800-CEO-READ Blog

10.2.06 | Maverick Monday

On bookshelves everywhere this Monday: Mavericks at Work

Some dates and links to note on the book and its creators:

Bill Taylor: co-founder of Fast Company magazine Polly LaBarre: FC contributor and co-author of The Big Moo

Catch them on Good Morning America this Monday--Maverick Monday. If you miss them on Monday, check out John Friedman's interview with Polly. Or find Bill and TopCoder's Jack Hughes, U.S. Gold's Rob McEwen, and Jones Soda's Peter van Stolk at public-radio's Chris Lydon's site.

Check out the book. Honestly, I read it on vacation. It's that good.

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p.s. If you're in Wisconsin/Illinois, join us in welcoming Bill and Maverick Dick Resch of KI to Milwaukee.

Thanks! Goodbye.

When I last talked to Johnny, he was at a cross road. The question is simple; will Johnny get what he needs to succeed, or will he take the path of least resistance? I guess you will have to look inside yourselves to really know that answer.

Thanks for sharing this time with Johnny and me, we really appreciate it and hope you learned something. Be sure to check out the web site and don’t hesitate to email me at mnick[at]roi4sales.com.

Johnny's tools

Finally the smartest thing Johnny said to me was he “wanted to develop a set of sales tools that would capture information, assess value and present solutions --and then package them to use in a successful, repeatable sales process.� I guess there is hope for him. He really needs to enlist marketing to help him. I reminded Johnny how important it is to use sales tools for what they were designed to do. Sales tools will help drive a sales process – write that down Johnny!

Speaking of sales tools –I am a huge fan of www.justsell.com - I love these guys, they provide us with what my friend Jill Konrath calls “triggering events.� In case you don’t know what that means, it is basically an event that occurs in a company that can spawn interest in your products and services. For example, an IPO, or infusion of VC are pretty good triggering events. So check them out, it is a great web site. Speaking of great web sites, you may want to check out the resource guide on www.whyjohnnycantsell.com. The resource guide breaks down sales tools by books, CRM tools, ROI tools, Proposal tools, Research tools and a whole bunch more.

Ask questions....lots and lots of them

I asked Johnny about the “sales environment�. He said, “like anywhere, a lot of tension between sales and marketing, and sales and development. Everyone thinks you’re always selling them something�. He reminded me of a phrase Mahan Khalsa once wrote, “…Sales is the second oldest profession, often confused with the first.�

I think I am offended by this. If the world didn’t have sales professionals the economy would probably come to a halt. Think about it, if every American didn’t buy any goods or services for a week, the economy would fall apart. In fact the world economy would likely crash too. It is critical to your success as a sales professional to shift the paradigm from the negative connotation of sales person, to one of trusted advisor or consultative sales professional. How? It is not that difficult really.

Learn to do your homework up front –use tools like their Annual report or 10K, or sign up for Harris InfoSearch, Jigsaw, Bitpipe.com or First Research to get a better understanding of your prospect. Then ask questions…lots and lots of questions. My father always told me…�God gave you one mouth and two ears, use them in that proportion!�

Why Johnny Can't Sell

Well Johnny shared some of his ideas for increasing sales with me and I have to tell you. I now know why Johnny can’t sell. His first thought was, “lower the price� everyone buys the cheapest. Johnny I only want to tell you this once, “no matter what price you sell your products and services for, someone will always sell it for less.� In general people do not buy on price alone.

The next thing Johnny was going to do is to, go into the market and hire sales superstars. This too is probably a bad idea. In the book Conversations on customer service and sales, Ken Edmundson writes, “we have a 52% chance of hiring the right person�. It is only increased by 8% if we employ superior interviewing skills.

He goes on to say that there are certain traits great sales people possess. They include:

• Passion
• Determination
• Self-discipline
• Attitude
• High self esteem
• Belief system
• Communication skills.

I shared this with Johnny. Finally he shocked me with this one…�You know Michael, Emotional connections are for sissies�. Johnny, Johnny, Johnny – my prodigal child. Most buying decisions are based on emotion. We typically buy on emotion and justify with logic. Think about that time-share you bought in Mexico last year. I can assure you that if a buyer doesn’t like you, your company or products, they ain’t buyin from ya!!!!

Sales technologies and tools

Tom Siebel once wrote:

“Sales is the untamed frontier of the business world; unpredictable, passionate, theatrical, full of eccentric characters, and dangerous to the newcomer. Like the frontier, the destiny of sales is to be explored, settled, and tamed by people using the RIGHT TOOLS AND TECHNOLOGY. But many also will perish on this frontier, because they are unprepared, unnecessarily exposed to the elements, and annihilated by quick-footed and aggressive foes. The real question is: how many bones will lie bleaching in the desert or buried on Boot Hill before the new era finally arrives? And will you be one of those victims?�

This quote is so true! Sales people will always fail if they do not have the right technologies and right tools to do their job. Why is it that companies spend millions on recruiting and very little on sales tools and customized sales training? Think about this one…What do you spend to keep your web site up to date? Now what do you spend to keep your literature up to date or on other sales tools? Aren’t they all vital to your organizations success? My advice to everyone is carefully select, customize and integrate your sales methodology, sales process, and sales tools so your sales professionals are totally prepared to compete.

And Johnny asks...

Johnny called me today and asked me this question: “Why is it that we spend millions of dollars on technology to keep sales people from selling to us, and yet management constantly complains when we are having trouble contacting stake holders?� SPAM filters, Email, gatekeepers, number blockers, etc. are all technologies that keep sales people from reaching their target market. As sales people, how do we beat technology with technology?

Johnny and I discussed some of the techniques we have observed over the years and put together a short list of opportunities. Ideas like…well Blogging for instance. This is a wonderful way to get your unedited message across to potential buyers. The usual suspects are always available to you too, like email campaigns, Fax campaigns, a newsletter, and of course the current most popular item, the Web Cast. We discussed a new technique called the book review. Visit one or more of the online book retailers and write a book review on books in your space. Discuss how it affected you and your business. Then enter your real name and company name. While you are in there, look at those people that wrote reviews and call them. Lookup there contact information at www.jigsaw.com. Jigsaw is an awesome tool for sales people –check it out!!

Hereeee's Johnny...

Thank you for having me as a guest blogger at 800CEOREAD. I am honored to be able to share some of my thoughts with your readers. My new book Why Johnny Can’t Sell is filled with plenty of terrific insights into sales, sales process and sales tools, all wrapped around a wonderful story about Johnny and his many challenges as a salesman and sales manager. I am going to share with you some of Johnny’s stories and what he did to overcome the many challenges of selling.

First, however let me introduce Johnny to you. Johnny started a new job today, selling for a 20-year old software company. Johnny’s job description is simple: “Sell now, and hire a staff when things are going�. Obviously a little vague, but you get the point.

Johnny has been selling for over 20 years. He started his career working for IBM, quit about five years later to try his hand at a dot com with IPO aspirations. He had a great deal of success selling and managing, but the IPO just didn’t happen, so Johnny moved on to another small company.

This new organization was VC backed, and Johnny really thought he had a home. He was pretty successful on large complex deals, but the VC’s were not impressed with the company’s growth rate and decided to “go a different direction�. Johnny finally landed at a job where he got to “run things�, but after two years, they too weren’t growing fast enough for upper management. So, Johnny is now starting this new job.

In Case You Missed It

In Thursday's 9-28-06 Wall Street Journal on page B3 is an article about downloads of audio books. I want to make sure you know that we have a great selection of free--nothing ever wrong with free--mp3 audio interviews that Todd has done with some very interesting authors. The interviews run from 30 minutes on up. Check them out here.

BTW, did I mention they were free?

More In The Fall

By the way, there are two other non-fiction books due this fall which I simply can’t wait to read. Michael Lewis’s book on football should be out in weeks, and Erik Larsen is following up his Devil in the White City with Thunderstruck. Neither book is about business per se; but in their prior efforts each author told such a resonant story that there are relevant lessons to be drawn. I consider Moneyball by Lewis to be as valuable a book on creating a meaningful system of evaluating talent as any sober text on the topic; and Larsen’s compelling Devil shared powerful insights about how great technical and social changes in society (i.e. those which both prompted and enabled the World’s Fair) can simultaneously enable darker consequences—in this case, one of the first recorded instances of a serial killer.

Six Degrees of David Allen

As someone who’s long believed that David Allen represents this generation’s Stephen Covey/Dale Carnegie/(name-your-favorite-business-coach), it came as little surprise to me that two of the most promising forthcoming business titles have passages about his influence.

A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder, which is somewhat of a cross between Blink and Getting Things Done (with a touch of I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional thrown in), makes a provocative argument about the drawbacks of the productivity guru’s hyper-popular system. This book, written by David Freedman (full disclosure—I have worked with Dave and confess to calling him a friend) and Eric Abrahamson, is my favorite of all the galleys in my office. We will do more on its great, provocative, counter-intuitive, and really enjoyable argument about the benefits of mess and the costs of organization, over the next few months.

And then we have Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software, by Scott Rosenberg, which will be on sale later this year. Like many ambitious business non-fiction books of the past ten years, the book is hyped as A Soul of A New Machine for this age. Unlike most of the other books, this one might make good on the promise. This book’s David Allen tie occurs during a passage where the author describes how principles of personal organization systems can be embedded in, or simply inform the design of, Personal Information Managers. This book looks very promising—more in coming months.

Business Chick Lit

Whenever Jack and Todd come across a business chick lit, it always lands on my desk. I'm finding there's more to chick lit than romance stories. Here are two currently on my desk:

• Am-Bitch-Ous (due out this December) what ambition means: "But ambition is not a dirty word. Ambition is a virtue. Ambition is the best of who you are."


• Climbing the Corporate Ladder in Stilettos on moving up while staying true to yourself.

Another book: The Power of Nice. While not necessarily women-oriented, it was mentioned in Cosmo (or other similar magazine) as a read for aspiring business women.

Last but not least is chick lit from recent years:

• Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office


• The Girl's Guide to Being a Boss (Without Being a Bitch)

The common themes are interesting. What other chick-lit have you read?

Wall Street Journal Online Is Free Today

Phillips is sponsoring The Wall Street Journal Online today.

Enjoy!

Patagonia on increased transportation costs

At Patagonia we have started to prepare for what we think will become a more locally based economy. The global economy based on cheap transportation is unsustainable. Our present mode of production includes buying organic cotton in Turkey, shipping the bales to Thailand to be processed into fabric, shipping the fabric to Texas to be cut and then to Mexico to be sewn and then onto our warehouse in Reno and then to our stores and dealers and finally to our customers' homes. Shipping costs may soon start to outstrip the cost of material and labor. We must begin to find a way to produce our goods locally. by Yvon Chouinard

...what else they're doing...

Place your vote.

The finalists for the annual Quill Book Awards have been announced. Place your vote before the end of September. Your business book choices:

• Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream by Barbara Ehrenreich
• The Girl's Guide to Being a Boss (Without Being a Bitch) by Caitlin Friedman and Kimberly Yorio
• Good to Great and the Social Sectors: Why Business Thinking Is Not the Answer by Jim Collins
• The Number: A Completely Different Way to Think About the Rest of Your Life by Lee Eisenberg
• The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works - and How It's Transforming the American Economy by Charles Fishman

Congrats to the finalists!

Become a whole-minded org

For years there has been the "creative types" and everyone else. Accounting people were grouped in the "everyone else" while marketing was deemed to be creative.

More and more companies are looking for people of both minds; people who, to quote Dan Pink, A Whole New Mind.

Here's Dan's advice to companies seeking a convergence of the creatives and everyone else:

1. Recognize where the value is, and that utility is abundant and signifcance scarce. They gotta get the utility right, but all of them are ultimately in the significance business.
2. [Offer] people the chance to solve cool problems and work with cool people, giving them autonomy and letting them follow their intrinsic motivation without some manager breathing down their neck.

From Ad Age, the 9.11.06 issue.

THE 2006 FINANCIAL TIMES AND GOLDMAN SACHS BOOK AWARD

The shortlist for the 2006 FT/Goldman Sachs book award has been announced. Here are the award criteria:

THE MISSION

"To identify the book that provides the most compelling and enjoyable insight into modern business issues, including management, finance and economics."

What I personally like about the mission statement is the use of the word “enjoyable� That term is missing from far too many business books.

Here is the list in random order:

The Long Tail by Chris Anderson published by Hyperion

Review of The Long Tail by Steve Sherlock
David Thomson's Review of The Long Tail
Jack Covert Selects: The Long Tail
Catherine Doyle's Review of The Long Tail
BEA - Chris Anderson and The Long Tail
The Long Tail Videos
Kawasaki on The Long Tail

Small Giants by Bo Burlingham published by Portfolio

Bill and Bo on Small Giants
Podcast from Bo Burlingham
The Small Giants Ofiicial Book Site

The Wal-Mart Effect by Charles Fishman published by Penguin Press

A collection of various posts
Charles Fishman/The Wal-Mart Effect Interview
Where the book started in Fast Company December 2003
Fishman and a Washington Post write walk around Wal-Mart
January 2006 story adapted from the book called "The Man Who Said No to Wal-Mart"

China Shakes the World by James Kynge published by Houghton Mifflin

Review from Challenge Forum
A review from the last British governor of Hong Kong

The Box by Marc Levinson published by Princeton University Press

Jack Covert Selects -- The Box
The Economist review

What I have done is put all the content we have posted about these books so you can have all the information in one place.
This is a superb list of very readable, extremely well written books that could change your outlook of the world. Read them.

Why are they successful?

The authors of Success Built to Last found what makes successful people tick:

Their passions create meaning in their lives that is nothing short of a lifelong obsession from which they seek no escape.

Found by interviewing people of all walks of life -- some famous such as Nelson Mandela, Steve Jobs, Maya Angelou, Steve Forbes and Dalai Lama -- they discovered three shared traits:

• Meaning. What you do must matter deeply to you, so much so that you lose all track of time. It's a "flow experience."


• ThoughtStyle. You have a highly developed sense of accountability, audacity, passion and optimism.


• ActionStyle. You find effective ways to take action.

Check out the full article in USA Today here.

Reinvention

As readers of this blog know I like music. I like all kinds of music. I have to tell you all that, at the ripe age of sixty five, Bob Dylan has done it again. His new album called Modern Times is about as perfect an album as I have heard in a long time. Now we know that Mr. Dylan may not have the best voice on the planet but what he has, he uses brilliantly.

When you think back over his career and how he has always never followed the pack. How he has always been the dog leading the pack. The Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home really documented this.

This album reminds me of what it would be like to be sitting on the porch and grandpa Bob was playing music to his grand kids on the front porch right after dinner on a warm summer night. The music is deceivingly simple, amazingly melodic, and just fun to hear.

Now I understand that this blog is about business books and business. Think about the fact that Bob Dylan has been doing the exact same job for forty five years and does something this different and good. Do we still have that creative burst in us after forty five years? I hope so. Drucker did, Deming did, Buffett does, Bennis does, Peters does.

More on Ford--From Jim Womack on Ford's History--and Future

Jim Womack, co-author of The Machine that Changed the World and Lean Thinking, writes a monthly e-letter distributed through the Lean Enterprise Institute. His newest missive, "The Lean Way Forward at Ford," just showed up in my e-mailbox and it's really worth sharing. It's a bit lengthy so I've put the rest in the extended section. Click here to see the letter from Womack:

I’ve been reflecting on today’s remarkable headlines about the latest retreat by the Ford Motor Company as part of its “Way Forward� campaign. While reflecting, I have found it useful to think about the history of lean thinking at Ford, going back nearly 100 years. I believe it offers many useful lessons for our current-day lean journey and Ford’s immediate choices.

The historical record is clear. Henry Ford was the world’s first systematic lean thinker. His mind naturally focused on the value creation process rather than assets or organizations. And he was the first to see in his mind’s eye the flow of value from start to finish, from concept to launch and from raw material to customer. In addition, Ford was history’s most ferocious enemy of waste. (Except, possibly, Taiichi Ohno at Toyota who claimed that he learned what to do from reading Henry Ford’s books.)

Ford relentlessly emphasized the need to analyze every step in every process to see if it created value before finding a way to do it better. Otherwise the step should be eliminated. (This was Ford’s greatest criticism of Fredrick Taylor and Scientific Management. Why, asked Ford, was Taylor obsessed with getting people to work harder and more efficiently to do things that actually didn’t need to be done if the work was organized in the right sequence and location?) Then, when the wasteful steps had been eliminated, it was time to put the rest in continuous flow.

By 1914 at his Highland Park plant Ford had located most of the manufacturing steps for his product – the Model T – in one building and had created very nearly continuous flow in many parts of the operation, using single-piece-flow fabrication cells for components in addition to the moving final assembly line. He had even devised a very primitive pull system by using “shortage chasers� on timed routes along the assembly line to check inventories at every assembly point and convey the information back to the fabrication areas. This speeded up upstream processes that had fallen behind and slowed down those that were getting ahead.

Equally remarkable, Ford had designed his Model T in only three months in one large room with a small group of engineers under his direct oversight. This surely was a high point in lean practice for decades to come.

Then it gradually fell apart. Ford’s span of management control at Highland Park had been remarkably broad because he could easily take a walk to see the condition of every process, in design, assembly, and fabrication. And he could train a cohort of managers to see what he was seeing and remove more waste. No abstract measures of performance were needed.

However, as the company grew Ford’s personal management method became impractical. But what to replace it with? Ford himself seems not to have had an answer except to link every step by conveyors – as he attempted to do at the massive Rouge complex completed in the late 1920s. By the 1930s the whole Ford Motor Company was in a sense one linked process. (Ohno, of course, realized that lengthy conveyors governed by a central schedule are a push not a pull system, but this was much later.) Did this mean that in the founder’s mind that the company needed only one manager -- Ford himself -- even as it became the world’s largest industrial enterprise?

In any case, the system came crashing down in the 1930s as Ford tried to produce multiple products with multiple options in wildly gyrating markets. Only the staggering cash reserves from retained profits during the Model T era kept the company going until Henry Ford II was able to take over in 1945.

But what management system should he impose on the chaos? Henry Ford II read Peter Drucker’s 1946 classic, The Concept of the Corporation, praising the General Motors management system and quickly remade Ford in the image of GM.

What a different system it was! Henry Ford had managed by going to the gemba to inspect the value creation process. General Motors executives managed by analyzing financial abstractions. For example, asset utilization (normalized for sales volume), days of inventory, cost of scrap, etc. in the factory. Available engineering hours utilized in product design. Managers were then rewarded for making numerical targets using methods developed by staff experts that managers rarely understood. A good way to make many of these numbers was to make products in large batches in order to achieve high asset utilization and low cost per individual step. The total value creation process from end to end -- which had been so clear to Henry Ford -- was gradually lost from view.

Soon Ford executives using the financial measures developed by finance czar J. Edward Lundy were even more rigorous in analyzing the performance of their area of control than GM executives. Robert McNamara and the Whiz Kids were the exemplars. And Ford did regain competitiveness as a GM clone, claiming a stable second place in the auto industry.

In addition, by the late 1940s Ford was one of three U.S. auto companies using the same management system in the same town with the same union. With high investment barriers to entry, a remarkable era of stability was put place, lasting nearly forty years until the transplant Japanese factories succeeded in the U.S. in the later 1980s.

When it suddenly became apparent at that point that the leading Japanese companies -- Toyota followed by Honda -- were using a different management system, it was very hard for Ford to respond.

In the late 1980s, as Dan Jones, Dan Roos, and I wrote The Machine That Changed the World, we were able to document that Ford had applied a number of lean techniques in its assembly operations and was making dramatic progress in manufacturing productivity. We took this to mean that at least one American company was applying lean principles and with good results.

What we couldn’t report, because we had no way to measure it, was the status of the management system. And this was largely unchanged. Ford managers were still manipulating abstractions because the gemba consciousness of the early Ford Motor Company had been lost. Even worse, in the product development and supplier management processes, no change had occurred at all.

But Ford could still be successful in its home market for another 20 years by developing large pickups and SUVs. These were essentially America-only vehicles, suited to wide roads and low energy prices. They could only be challenged by Toyota and its Japanese emulators if they were willing to design vehicles specifically for the U.S. market and to locate production in North America.

In 1997 I got a call from Jac Nasser, who had just taken over Ford’s North American Automotive Operations on his way to becoming CEO of Ford. He matter-of-factly told me that Ford’s Explorer and F100 pickup series were the only Ford products that made serious money and that he calculated that he had four years to become as efficient and effective as Toyota. Otherwise, the large pickups and SUVs would be copied by foreign firms at lower cost with higher quality and Ford would be in terminal decline. “So,� he asked, “how can Ford become Toyota in four years?�

We sat down to talk over just what this would mean -- dramatically changing the supplier management system, dramatically changing the product development system, dramatically changing the production management system, dramatically changing what managers do -- and he quickly concluded that it was just too hard. So he changed the management metrics, purged the poorest managers according to the metrics, and experimented with selling cars on the web! I was not asked back and had no desire to go back.

Ford actually survived for five years beyond Nasser’s projected meltdown date – although Nasser didn’t as CEO -- to arrive at its current crisis. But my prescription for new Ford CEO Alan Mulally is the same: Fundamentally rethink the supplier management system. Fundamentally rethink the product development system. And fundamentally rethink the production system from order to raw materials and from raw materials to delivery, with special attention to the information management system. (Much can still be learned from Ford’s Mazda subsidiary, which became an able pupil of Toyota after a crisis in 1973.) Above all, fundamentally rethink what mangers do and how they do it in order to regain the gemba consciousness that originally took Ford to world dominance. In brief, Ford needs to remake itself once more, this time in the image of the company that copied Ford’s original system: Toyota.

In addition, finish rethinking the social contract as Ford becomes a normal company (not an oligopolist) in a normal town (where labor doesn’t come from one supplier) that must live in a global market. Finally, rethink brand strategy to get rid of hopeless makes that can never make money – Mercury, Jaguar, Lincoln too? -- while refocusing the remaining brands on what customers really want -- sophisticated, hassle-free transportation in every price range. (A hint: Rethink the vast gap between the company and the customer to provide hassle-free mobility on a continuing basis to user-partners rather than selling cars to strangers in one-time transactions.)

Who knows whether this is doable in the time still available but it is the lean way forward. It will be tragic if the originator of lean thinking is crushed in the end by failing to learn lean lessons from its most earnest pupil.

When Ford Was A Startup

As Ford tries to fend off catastrophe by cutting workers, changing leadership, and looking for more ways to shrink to growth, I’ve been discovering some fascinating tidbits about the company when it was the dominant organization of the world. After all, it was once the most exciting startup imaginable.

Here’s a few items from Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and A Century of Progress by Douglas Brinkley (though they might want to edit the subtitle to something more like a Half Century of Progress):

In the heyday of the Model T, people simply referred to cars as “Fords,� as we do today with Q-tips, Kleenex, and Xerox-ing.

For a brief period, the daredevils of the 1910s enjoyed a sport called Auto Polo, in which they did what you would imagine: played polo, using Ford Model Ts as their horse. Look it up. (And if the guy who did the movie Dodgeball ever wants a vehicle to get Johnny Knoxvile and his cronies on board, look no further.)

During the period of intense growth, production at Ford doubled every single year for the decade after 1913. And during that time the price of the car dropped by two-thirds.

As a result of local merchants gouging Ford’s employees who were being paid the sum of $5 a day, Ford created the first modern supermarket, the precursor to Wal-Mart. He first sold workclothes, and eventually all sort of groceries, and as a result of efficiencies, sold at a lower cost than any competitors, and still made a profit.

Finally, two excellent passages about the real revolution Ford brought about:

“New and better machinery was in constant development at Ford Motor Company. It was said, in fact, that throughout the long production run of the Model T, at least one new machine or tool was introduced at the factory every single day. Not much of importance may have changed on the T to make it new, improved, or different during its nineteen-year model run, but nothing remained the same about the methods used to produce it. That was the imperative laid down by Henry Ford.�

And,

“..in 1913, the first assembly line was implemented at Ford Motor Company. The process grew like a vine and eventually spread to all phases of the manufacture of Ford cars, and then through the entire world of heavy industry. There can be no doubt that a powerful revolution occurred at Highland Park—but it was not the assembly line itself that provided the power. Rather, it was the creation of an atmosphere in which improvement was the real product: a better, cheaper, Model T followed naturally. Every man on the payroll was invited to contribute ideas, and the good ones were implemented without delay.�

I'm a Virgo

I was sitting on the plane the other day, reading my horoscope, thinking I was hundreds of miles away from business books. When low and behold, Dale Carnegie's words of inspiration work their way into my horoscope:

People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing.

It's amazing how the words of business wisdom can fit everywhere -- even into a horoscope.

Lead on

There are many good and valid ways to lead; three people, given the same job, can certainly succeed even if they have differing management styles and philosophies. Natural tendencies can also be influenced and accentuated, revealed or hidden—a degree here, two degrees there—depending on the circumstances. But when you plan viable legacies, your goal is to align your intent with your instincts as closely as possible.

--From Your Leadership Legacy

Get started on your legacy...

Patrick Lencioni and the NFL

From September 14, 2006 Milwaukee Journal Sentinal:

"Packers coach Mike McCarthy and New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton have at least two things in common.

They are the same age (42) and until this season have never been a head football coach on any level.

McCarthy enjoyed a successful run as the offensive coordinator of the Saints from 2000-'04, after leaving Green Bay after one season as quarterbacks coach in 1999.

In the NFL Kickoff guide for 2006, Payton is one of the eight head coaches in the league who provided answers to a questionnaire about his background.

Payton said the last book he read was "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team" by Patrick Lencioni. He may want to lend his copy to McCarthy, whose team may have more than just five dysfunctions.

Payton says the "greatest overachiever" he ever coached was quarterback Ty Detmer, who was drafted in the ninth round by Green Bay in 1992.

Payton also says his favorite stadium in the NFL other than his own, is Lambeau because of the "tradition" and the "setting."

Also check out an article USA Today wrote about the book last year.

Thanks!

“At the beginning of the day, it’s all about possibilities. At the end of the day, it’s all about results�.

Today has been a great day! In addition to writing about several important business topics, I did a podcast with Lisa Haneberg - accomplished business author, trainer and speaker. I’m so lucky to know Lisa and highly recommend her Management Craft Blog to anyone who wants to become a better manager and leader.

In closing I want to share two emails that I received today. The first is from a business person that I’ve never met.

“I bought your book yesterday and read it this afternoon. Excellent! I am already making changes.�

The next is from a dear friend I use to work with.

“I cannot begin to tell you how much I appreciate and how flattered I am by the acknowledgement in your book. As I consider my own mortality, an inescapable consequence of having cancer, its things like this that really stand out. Long after I’m gone, my son and my grandchildren will have your recognition as a testament to the fact that maybe I did matter.�

I’m so thankful to have been given the opportunity to make a difference. Make each day count!

Best wishes to all – Bob
www.bobprosen.com

Hire Smart

One of the most important aspects of being a leader is hiring people smarter than you. That’s why top leaders spend more time putting the right team in place to accomplish their objectives than they spend on planning, strategizing, or many other components of their job.

Some leaders have a fear of not knowing the answer to every question. They personally want to bring all relevant facts to the table every time. That’s not only impossible but also counterproductive. Effective leaders hire people who can provide the answers that are pertinent to their particular area of expertise. True leaders also know how to listen to advice and move out of the way to let others do what they do best. When I was brought in to lead a division of NCR’s professional services organization, I realized I had my work cut out for me. We had to change the culture from being response driven to that of a proactive solutions provider. One of my first initiatives was to assess my team, making certain the right people were in the right positions. After a few months our team was in place. It was made up of a combination of internal talent and a couple of people hired from the outside. As a team, our goal was to become the top-performing division within eighteen months.

As a team, we increased sales 38 percent while achieving the �rm’s highest profit level and employee satisfaction rating.

In one job, I left the director of capacity planning position open for many months until I found the absolute best person. I took a lot of heat from senior management, but decided not to compromise and held out until I eventually hired one of the top pros in the business. Not only did my job get easier, but we were also able to make better strategic and �nancial decisions.

Of course I’ve also made my share of staf�ng mistakes. One of the biggest mistakes was placing the wrong person in charge of the contingency planning department to develop methods and procedures in the event of a disaster. In retrospect, I should have taken more time up front to review the employee’s past performance and speak with his previous managers and peers before promoting him. After a few months, I noticed critical assignments weren’t getting done and the employee kept blaming others instead of taking responsibility. For the next two months I tried coaching him to no avail, and eventually I exited him from the business. The entire process took six months to conclude and put us way behind plan. The disruption to the organization, along with the added work and stress necessary to closely manage a performance problem, far exceeded the time it would have taken to hire the right person in the �rst place.

If you’re working too many hours and following up on every detail you may want to look closer at your team to ensure you’ve surrounded yourself with people who know more about their area of expertise than you do. Once I started doing this my job got easier and we accomplished goals faster than we thought possible.

How do you know if someone who works for you is smarter than yourself?

Try this. First, ask how often the people around you recommend sound ideas that you never knew were possibilities. Does this happen once a week? Once a month? Does it ever happen?

If you’re hiring people who are smarter than you, you should be surprised with their new ideas and solutions. You should be constantly learning from them.

Second, in the privacy of your office, study each person in your organization who reports to you, and ask yourself, if there were no rami�cations associated with the answer, would I pick this person again to be on my team and in the same position? Caution! If you worry about what you would do if the answer is no, you will not answer the question honestly.

If you can answer often to the �rst question and yes, without hesitation, to the second, then you have the right person in the right job.

One of the toughest jobs for a leader is hiring someone you don’t know. The last thing we want is to hire wrong and then have to deal with the aftermath. Here is a secret I use to increase the probability of making the right hiring decision: During the latter stages of the interviewing process, after my colleagues and I have met with the prospective hire several times, I ask the candidate to write a one-page action plan describing what he or she will do the �rst sixty days on the job. The next time we meet, I ask the person to present the plan. This not only allows me to evaluate the candidate’s style, approach, and critical thinking skills, but it also gives me a ready-made performance plan by which to evaluate the person in the months to come. If I’m hiring to �ll a senior position, I ask for a three-month action plan.

I hope these tips help. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Doing Good And Doing Well

Do you believe that you and your company can do good and do well at the same time? I do. I wrote Kiss Theory Good Bye to give you the tools and techniques to use daily to accomplish your goals pro�tably and ethically.

I hope you share my belief that a highly pro�table company can be both competitive and successful while maintaining its integrity. The old adage is true: You can do good and do well. You don’t have to cheat to become highly pro�table. There’s no need to color your reporting or “cook the books� to achieve great success.

Whether you are the leader of a Fortune 1000 company, the owner of a privately held business, the leader of a not-for-pro�t organization, or a manager or supervisor within a department, successful leaders share a set of common goals. We want to be part of a successful organization that consistently achieves its objectives. We want to make our work easier and more ful�lling.

We want all of our employees working collaboratively to achieve the organization’s objectives, have fun, react less, and be proud members of an enterprise that is respected and admired.

We all want to be part of a company where employees look forward to coming to work and being part of a bigger mission. We want to create an environment where everyone’s ideas and talents are sought after and respected, where trust is high and politics are kept to a minimum.

Unfortunately, some business leaders look for the quickest road to success, regardless of the consequences. The business pages of newspapers and magazines are �lled with news about seemingly successful companies and CEOs who basked in the glory of the cover stories and feature articles, only to come crashing back to earth as their dishonest, corrupt, and greedy business practices came to light. For instance, former WorldCom chief executive Bernie Ebbers just last week was ordered to report to prison on Sept. 26th.

Companies can be ethical, fair, and socially responsible while competing �ercely to win in the marketplace. You can do good and do well—these traits are not mutually exclusive. Companies such as Edward Jones, The Container Store, Adobe, TDIndustries, JM Smucker, Chick-�l-A, and Southwest Airlines are just a few examples of corporate success achieved by doing both good and well. There are also many small and midsize companies and organizations, including Rasa Floors (owned by my good friend Michael Rasa), Junior Achievement, The Boy Scouts of America, and many others that have achieved exemplary status.

Companies are created for one purpose: to achieve a mission. To do this requires consistent delivery of results against goals. Results are best achieved when organizations have strong leaders who know how to balance vision and results, create an accountability-based culture, hire the right people, communicate effectively, realize that people are the most important asset, tie recognition and rewards to results, operate with integrity, and have the courage to lead.

I sometimes wonder if business integrity and honesty are less important today than they were yesterday?

Are You Still Struggling With Employee Performance Problems?

Does this sound familiar? – I should have taken action sooner! If so, I believe it's because you don't think you've been fair. Leaders who fail at performance management are not respected. That's because it's not fair or equitable for top performers to be burdened with less competent colleagues. We all know employees talk about leaders behind their back when they turn a blind eye to obvious performance problems. Follow these four steps to solve almost any performance problem.

1. Determine the source of the performance problem. Example, your salesman has not achieved quota for the past 6 months.
2. Ask the employee to list up to three things that stand in the way of achieving quota. Determine if the reasons are due to real internal process problems or just excuses. Pay close attention because the solutions are different in both cases.
3. Discuss each item and decide how and when they will be resolved. It’s not uncommon for both you and the salesman to share some responsibilities. If the problems are internal process issues such as poor product quality, it’s the leader’s job to fix them. If the obstacles are excuses, removing them allows you to see the salesman’s true capability to perform.
4. When the required performance is achieved, be certain to recognize the salesman. If the required performance is not achieved, you have been fair and it’s time to take action.

Follow This Formula and Watch Accountability Improve

Leaders are always asking how they can increase accountability to get the results they need. My advice is to start by defining your role when it comes to delivering results. Simply put, the leader’s job is to ensure every member of the team wins, and winning is defined as meeting the organization’s top objectives. I only wish someone would have explained this to me earlier in my career. The reason this is so powerful is due in part to the inherent quid pro quo. Throughout my career one of the best ways I’ve found to help people win is to establish an accountability-based culture focused on producing results, not activities. Here is the five-step formula you can use to create accountability and achieve extraordinary results in any organization:

1. Establish the organizations top three objectives. This means the significant few, not the important many. Once identified, objectives must be clear, concise, measurable and obtainable. Notice I didn’t say easy!
2. Assign each team member his or her respective objectives. Remember, when combined they must allow the organization to achieve its top objectives. In other words, the sum of the parts must be equal to or greater than the whole.
3. Ask each team member what he or she needs to win. To help people win, leaders must remove the roadblocks that stand in the way. Do this by having each team member identify a maximum of three things they need to accomplish each objective. Have them put it in writing.
4. Agree on what the leader will do to help. Meet individually with each team member to clarify the roadblocks and agree on what’s needed to win and who will be responsible for making it happen. In all likelihood, the leader will assume some responsibility. Why? Because you’re responsible to people, not for them. Being responsible to people means helping them get what they need to win.
5. Reward results. When objectives are achieved, ensure that rewards are disproportionate and highly visible. Those who achieve the most get rewarded the most—and everyone should know that. It’s just that simple. Ensure that people at the bottom are either improving their performance or being moved out. No one with poor performance gets to remain on the bottom for more than a year without action being taken.

What are your thoughts on accountability and how to get more of it?

Do you believe top performers like accountability? What about poor performers?

If you want to end indecision, increase accountability and productivity go to my website and get a free copy of The Leader’s Daily Checklist and The Four Steps To Achieve Winning Results.

Finding A Parade

When things are going well, I believe it's easy to be a leader. It's like finding a parade and getting in front. That’s a whole lot easier than having to create the parade. Great leaders shine during tough times.

In light of the latest announcements at HP, the newly appointed chairman Mark Hurd, whom I worked for at NCR, will be in the leadership spotlight like never before. In addition to being the CEO he's now the chairman, taking over from Patricia Dunn who's embroiled in a scandal involving the use of personal phone records to investigate apparent leaks. Mark is a stand-up guy with a solid track record for helping companies get back on track. I like what he said yesterday on internetnews.com:

"HP holds itself to the highest standards of business conduct and we are accountable to these standards for everything that we do,"

Integrity, trust and doing what's right for the company during times of trouble and intense political pressure are what leader’s like Mark Hurd are made of. I welcome your thoughts on how leaders take charge during tough times.

Good Morning!

I'm so thrilled to be here among such leading minds and want to thank those at 800-CEO-Read for letting me host the blog today. I’ve heard so many wonderful comments since the release of my book , Kiss Theory Good-bye and I’m doubly thankful that so many in the marketing and business communities have featured my book.

Over the 25 years I spent helping companies achieve their financial and operating objectives, I noticed a lack of practical information to help business leaders execute their plans.

My whole goal of writing the book was to really give actionable steps that anyone could take to meet their real business challenges and achieve extraordinary results in leadership, sales effectiveness, operational excellence, financial management, and customer loyalty. People are tired of theory and want the how-to details that actually produce results. The results I’m talking about are performance, productivity and profit.

The first question I ask anyone about their company is - What are your top three objectives and how do you know you are achieving them? Is everyone focused on achieving the organization's top objectives? I would love to hear your comments on both questions.

PS There is alot more at my website.

Books on Blogs - 9/12/06

If you read the blogs that I do, here are the books you would have seen mentioned over the last week or two:

Curt at The Occupational Adventure is reading Energy Addict: 101 Physical, Mental, & Spiritual Ways to Energize Your Life by Jon Gordon. He says he is adding it to the list of book he regularly recommends to clients.

Paul at the Idea Sandbox talks through the six factors that made Walt Disney successful. He draws on the material from How To Be Like Walt: Capturing Disney Magic Every Day Of Your Life by Pat Williams.

You can find some interesting picks in Kevin Maney's Thursday CEO Book Group. Each CEO posts an old book and a new book they like. Last week Kevin posted the choices of two CEOs -- Howard Anderson and Steve Waite. Both chose The End of Medicine as their new choice. For their old choice, Anderson went with Drucker's Management and Waite went with Complexity by Mitchell Waldrop.

Matt Blumberg at Only Once writes quite a few book reviews under the heading "Book Shorts". His latest post gives a thumbs up to Dealing with Darwin by Geoffrey Moore and a thumbs down to Small Is The New Big by Seth Godin.

Matt at Signal vs. Noise writes about Point and Shoot Software and invokes Gary Klein's classic Source of Power.

Jack Covert Selects: The Power of Nice

The Power of Nice: How to Conquer the Business World with Kindness
by Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval, Currency Books, 110 Pages, $17.95 Hardcover, September 2006, ISBN 0385518927

There are weighty tomes that require serious concentration and contemplation. But bigger doesn’t always mean better. This book weighs in at just over 100 pages, but this penultimate airplane-read is the classic example of good things coming in small packages. The book starts with a Jay Leno forward, then proceeds to a surprisingly meaty interior. One of the chapters is called, “Bake a Bigger Pie�. The premise is that we should share and if your share is too small, bake a bigger pie, instead of envying someone’s bigger slice.

[B]eat out the competition; grab your slice of the pie before they get it first. Because if you don’t, you’ll be left with only crumbs. Right? Wrong. Life is not a zero-sum game: If the other person wins, I lose, or vice versa. There’s no need to squabble over who gets the biggest piece of pie—we just have to bake a bigger pie. After all, who says the pie is finite? The universe isn’t—the universe is infinite. Our capacity for love isn’t finite, either, as any parent knows. You have your first child and you think your heart couldn’t grow any bigger. Then you have a second child and it doubles, or triples.

At the end of each chapter they have one paragraph “takeaways� For example:

Nice Cube: Make a difference
As the Beatles said, ‘And, in the end, the pie you take, is equal to the pie you bake.’ OK, that’s not exactly what they said, but you get the point. In other words, every time someone gives you an idea, a job tip, or a loan—make sure you pass it on. It doesn’t have to be an exact quid pro quo. If someone higher up in your company gives you good advice, think about passing it on to a more junior person you would like to mentor. If a competitor recommends you for a job she can’t take, try to come back to her with some worthwhile contacts. Or just do something nice. Visit a home for the aged. Or call your grandmother, for goodness sake—she’s dying to hear from you.

As you can see this book has special advice that will last you a long time.

Could it get any better?

If you are the folks at Portfolio, you have to be jumping up and down with joy.

The trials and tribulations the Hewlett-Packard board is going through is the IDEAL lead-in to Carly Fiorina's Tough Choices. The former CEO's book is due out in a little over a month. The original investigation by Patricia Dunn was created to find out who was leaking information about the growing split between Fiorina and the board.

Tough Choices is currently embargoed (meaning there are no galleys or manuscripts available ahead of the publication date) and Fiorina is declining interviews until the book is released on October 18th.

Jack Covert Selects: The Anatomy of Peace

The Anatomy of Peace: Resolving the Heart of Conflict
by The Arbinger Institute, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 200 Pages, $22.95 Hardcover, August 2006, ISBN 1576753344

I have been doing Jack Covert Selects reviews for years now and this review was the hardest to write. This book is loaded with profound insight into the way we perceive life and how we can control our own mindsets. The ample amount of ‘good stuff’ was just so hard to boil down.

The book is a fable, the story of a two-day workshop where adults who are having problems with their kids, spouses or their work life, go to fix their world. The workshop is run by a Palestinian and an Israeli who have learned to conquer their differences..

The authors use a pyramid metaphor with three distinct lessons. Particularly important is lesson one: Most time and effort should be spent at the lower levels of the pyramid. The authors say:

Remember, we want to spend most of our time in the levels of the pyramid below correction, which is exactly opposite of what we normally do. We want to spend most of our time actively helping things go right rather than dealing with things that are going wrong. We want to get out of the box, build relationships, listen and learn, teach and communicate. Where circumstances are such that we choose to engage in correction of some kind—whether it is putting a little child in a time-out or by sending war planes into the skies above a country that has attacked us—the lower levels of the pyramid become more important. Correction is by nature prevocational. So where we choose to correct, we need to increase our efforts at the lower levels of the pyramid all the more…

This book kept me thinking throughout with its complex subject matter presented simply. On a personal level, I found many examples of how I was looking at people wrongly and by doing so, was treating them wrongly. On a more global level, I could apply these lessons to any international conflict seen on CNN and see how this process can be used to end age-old conflicts that have plagued society for many years.

Jack Covert Selects: Success Built to Last

Success Built to Last: Creating a Life that Matters
by Jerry Porras, Stewart Emery, Mark Thompson, Wharton School Publishing, 304 pages, $22.99 hardcover, ISBN 013228751X

In 1994, Jerry Porras and Jim Collins wrote an important and very successful book called Built to Last. The duo wrote about enduring companies and the qualities that made them exceptional. Collins went on to write the equally popular Good to Great.

Success Built to Last is Porras' follow-up. In this book, rather than looking at companies, Porras, Emery and Thompson talk to people—very successful people—to find out what made them so. The candidates had to have been successful for at least 20 years. This left them with a potential list of about 1000 people. 200 personal interviews were conducted over the last ten years and the results form the basis for the book.

Early in the book, the authors talk about meaning and the importance of finding passion: "Listen up---here's some really bad news: It's dangerous not to do what you love. The harsh truth is that if you don't love what you're doing, you'll lose to someone who does!...This person will work harder and longer. They will outrun you."

They talked to Larry Bossidy, and this point also came up with him. "It's a competitive imperative. Only by loving what you do will you actually do more and do it better than the person sitting next to you."