An even greater concern may be potential for losing additional operating budgets – resource consolidation by nature reduces cost of doing business, thus it is expected individual units will require less funding than they currently receive.

Of course in most cases this is simply not true – however it is a strong perception.

Now let’s talk a bit more about GRID. You have probably heard about it – and have a nagging thought in back of your head eventually you are going to have to deal with it. You know it is going to seriously disrupt conventional ideas about systems management and resource utilization, and it may be one of those thought s that you want to put out oif your mind until last possible minute.

Let’s look at some simple GRID facts:

Properly employed GRID will greatly increase amount of compute resource available to your company. In article “GRID Computing,” Royal Bank Insurance gives example that actuarial calculation requirements were reduced from 18 hours to 32 minutes upon employment of their enterprise GRID. Monsanto claims in same article they have reduced their new server purchase year over year by 90 percent Morgan Stanley, Charles Schwab, Wachovia, and others have announced consolidating enterprise desktops into an enterprise processing GRID With this level of enterprise adoption of GRID technologies, it is clear this is a technology we are all going to deal with within next couple years. So if statistics mentioned in Platform’s survey are true, there is potentially going to be a lot of organizational trauma. However looking at money savings, it is very clear that benefits of employing GRID resource virtualization within an organization are tremendous.

Thus question should not be whether or not an individual or section will lose control of a small number of resources, but rather how much more work they can potentially do if their existing applications and strategies can make use of compute power of enterprise GRID. Once power of corporate compute resource pool is addressed and registered, all compute intensive applications within organization will have much greater flexibility and have greater potential for building innovation into their product or service designs. With GRID resource, applications can be better written to solve problems and tasks, rather than simply be written against limitations of a piece of hardware or operating system.

Just as email had a major impact on way we viewed business communications, GRID computing will have a similar effect on how we approach business planning. As employees, leaders, and professionals now is time for us to start thinking with long term vision – don’t think about winning petty battles within organization – concentrate on winning war. Your resources contribute to success of organization in winning corporate and global economic wars.

Case In Point: Lead Generation

Holmes guides companies through process improvement on other pressing business development needs, including lead generation.

One initiative showed just how powerful a process improvement can be.

The first session initiated a discussion that resulted in ideas to drive lead generation. The employees also decided it would be beneficial to tune up communication pieces.

They decided to meet once a week for one hour to work on process improvement.

Next meeting, they looked at how prospects and customers interact with company.

They identified all possible interfaces and zeroed in on first point of contact. Whenever a prospect touches company via web, email, phone call, personal interaction or whatever they took each area and asked simple question,

“What would make this more potent?"

The employees worked their way through complete sales process.

The issues that resulted focused on:

“How can they establish quick rapport?” “How can they build even more rapport?” “How much do they learn about prospect?” “How do they create desire?”

A couple of meetings later they decided to looked at how they close sale.

The employees identified and worked through issues:

“What could we offer to sweeten deal?” “How many different ways could we cost justify?” “How could we make it so it was painful NOT to buy?” “Could we offer risk-reversal at point of sale?”

But they weren't done there—They were so enthused they wanted to look at what happens after sale is made. So they developed more issues:

“What is follow up?” “What else can we offer?” “How can we get something going that creates an annuity?”

Holmes said, “Over a five month period, every aspect of sales process was examined and systematically improved. They totally re-invented entire sales process.”

Before process improvement sessions company was getting one sale for every 100 internet leads After sessions that changed to six sales out of 50 leads.

One year after process improvement effort Internet had become their primary source of prospects and sales.

Working On The Business

We've all heard saying: "work ON business not just IN business." Here's how you work ON it:

You have to ask people three questions:

Where’s pain? What needs to be fixed? What can we do to fix it?

Process improvement can be a very profound and beneficial experience for your company.

“However, most difficult task may for you to let your people speak freely and let them tell you what they think. You have to resist desire to tell them what you think.”

Many companies have never asked their staff “what's broken?”

Holmes warns however, “Top management has to be prepared to deal with difficult responses without retribution. Ask these questions and employees will tell you.

But you have to be willing to respond with care, sensitivity, and immunity.

Employees will remain loyal and enthused only if CEO and management demonstrates respect, integrity, honesty, and forthrightness through process.”

Externally, company profits and earnings determine company’s net worth.

Internally, it’s an achievement when employees can say "I believe in my company and they believe in me and that’s why I’m proud to be an employee."

It’s pretty difficult for companies to manage process improvement without professional help. Having a trained improvement specialist will help make sure that no one can get hurt by what they say and no one will be made to feel stupid or intimidated.

The ideas matter, not who says them. Give people time to think and write some notes before they share their ideas. Capture ideas but not who says them. That way you'll get way better quality answers.

“If you have a good staff, only thing CEO needs to bring to a meeting is his good judgment and willingness to see things through eyes of employees.”

“When you do process improvement, for management it’s KMS Time (Keep Mouth Shut). It may be difficult but you have to stop talking and listen carefully. You have to let data tell you what’s happening.

Your people will fill you with valuable information and ideas on how to fix problems you didn’t even know existed, and lead you to unimagined profits, if only you let them.”

Chet Holmes is President of Jordan Productions, an international multimedia firm that helps companies accelerate growth.

Chet Holmes doubled sales of every company given to him as a line executive working for billionaire Charlie Munger. He has conducted training for more than 50 Fortune 500 and other prestigious companies and is author of The Mega Marketing & Sales Training Program, Business Growth Masters Series and Guerrilla Marketing Meets Karate Master.

For more information visit www.howtodoublesales.com