How do you know most of your work matters? There are probably a few things that matter to produce the outcomes important to an organization. Most work is simply effort and cost and does not produce meaningful results. You can see this with the ridiculing of office politics and people doing busy work in cartoonsContinue reading “Manage By Outcomes”
Tag Archives: process
Why You Need a Knowledge Base
When you are small, you can run and grow your business in your head. In the early days, it’s hard to think that you play many different roles because you do different jobs yourself. You can be the salesperson, accountant, marketer, product development manager, HR administrator and many other roles without calling these out asContinue reading “Why You Need a Knowledge Base”
Trust, But Verify
If you want to grow your business, you have to have good people to delegate functional work to. Otherwise, you become the bottleneck and risk making customers unhappy. Many years ago, I remember learning the lesson of delegation early while working an engineering project. I had a designer working on new revisions for drawings ofContinue reading “Trust, But Verify”
The Lucky Fool and Reality
“It manifests itself in the shape of the lucky fool, defined as a person who benefited from a disproportionate share of luck but attributes his success to some other, generally very precise, reason.” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness If you haven’t read Taleb’s book, he does a masterful job of pointing out how our perceptionsContinue reading “The Lucky Fool and Reality”
Reduce the Handoffs to Increase Efficiency
Every handoff in your business is a failure point. When one person is handling information and moving execution to the next step, often you can get things done without many mistakes or delays. When you have to hand off a lead, support call, requirements, or project task, it’s risk. What if the information is notContinue reading “Reduce the Handoffs to Increase Efficiency”
Dealmaking Is Slow then Fast
I love dealmaking. I agree with Robert Ringer’s observation about dealmaking: “There are no statistics to prove it, but after years of experience, I’m absolutely convinced that dealmaking is the highest-paid profession in the world.” I think the creative pieces and bringing ambiguous, and often disparate parties and value together, is exhilarating. Great deals helpContinue reading “Dealmaking Is Slow then Fast”
The Only Answer is Repetition
At some point, there’s nothing more to change or create. You know what to do and only dogged determination and repetition with accountability will work. This is the part of scaling that moves the ball inches at a time and is quite painful. Repeating what everyone has agreed to can seem tedious, but it isContinue reading “The Only Answer is Repetition”
Selling By Being Organized
IBM used to train their salespeople with the BANT method: Budget Authority Need Timing It’s still an excellent framework to ensure you are selling to people that can say, “Yes!” However, that last item, “timing,” is a big variable today. We work within much more chaos and the vast majority of businesspeople are disorganized. TheirContinue reading “Selling By Being Organized”
You Have All You Need to Start Something
We live in an unprecedented time in history. It used to be hard to start something. You needed infrastructure, people, permission, etc. That was how the industrial economy worked. The mass forced us to push with enough weight of force behind us. But now, you can put the pieces together yourself. The only thing limitingContinue reading “You Have All You Need to Start Something”
Build Change Into Your Workday
I try to mix things up and change the routes I drive, places I work, people I meet and even houses I live in. Constantly experimenting and finding what is possible or what may work keeps a certain freshness to how I can approach work or do deals. There’s a lot of value in havingContinue reading “Build Change Into Your Workday”
