Archive for the 'Management' Category

Jan 5th 2012 Would You Invest in Your Own Company?

The CEO of one company was determined that his employees understand the issues surrounding the company’s recent poor results and become fully engaged to help turn the company around. Here’s how he accomplished this.

The company held four brown bag lunch meetings over four weeks where employees could attend for free for one hour and hear from an outside professional about how to invest in the share market. Importantly, there was no obvious link between the meeting topic and the organization the employees worked for. At week three, they were analyzing annual reports and generally deciding whether they would invest in a particular company based on the information contained in the report. By the fourth week they were given another annual report and asked the same question, “would you invest in this company?” The answer was overwhelmingly no. And of course this last company was the one they all worked for, which brought them to the “Aha!” moment. Now the organization’s employees understood and were engaged and ready to become involved in turning the company around through teamwork and new initiatives.

Source: Are Your Communication Strategies Really Engaging Employees? by Marcia Xenitelis | LeaderValues, July 2011

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Sep 12th 2011 Staying on Top

A turkey was chatting with a bull. “I would love to be able to get to the top of that tree,” sighed the turkey, “but I haven’t got the energy.”

“Well, why don’t you nibble on some of my droppings?” replied the bull. “They’re packed with nutrients.”

The turkey pecked at a lump of dung, found it actually gave him enough strength to reach the lowest branch of the tree.

The next day, after eating some more dung, he reached the second branch.

Finally after a fourth night, he was proudly perched at the top of the tree.

Soon he was promptly spotted by a farmer, who shot the turkey out of the tree.

MANAGEMENT LESSON: Bull Shit might get you to the top, but it won’t keep you there.

Original Source: Rajat Khungar

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Aug 16th 2011 Hey, You Got the Elephant

Recognition can be given in traditional ways—a complimentary e-mail, or a pat on the back for a job well done. But you can also get creative with it. One of my favorite examples is the one business consultant Alexander Kjerulf cites about a Danish car company that instituted “The Order of the Elephant.” The elephant is a two-foot-tall stuffed animal that any employee can give to another as a reward for doing something exemplary. The benefits come not just in the delivery and reception of well-earned praise, but afterwards as well. As Kjerulf explains, “other employees stopping by immediately notice the elephant and go, ‘Hey, you got the elephant. What’d you do?’, which of course means that the good stories and best practices get told and re-told many times.”

Source: The Happiness Work Ethic by Shawn Achor | ChangeThis, Jan. 19, 2011

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Aug 9th 2011 The Best Bosses Shield those Who Work for Them

Annette Kyle managed some 60 employees at a Texas terminal where they loaded chemicals from railcars onto ships and trucks. In the mid-1990s, Annette led a “revolution” that dramatically raised her unit’s performance through a host of changes, including better planning, greater responsibility at the lowest levels, improved and more transparent metrics, and numerous cultural changes. She personally sewed “no whining” patches on workers’ uniforms, for example, to discourage the local penchant for complaining and auctioned off her desk to workers for $60 because, as she explained it, “I shouldn’t be sitting behind a big desk. I should be contributing to team goals however possible.”

This transformation virtually eliminated the penalties that were levied when ships arrived at the terminal’s dock but (despite considerable advance warning) workers weren’t ready to load them. These “demurrage charges,” which cost the company $2.5 million the year before the revolution, were down to $10,000 the year after. Previously, it had taken more than three hours to load an average truck. Afterward, more than 90 percent were loaded within an hour of arrival. Surveys and interviews by University of Southern California researchers showed that employees became more satisfied with their jobs and felt proud of their accomplishments. I asked Annette how she could make such radical changes in her giant company. She answered that her boss shielded her from top-ranking managers—he found the resources and experts she needed but never discussed these moves with senior management until they succeeded.

Source: Why Good Bosses Tune in to Their People by Robert I. Sutton | The McKinsey Quarterly

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May 20th 2011 Where is the Glass?

John Sunderland, the former CEO of Cadbury Schweppes, often responded with a parable when an executive argued that the business could increase either margins or sales, but not both. Sunderland would remind the executive of a time when people lived in mud huts and struggled to get both light and heat: Put a hole in the side of your hut, and you let the daylight in, but also the cold; block the opening, and you stayed warm, but sat in the dark. The invention of glass made it possible to have both light and heat. He would then ask, “Where is the glass?”

Source: Getting Tensions Right by Ken Favaro and Saj-nicole Joni | strategy+business, Issue 60, Autumn 2010

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Mar 7th 2011 Where’s the Brown M&M in Your Business?

In its 1980s heyday, the band Van Halen became notorious for a clause in its touring contract that demanded a bowl of M&Ms backstage, but with all the brown ones removed. The story is true — confirmed by former lead singer David Lee Roth himself — and it became the perfect, appalling symbol of rock-star-diva behavior.

Get ready to reverse your perception. Van Halen did dozens of shows every year, and at each venue, the band would show up with nine 18-wheelers full of gear. Because of the technical complexity, the band’s standard contract with venues was thick and convoluted — Roth, in his inimitable way, said in his autobiography that it read “like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages.” A typical “article” in the contract might say, “There will be 15 amperage voltage sockets at 20-foot spaces, evenly, providing 19 amperes.”

Van Halen buried a special clause in the middle of the contract. It was called Article 126. It read, “There will be no brown M&Ms in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.” So when Roth would arrive at a new venue, he’d walk backstage and glance at the M&M bowl. If he saw a brown M&M, he’d demand a line check of the entire production. “Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error,” he wrote. “They didn’t read the contract…. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show.”

In other words, Roth was no diva. He was an operations expert. He couldn’t spend hours every night checking the amperage of each socket. He needed a way to assess quickly whether the stagehands at each venue were paying attention — whether they had read every word of the contract and taken it seriously. In Roth’s world, a brown M&M was the canary in the coal mine.

Like Roth, none of us has the time and energy to dig into every aspect of our businesses. But, if we’re smart, we won’t need to. What if we could rig up a system where problems would announce themselves before they arrived? That may sound like wishful thinking, but notice that it’s exactly what Roth achieved. Surely, you won’t be outwitted by the guy who sang “Hot for Teacher.”

Where’s the brown M&M in your business?

Source: Business Advice From Van Halen by Dan Heath and Chip Heath | Fast Company, March 2010

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Oct 5th 2010 Being Open to New Ideas

Rosabeth Moss Kanter tells a great story about an executive at a fabric manufacturer who took over a group and demonstrated that he was open to any new ideas. Someone from the production line approached the executive and, in a heavy foreign accent, said he had an idea that might solve a problem that had long bedeviled the company: An important type of fiber would sometimes snap, causing millions of dollars of production delays each year. The executive promised to try the idea, and it worked.

“That was a great idea,” the executive told the worker. “How long have you had this idea?”

“Thirty-two years,” the worker replied.

Source: Let’s Get Persian by Paul B. Carroll and Chunka Mui | ChangeThis, October 2008

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Aug 31st 2010 Treating Mistakes as Training

There’s the story of a top salesman who made a terrible mistake. He’d bought a vast amount of fruit. He thought it would be a bargain but had totally overestimated and his company was left with tons and tons of this rotting fruit. He arrived at his office the following day and started to tidy his papers, clearing his desk. He gets a call from his manager, “Could you pop up and see me?” she says. “Of course” he mumbles and slowly makes his way up the stairs to his boss’ office.

As he enters the room he says “Look I know I got it wrong – I’m sorry – I’ve written my letter of resignation – here it is ” and puts it on the desk.

His manager looks at the letter, rips it in half, rips it in half again and puts it in the bin. “You must be joking” she says smiling ” We’ve just spent £20,000 on your training – there’s no way you’re leaving until you’ve made that back for us.”

Source: Speed of Recovery by Byron Kalies

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Jul 6th 2010 What a Waste of Brainpower

Several years ago, I visited a manufacturing plant in Florida, which had the best quality and productivity metrics in its division. My client and I were there to learn what the facility was doing right so we could apply those management techniques at other facilities. As the plant manager took us on the tour, he pointed out an hourly employee working on his machine. “See Ted there?” the plant manager asked. “He’s been with us for more than twenty years, doing the same job year after year. You might not think Ted’s got much to offer, because he’s just a manufacturing worker. He has no interest in being promoted. He leaves work as soon as his shift is over. But Ted knows more about his machine and that manufacturing line than anyone. And when we initiated an exercise last year to make that line more efficient, Ted had the best ideas for how to improve things. Afterward, I bought him a cup of coffee and asked why he had never made those suggestions before. ‘Those college-educated production managers are so sure they have the answers, all they do is tell me what to do,’ Ted told me. ‘They never ask what I think.’”

The plant manager shook his head. “What a waste of brainpower,” he said. Then he smiled. “Want to know my secret? It’s Ted, and the other eight hundred employees at this plant. If I respect Ted and listen to him, we’ll be successful.”

Source: Left Behind by Alison Davis | The Conference Board Review, Fall 2009

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Mar 29th 2010 An Outsider’s Point of View

You don’t necessarily need an outsider to provide an outside perspective, however. Occasionally a creative, clear-headed insider can break free of both his company’s and his own preconceptions by adopting a novel point of view.

This was demonstrated by Andy Grove in 1985, when he and his boss, Gordon Moore, were fighting what appeared to be a losing battle against an impossible business dilemma. In the midst of their aimless wandering, Grove asked Moore, “If the board kicked us out and brought in new management, what do you think they would do?” Suddenly the answer to Intel’s dilemma became clear to both men. Grove’s deceptively simple question stripped the blinders of denial from their eyes. It allowed them to see the situation afresh, face it squarely, and make what had instantly become the obvious choice.

Grove’s question did not make either man smarter. Both were, and are, smart enough. Fighting denial is not a matter of IQ. It is a matter of point of view.

Source:: Ruthlessly Realistic: How CEOs Must Overcome Denial by Richard S. Tedlow, Martha Lagace | HBS Working Knowledge, March 29, 2009

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