New Book from Jim Collins: How The Mighty Fall

Here is a clip of Jim Collins talking about the core concepts from his new book, “How the Mighty Fall“.

  

 

I love the simple ways he presents the findings of their research…He breaks the process into 5 stages and in Jim Collins style, links them to a growth chart of a company: 

 

STAGE 1: HUBRIS BORN OF SUCCESS

STAGE 2:  UNDISCIPLINED PURSUIT OF MORE

STAGE 3: DENIAL OF RISK AND PERIL

STAGE 4: GRASPING FOR SALVATION

STAGE 5: CAPITULATION TO IRRELEVANCE OR DEATH

 

 

The key here is to be able to spot if your organization is getting caught on this path – and to catch it early on.

 

There is also a detailed story in BusinessWeek this week.

 

Take a read for yourself…I have yet to read the whole book but expect that it will be as good as Good To Great and Built To Last. 

 

CoachKevin’s Challenge:

•  Where could you be getting caught up in your own success in away that could lead to your demise?
• What can you do to get a good reality check?

Why are Many Meetings a Waste of Time?

Meetings are absolutely essential to the success of any organization. They are the glue that pulls people together for a short period of time. But in many companies, meetings are pathetic and create little or no value. It shocks me to see the number of companies that don’t even have weekly meetings to keep executives or managers on track.

 To get and keep aligned and focused, most teams need to meet at least once a week.  In The Rockefeller Habits  methodology I use with clients, they meet every day.

People usually stop having meetings because they feel it’s a waste of time – and they’re often right. We’ve all been there. Some people just want to talk about things. There are no decisions being made. There’s nobody taking notes about commitments. You’re just having a chit-chat. You feel like you’d do better across the street at the Starbucks having a coffee.

Leading meetings is a skill as valuable as being able to write or build something. Meetings are Business 001, even before Business 101. You need an agenda. Along with that agenda, here’s my list of basics for a good meeting.

• Start on time and end promptly, too
• Have people be prepared to share what they need to share
• Lead the meeting, to move it ahead
• Redirect off-topic discussions to another time and place
• Make tangible decisions at the meeting
• Take notes about all decisions or commitments, and note the date those items will be completed
• Most importantly, you must keep your meeting on track: cut people off politely who are long-winded or off topic

That last basic requires a bit of finesse.  Here are some of the techniques I use:

• Tell people up front that you will cut them off, so they are not surprised or offered
• Use phrases like “take 10 seconds to finish up your point.” Or, “How does that relate to what we’re talking about here?”
• Say to the group, “Last comment. We need to make a decision.”

Decisions lead to results. Write down those decisions and follow up at next week’s meeting. Once you make a decision and commitments, then you can talk about it—after the meeting.

 Coach Kevin’s Challenge:

In the end, your meetings need to create tangible value for all that attend…

• What is keeping your meetings from being as valuable as they could be?
• Ask at the end of your meeting how effective it was. Rank your meetings on a 1-10 scale.
• Make a list of 3 points right now that would make your meetings a 9.5.

In-N-Out Burger

One of my favorite business strategies is to leverage your relationships with your customers. On my recent trip to Mexico, I saw that strategy working for In-N-Out Burger.

You might know about the loyalty to these burgers. On our bus ride down to Encinada, 40 people were raving about them. Even before we got on the bus, they were saying, “We’re going to In-N-Out. You gotta eat there, it’s great!” Never in my life have I seen so many people get excited about a hamburger joint. People were evangelizing, saying how cool it was. So much so, that there was really no choice. I had to go.

If you haven’t gone, you get a burger, fries, and a drink or milkshake. And that’s their whole menu. It was an incredibly efficient business, and nice to see something so darn simple. Because it’s so simple, it’s easy for people to get behind it and tell the story. In-N-Out’s story is so simple that people go crazy about it.

This story is the subject of new book about In-N-Out.  I read the book review in BusinessWeek, and the article notes that a lot of the success comes from the fact that In-N-Out didn’t mess it up. They managed to stay true to their values and keep it very simple. I loved the marketing they did with free bumper stickers, where the company used spotters to enter drivers with the stickers in a vacation contest. They managed to make their story into a cult of hamburger lovers.

The story about the burgers was not only dead-on, but these customers were able to articulate it in a way that engaged me.

Coach Kevin’s Challenge

What would it take to get your customers out there, getting excited about your business like In-N-Out’s customers do? What is the simple message you would love everyone say about you?

The Fewer Moving Parts, The Better

Lots of people are talking about ideas on how they can be LEAN or more efficient in their businesses. One of the core principles to LEAN is how do you remove from a process to make it more efficient.  Here is a beautiful thing that actually removes the need for staples in an office…food for thought.

 

Coach Kevin’s Challenge

How can you apply this to your business or better yet, how can you apply this principle of removing something to make the process more efficient?

Article from Kevin Lawrence: How to Engage Your Entire Organization in Driving Business Results

Below is Kevin Lawrence’s article, “How to Engage Your Entire Organization in Driving Business Results”. We hope you find it relevant and insightful. You can also access other articles and subscribe to Kevin Lawrence’s email newsletter “Coach Kevin’s Insights” by clicking here. 

If you would like to reprint this or other articles, we ask that you leave Kevin’s contact information intact at the end of the article and notify us that you will be using it. If you’re looking for an article customized for your publication, please let us know.

Please contact me with any questions, either by email at Janice@CoachKevin.com or by phone at 604-313-2229.

__________________

Many companies launch internal campaigns to boost morale or drive change within an organization.  The reality of these is that they’re often just corporate fluff and puff and really don’t create an impact.  Here’s an example of a leadership team who has created notable change, not only in the performance of the company, but in the level of service delivered to clients. An incredible theme aligned the entire company creating marked and measurable performance over a period of 90 days.

Victorian Epicure Inc.

Vancouver Island, on Canada’s West Coast, is home to Victorian Epicure Inc. which was founded in Victoria, BC in 1991, by Sylvie Rochette. Sylvie first sold her small selection of home spice blends from the back of her station wagon at community fairs and other events. Her vision was to make it easy for busy mothers to create healthful and delicious meals for their families.

From those humble roots, Victorian Epicure has expanded to an office and manufacturing facility situated on 80 acres of agricultural reserve land, which includes 7 acres of vineyard on the Saanich Peninsula, just north of Victoria. Sylvie’s original vision of helping busy mothers continues today, but the company now manufactures and markets over 300 high quality spice blends and gourmet food products, accompanied by a line of professional quality cookware and a Home and Body Care line.

In 1996, Epicure Selections® (www.epicureselections.com) was created as a catalogue division of the company in response to the high demand for the products. More than 6000 Independent Sales Consultants represent Epicure Selections® in communities across Canada, providing personalized service to sell Epicure’s products. Amelia Warren is the Vice President of Epicure Selections®.

Identifying the Challenge

In the fall of 2007, the senior executive team at Epicure met to plan their strategy for the fourth quarter, which included Christmas, the busiest time of year for Epicure. In the meeting, it became clear that the biggest challenge (and opportunity to improve) they faced  was the time it took to process each order during the Christmas rush period. This “in-and-out” time needed to be dramatically shortened: in previous years, it was taking up to ten days from the time an order was received at the Home Office facility until it was out the door for delivery. Depending on where the order was going in Canada, the shipping time could be an additional three to seven days. In the worst case, a customer would have to wait up to seventeen business days for their order.

Near Christmas, customers wanted to ensure their orders arrived before December 24^th. Because customers were uncertain about processing and shipping times, they would stop ordering at the beginning of December to ensure timely delivery. For Epicure, this meant the potential loss of two weeks of sales at the busiest and most lucrative time of the year.

During the planning session for the fourth quarter of 2007 there was much discussion around order processing times . In the end, the leadership team decided that they needed to get orders out the door in under three days. While the focus was on speed of delivery, the leadership team knew that customers also had the expectation of accurate orders. As a countermeasure to speed, they decided that the absolute minimum quality threshold would be 97% accuracy of orders (proper items selected, sealed and labeled properly, and packaged so that there would be no breakage during shipping).

Choosing a Theme

 The leadership team brainstormed on how to communicate the order processing goal of three days to the company. They wanted to engage each and every employee in making sure that the entire company would deliver the commitment to Epicure customers.

In order to ensure success in achieving the goal, they used a process they have used a number of times before, which is called a quarterly theme.  As explained in the book Mastering the Rockefeller Habits by Verne Harnish, quarterly themes are designed to engage all employees of a company in achieving the number one goal for the company in that quarter. In the end, the theme they chose was so simple that everyone, customers and employees, could grasp it at once:

 “In & Out in 72”

Executing “In & Out in 72”

Much thought was given to aligning the entire company around the new goal.. Tangible ways were found to measure whether they were meeting the order processing in 72 hour goal. A bonus scheme was created to incent employees to achieve the quarterly theme. Epicure built a system that provided daily feedback to all employees on how they were doing. With the help of the art department, the leadership team created posters that set expectations for employees and showed the bonus levels while communicating the absolute minimum goal of 93% of orders processed in 72 hours with a minimum of 97% accuracy.

At Epicure, the employees are called the “Home Team.” At the same time that the Epicure leadership team was selling “In & Out in 72” to the Home Team, they made a bold move. They ran a six week marketing campaign to all their external customers promising them “In & Out in 72.”  Employees were featured in advertisements promising “We will deliver in 72 hours, period.” Amelia Warren, Vice President, said “(The ad campaign) was effective in that once we made our commitment public to our customers it also was engaging and reinforcing the importance to our Home Team, the importance of their jobs to the businesses and livelihoods of our customers.“

Running Hard to Christmas

The campaign was launched with tremendous enthusiasm and excitement. Employees responded positively to the bonus scheme. Everyone was held accountable.  Teams met in daily huddles and reviewed the numbers. The numbers were published daily, both yesterday’s orders and accuracy, but also the cumulative totals on whiteboards around the Home Office facility. There was no hiding from the results. Everyone knew where they were at. People did stumble, but there was one goal, one focus, and everyone had to work together better than they had ever done before.

Amelia says “I think it challenged everyone to look at, where are the gaps here?  Where are we stuck?  What’s the relationship between what I’m doing over here to what you’re doing there, and how does that all contribute to meeting or not meeting that In & Out in 72 hours?”

There were other changes that helped them drive to their goal:

• Management made it crystal clear that it was 72 hours from order receipt until shipment out the door. If the order arrived Friday at 11:59 pm the shipment was out by Monday at 11:59 pm.
• They moved to a seven day schedule.
• The pick list was tweaked to correct some confusing items. For example, they changed “Greek Oregano” to say “Oregano-Greek” as sometimes the “Greek Seasoning” was being picked by mistake.

Exceeding Expectations

The “In & Out in 72” campaign was a phenomenal success. There were 28,543 orders shipped during the campaign with an amazing 99.67% In & Out in 72 Hours. The average time to process an order and have it ready for shipment was less than 27.5 hours (just over a day) — which is two and a half times faster than their In & Out in 72 goal. They did all of this while maintaining an outstanding 97% accuracy for all orders.

“In & Out in 72” is the new expectation by the leadership team, the Home Team and for Epicure’s customers. There is a complete expectation inside and outside Epicure that orders will be processed and shipped within 72 hours. The accuracy rate has improved, rising from 97% to almost 99%. Not only did they improve the performance of the company, all of the employees pulled together and got to share in the satisfaction of being a winning team.

Lessons Learned

We discussed the lessons learned from this campaign with Amelia. She told us the following:

1. There has to be one person driving the whole process.
2. Clear measurable goals make the focus clear to the leadership team and give them a sense of what is happening with the rest of the Home Team.
3. Employees like having numbers to aim for. Providing daily feedback means that they know immediately where they are succeeding or failing. If you don’t know what you’re aiming for, you don’t know whether you are succeeding or not.
4. Having measurable goals helps everyone pull together and lets individuals know the role they are playing in the lives of Epicure’s consultants. When Management talks about meeting “In & Out in 72”, they can link it to feedback from a consultant in Nova Scotia who writes and says “Thank you so much. I was so excited to get my order.”
5. Keep it simple. You want the minimum possible administrative burden. The “In & Out in 72” campaign had two simple goals:
   1. At least 93% of orders out in 72 hours.
   2. At least 97% accuracy of orders.

The incentives don’t have to be huge.  It’s more about the energy and excitement that the theme generates and less about what the actual reward is.

Wrapping Up

Quarterly themes can be a powerful way to drive business results. A theme is an engaging way to get all employees in an organization to pull together to deliver on a tangible goal that makes a real difference to the business. Themes work best when they are backed up by simple daily measurable results that every employee can understand.  As with this example with Epicure, a quarterly theme is a powerful way to improve the performance in an organization while at the same time engaging the entire team in accomplishing something they can take pride in. Epicure performed two and a half times better than their unbelievable goal of 72 hours, while delivering 97% accuracy on all orders. To learn more about using themes and other strategic tools in improving your company’s performance, contact either Kevin Lawrence or David Greer.

The Gift Of Giving & Stretching Yourself In The Process

Two weeks ago I came back from Ensenada, Mexico on a trip to build a house for a family of nine who couldn’t afford it. I took my son who’s six and my dad with me, and it was an amazing experience. We stayed in an old hotel room with five bunk beds in it. Now, people give money to charities and that’s good. But I saw that when you can stretch yourself out of your comfort zone to give, it’s questionable who really benefits from the act. Is it the other person, or it is you? From what I experienced, I think both.

I got started much closer than Ensenada. In my hometown of Vancouver, the homeless people come to the Downtown East Side to survive the Canadian winters. A few friends and I wanted to help them directly. We sent an e-mail and a dozen people showed up to give out blankets and gloves to the East Side people at Christmastime. Two magical things happened. The first time we got onto the streets, we quickly realized these people felt more like a community than any neighborhood I’d lived in.

The second thing is that these people told us they didn’t really need blankets—they needed socks. By the time we did this four years later, we got together socks, gloves, hats, a thousand bags of these things to give out. It was all given away to people to needed it in just over 30 minutes.

We got out of our comfort zones to do this. Mexico was similar, a couple of days of building a house. I came away with these insights about both experiences.

 • We were helping people less fortunate, and that let us see how lucky we were in our own lives.

• We got to spend high-quality time with friends and family. It’s a very different experience doing charity work together than watching a movie or TV show.

• We met incredibly interesting people in an environment where almost anyone would be at their best.

 It changes how you feel about things, and what you see. Giving of yourself is about as equal to a win-win as is possible on this planet.

Coach Kevin’s Challenge

Look at ways of giving that are not only extremely meaningful for you, but create a change or stretch within yourself and your family. What would you like to do, but aren’t quite comfortable enough to commit to?

What really motivates employees…and motivates them to quit?

Business books are wonderful. But thousands come out every year, and there’s probably only a half-dozen that really count. I’ve found a hidden gem of a book in The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave, by Leigh Branham. These reasons make sense when I look at companies and careers.

This book has the elements of my favorite business books. When you read it, it dispels a major myth and creates a shift in the way you think. Second, it has tangible concepts you can understand — and apply directly tomorrow. Third, it’s based on credible research. These Hidden Reasons came out of exit interviews with more than 10,000 employees.

You might not believe it, but getting paid more is not the major reason why people leave companies.

One of the things that dispels that myth is Reason Number 4: Employees don’t see enough opportunity for growth and advancement. People need to see the path to get to where they want in their career. Many companies don’t make this easy for their employees. When you can show the specific steps to get them exactly where they want, there’s no need to leave.

The myth that people leave companies because they want to get paid more never really felt right to me. People don’t leave a business because of money. This book really shows that salary is only part of compensation—and the really smart people realize it’s less than half.

Most businesses miss the boat when they try to make people more loyal with just financial compensation. I always ask the employees in companies I work with, “Where do you want to be three years down the road?” Then I want to know if they can see the path they have in their current company. The sad reality is more often than not, they can’t.

Coach Kevin’s Challenge

Look at The 7 Hidden Reasons. How are you taking care of them for your employees? As the book says, how can you act before it’s too late?

How To Get A Higher Return On Your Learning Or Training Investment

I find that most companies need to work on getting a return on their training investment. Earlier this year I did a two-day training session for about 30 companies to learn the Rockefeller Habits. I use these Habits with all my clients to help them improve their focus and results. One table was a forum group from the Entrepreneurs Organization (EO). These nine people got lots of value from the session. But afterwards they realized they should’ve brought their executive teams with them, so the execs could learn and understand the training approach.

So the group asked me if I could train their executives. Now, a typical solution would be to give another a seminar for all those companies. But even though they could split that cost, it wouldn’t give a very good return on their investment.

I find people learn during a workshop, but typically there are specific questions for each company. A generic seminar would’ve been okay, but it wouldn’t provide those answers. I didn’t feel right about that extra workshop, because I knew they were serious about using the Rockefeller Habits. They mastered the learning, but didn’t have a process for follow-though.

They came up with a brilliant solution: A half-day with all the executives, then about 1.75 hours for each executive team over the next day or so. During that short time we solved 5-10 specific issues for each of the companies. We moved them from being 20 percent to 50 percent effective with the Habits in just that time. These companies had my direct experience of going through the process hundreds of times.

Problems that could take a day to solve got solved in 30 minutes. We took so many roadblocks out their way because we could troubleshoot them one by one. You could do this over an hour or so of a Webcast or conference call.

Coach Kevin’s Challenge:

Can you use this kind of model to achieve better returns from your training? Is there an expert you could bring in to work with you?