Category: Management

Many managers believe there is only ONE way to convey information or gain input from their Team – a meeting!

Before scheduling a meeting, follow these 3 rules:

• Only use meetings for discussions and decisions that must happen with a team. If you can communicate your messages via e-mail or a water cooler chat, take this option.
• Send a clear agenda with the meeting invitation with at least 3 days notice, so everyone can prepare. The Agenda will also help people determine if they need to attend based on their relevance to the discussion.
• Ensure someone takes minutes – thorough notes! Share these post the meeting to everyone – even the people who didn’t attend, so they stay in the loop!

Be respectful of your team’s time and they will be respectful of yours!

Can you identify why you don’t reach your business goals?

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Great by Choice, written by Jim Collins and Morton Hansen, is the follow up to, Good to Great.  ‘Chapter 4: Fire Bullets; then Cannonballs’ is a wonderful way to remember that experimentation and prototypes are extraordinarily valuable when seeking improvements and progress.

In the 18^th Century, wise captains did not waste their cannonballs. They would shoot rifle bullets. By using the rifle shots, which were low cost, low risk and low distraction, they could test or experiment on the strength of the wind, the distance of the ship and its rate of speed.

Once they had hit the target with the experimental rifle shots, they would then zero in their cannonballs. This meant that the gunners did not have to have brilliant skills or insights; they simply needed to pursue the practice of low cost experimentation.

Great by Choice companies are not particularly creative; just creative enough, and they fire a lot of rifle shots to experiment and learn, and it’s through the learning that they make continuous, cumulative progress and get ten times ahead of their industry peers.

Too often, once a good idea does come along, the undisciplined captain fires cannonballs. We call these un-calibrated cannonballs because we have no idea if they’ll hit a target. An un-calibrated cannonball can lead to calamity – probably more often than a success. The missed venture burns huge resources, which will limit the ability to fund future experiments.

The failed venture will temper creative and risk taking behaviours into caution. ‘I tried that kind of thing once; we don’t do a lot of experimenting here anymore. We don’t try new things here. We wait until someone else has proven it and gotten it right, and then we might try to copy them.’

A rifle shot or a test or a prototype is a low cost, low risk, low distraction activity that you can conduct fairly quickly and learn from so that you can recalibrate the next rifle shot, eventually hit the target and decide how to fire the cannonball. The purpose of rifle shot successes is to bring together and marry relentless discipline and creativity.

If you would like our ‘Rifle Shot and Cannonball Business Assessment’ tool, then drop JT an email: [email protected]

Has anyone ever said to you, ‘You’re no Einstein!’ or ‘Nice one Einstein!’? Probably with a touch of sarcasm without knowing how close they are to the mark!

Reading www.entrepreneur.com I found an intriguing article that compared the traits of Albert Einstein – the most influential person of the 20th Century – with entrepreneurs of the 21st Century!

Here are a couple:

•    Imagination. Einstein said, ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge.’ The people at Google had all the computer skills and knowledge they needed to have successful careers in some firm’s IT department – along with tens of thousands of other techies. What makes Larry Page and Sergey Brin household names is the fact they imagined there was a better way to search the web, and then they created it.

•    Always questioning. ‘The important thing is not to stop questioning.’ One of the most important questions an entrepreneur can ask is, ‘How can I make it better?’ Whether you offer a product or a service, improving it is the only way to attract new clients and retain existing ones. While Phil Knight was marketing Nike to the top of the athletic-shoe sales heap, Bill Bowerman tinkered with the shoes’ designs and made sure Nike footwear was on the cutting edge of innovation. How can the new model, Bowerman wondered, be better? If Einstein had stopped questioning, we would have been left with his thoughts on relativity instead of an entire theory.