resolution usually leads to an improvement in organisation and personal performance, and the chances of success rise.

If not a game of two halves, it is a game of at least two Parts!  The real messages here to business leaders reading this: 

1. Check your arguments.  Are those with others because you are anxious or bored (or attacked by someone who is?)  
2. Check on the inside next.  Are your arguments still going on?  If this is true for you, it is also true for your team and perhaps it is worth working on your self-knowledge as much as you work on understanding your team.

Make sure your arguments are strategic - balanced, about principles, helpful.  Don't just argue because there is nothing better, or too much to do!