Or… Still Fighting Battles and Losing Wars

The objective is to beat competition and make money. Everything a business organization does should be focused on that simple objective, with interpretation through various Vision and Mission Statements. However if we take a survey of how our organizations spend our energy, often that objective is lost in a web of internal politics and positioning. Of course competition is normally good – regardless of whether it is internal or external – to point we do not lose focus on company objectives as ultimate outcome of our competition.

We often use phrase “winning battles and losing wars.” That phrase really hits home when we record all things we do, every day of our business lives, that result in a situation where we are struggling with more fervor for internal positioning then committing energy in activities to beat our competition. What does “winning battles and losing wars really mean?

Perhaps sales and operations groups are having difficulty with product and contract provisioning. Sales of course wants to sign contracts, get acceptance, and quickly start customer billing – their commission depends on shortening book to bank process. Operations is unhappy because contracts tend to stray from letter of a product or service. Thus, operations may dig their heels in and not expedite provisioning while “bring sales guys into line.”

What is result of this little battle? Of course, customer does not receive service within want date and company does not get paid as quickly as they would with a fast implementation and acceptance. And I, as your competitor, will be aggressively spending my time eroding your market share. The customer is angry, sales and operations people are angry, and your image in industry is tarnished while competition quickly moves to exploit your weaknesses.

Let’s use a different example. Your organization has same challenge every other organization around world has – a need for higher compute power, and a need to lower capital expenses on IT-related equipment. So we look into our bag of tools and determine a few relatively easy innovations could meet both objectives. You determine you can save money and increase compute resource through:

Server consolidation Disk consolidation/virtualization GRID computing Easy, right?

In Platform Computing’s recent study “Organizational Politics as a Barrier to

Implementing Grid Computing” 79% of company managers indicated that resource consolidation and virtualization should be considered high priorities for an organization’s IT planning, however 89% of same companies indicated organizational politics and other issues could pose a major barrier in accomplishing consolidation.

By Chet Holmes, President of Jordan Productions

Times are tough. The economy is in a constant state of upheaval. Is your company doing better than most?

Are you placing greater emphasis on pure performance?

If you haven’t maybe it’s time for a serious round of intense corporate soul searching. But do you know how?

Business consultant Chet Holmes says that beyond pure financial performance, most companies can really benefit from finding out what it really means to be a great company.

And answer lies within.

Holmes is a man who is heavily engaged in corporate introspection with Fortune 500 companies.

He is widely credited with bringing a consultant's passion for rigorous self assessment and performance measurement with him.

Now, however, Holmes is obsessed with more than just numbers. He's saying that companies must examine company's culture and inner workings to find ways to be more than just profitable.

He’s discovered that breakthroughs can be achieved only if you figure out how to can tap into incredible treasure trove of knowledge, harness energies and then channel efforts of your employees to help you become great.

Just think, you may have invested millions in automated systems. Have you any real idea how they are being used?

Ask employees.

Your people may know how to make money for you, but are procedures and processes based on intuition, personal and professional experience, and corporate memory? Can these systems be readily duplicated or transferred in event of accidents, sickness or major changes in personnel?

Ask employees.

“It’s possible to become world's most efficient, relentless, and competitive machine,” says Holmes. “But you have to find out what your company is really doing.”

How do you do that?

Ask employees.

Holmes is regularly brought in to lead companies through a discussion to find out what this really means. He has mastered processes needed to identify changes needed to make a company better. His skills are in demand.

Usually, he gets permission to hold a series of strategy sessions. He starts by asking employees to tell boss how company is doing.

How are we doing?

Is top management strategy on track? What are we doing right? What hurts? What needs fixing?

Holmes helps company identify specific items that reveal things that standing in way of becoming a much better company.

“Even one process improvement meeting can give you six months of things to fix in your company,” Holmes says.

Case in point: Too Many Exceptions to Rule…”

In one company session one of items that came up was a vague notion:

"Too many exceptions to rule."

Holmes asked people for specific instances or situations where this occurs. In an hours time he facilitated creation of a list of specific examples to document what people meant.

The list revealed 19 different situations where this company had never bothered to create procedures, policies or standards by which people operate.

Turned out that very few people really had any concrete idea how things were done across company. The shock and pain was deep and felt company wide.

Holmes then asked very same people how to fix it or make it better:

“What can we do to make pain go away?”

They used a whiteboard to capture all brainstormed ideas. Then they focused on culling list of possible actions until they came up with two viable correction strategies for each problem. Using consensus, they went for reasonable solutions that could reduce most pain first.

The employees worked with management and implemented corrective actions until all 19 problems were fixed within two weeks.

Some of solutions involved simple form letters. Some involved putting up a section on their website where many of these questions were answered (the customer service people would then send an email with link).

Some solutions required setting boundaries by which customer service people could operate, even creating a tiered approach to what they could do. (Meaning, try this, if that doesn't work, do this, if that doesn't work do this, etc...)

Virtually every area where they once had to go to a supervisor was fixed, creating some standard operating procedure for people to refer to and follow that didn’t involve supervisor to same extent.

The results were astonishing. The entire company runs better now. In two weeks, they solved problems company had had for a decade.

Many of problems went all way up to president of company. And when they solved all these problems, it lightened his load, and that of his direct reports, very significantly.