Category Archives: Personal Skills

Managing Key Personnel – Do What Is Inevitable – evasion and self-deception will not work

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Recently I was speaking with the owner of a financial services firm. She has 15 people in her organization which is now almost 18 years old. By any measure a successful firm.

She told me about one person who has been with the firm for eight years. The owner described this person as the most professional and reliable person in the organization. She performs all sorts of important customer-facing activities flawlessly. This employee is a key person in the organization. The owner went on to tell me about a recent conversation she had with this key person who confided that she did not want to be just an “insurance geek”. She was emphatic about this. The owner told me that this statement jived with other comments this person had made recently. She believed her and felt that her days are numbered.

The owner then went on to describe how she had begun to put together a job manual for all of the key tasks now under the wing of the key employee. This seemed to me to be just the right step. First, the key employee was cooperating in constructing the job manual. This is a great sign of continuing good faith. Second, the owner is testing out the manual to be sure that it really will be a solid platform for training a replacement. Continue reading →

Time Management – is now the time to get beyond this distracting oxymoron?

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Time management is an extremely popular topic. Is this productive?

A Google search for the phrase “time management” returns the droll news that there are more than 14,900,000 responses. Amazon lists 448 books with ‘time management” in the title or subject line. A similar search on Youtube.com returns over 2,000 videos about time management.

But, what can this really be about? Time is a concept we use to delimit the past from the present, and whatever future there might be. Einstein is reported to have said, “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.” ((I could not find a reference citation for this quote. It is ubiquitous on the web. Perhaps it is apocryphal? In a recent re-read of David Allen’s Getting Things Done Penguin, 2001), he has a side note (p. 5): “Time is the quality of nature that keeps events from happening all at once. Lately it doesn’t seem to be working”. – Anonymous )) Perhaps because we, as human beings, are a fleeting moment, we have a special focus on time. We are very aware that our time is limited, unknowable. Continue reading →

What If Agreements – get them in place now, before a what if occurs

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Just this morning I heard another tale of woe from a business owner who is now entering into legal disputes because a partner is getting divorced. The business is ten years old, healthy, in fact, holds a strong position in a niche market. But, now the business will be sold or broken into pieces. Several lawyers are also enjoying a feast of fees. 

All of this points back to a fundamental of business formation and business planning – the need for “what if” agreements among the owners.

What if someone dies, becomes disabled, divorced, married, wants to leave the business? How are new partners added? Can a founder be fired? Who owns what and in what form? How will disputes be settled? And, the list of “what ifs” goes on.

So often people start businesses and, in the glow of start up enthusiasms they think, or don’t want to think, about the almost inevitable “what ifs”. They quickly go through setting up the incorporation process and get to work ignoring what will turn out to be all important, the Founders’ Agreement. 

If you are just starting out, make sure that you work through the discussions and legal work for a Founders’ Agreement within the first couple of months. Put your Founders’ Agreement in place. On the other hand, perhaps you have ten years of success in your wake and you still have no Founders’ Agreement (referred to also as Owners’ Operating Agreement and other title). You are living on borrowed time. Get together with your business partners and make it a priority to think through the obvious “what ifs” and then involve your attorneys to formulate an agreement. When one of the “what ifs” occur ,you will be very happy to fall back on its structure.

Too Much Information – learn to control those interruptors

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A continuing hot topic here is the surge of interruptions that consume our work day (and evenings, too).

I have talked about this earlier in these postings, Seize Your Time – gaining control over Too Much Information and Multitasking, Too Much Information, Interruptions, and High Performance

Many people see their emails, instant messaging, Twittering, Blackberries and iPhone (to mention just a few interrupters) as beasts that they must satisfy instantaneously and continuously. Everything is in real time.

The first question to be asked is, “Do all of these interruptions really have equal claim on my time?” If you work in a customer service call center, then truly that ringing phone does have claim on your next free moment. But, in reality customer inquiries can be filtered and sorted for action as appropriate.

A second point to be considered is how inefficient and unreliable all of these little interruptions make us. Despite all of the blather about “multitasking”, human beings really can only do one thing at a time. When we are “multitasking, we are really performing a whole series of tasks sequentially. The brain is expending lots of energy and taking extra time to keep track of which tasks are in queue and what the status is of the last one we worked on and the next one we pick up. Worse, in most ways, is the fact that all of this is making us perform at a lower quality level. All of the back and forthing introduces errors and the interruptions are preventing us from really devoting enough time to energize our creativity and problem solving aptitudes.

Multitasking is a fraudulent idea.

Lets take a line of thought about emails and see if we can develop some actions that you can take that will bring at least this interrupter under your control.

Look over the emails you have received over the last day to week. How many of these really required instant action –  did the sender expect you to be sitting at your computer waiting for the email gong to put you into action? Did the sender really think that they were emailing to the equivalent of a customer service center where they could expect that someone would immediately read their email and respond? What would have been a reasonable response time for these emails? Today? End of Business Tomorrow? Do all of the emails requiring response in less than a day come from a predictable set of people? If so, do they really need this, or is it just a bad habit that you have encouraged? Perhaps, you can set some new expectations for them.

But, lets say there are some people who require responses in less than a day. Set up an email filter (“Smart Folder” in the Apple MAC world) where these emails will automatically be sorted. Now when you go to your email application, you only need to look at that folder. Everything else can wait until one of your regularly scheduled trips to the email box.

And that brings us to the next step. Set up a schedule for checking and responding to email. For most, first thing in the morning and at the end of the day will do it. Then, you have to stick with it. For me the challenge is my iPod Touch. I carry it around in my pocket and there is an enormous temptation to take it out and look at my emails.

Take this one step with emails. Don’t worry about all those other interrupters. Rome was not built in a day and you will not change your multitasking habits over night. Prove that you can gain control over just your emails. See what the results are. Then, you can move on to the others.

Remember, time is the one resource you have that can not be bought or inventoried. To be productive and sucessful you must make the best use of this most valuable asset.

Hiding Innovations from Customers

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Over the Thanksgiving holiday I learned something quite startling.

The age-old problem of rolls of aluminum foil, plastic wrap, and other rolled goods jumping out of the box when you are dispensing them was actually solved years ago by a clever packaging engineer.

My sister-in-law, Meredith Morgan, Press Here to Lock Endan award winning chemistry teacher at Governor Livingston HS in Berkeley Heights NJ, learned this from her students one day when she was fumbling around in front of a class with a roll of aluminum foil.

“Dr. Morgan, don’t you know about the little tabs your press in on the ends of the box?”

She didn’t. But she learns quickly. Meredith was so impressed by this innovation that she demonstrated it to me on every box of foil, plastic wrap, and wax paper in the kitchen.

Now, you might ask, “What does this have to do with my business?”

This is a good example of a small innovation with very practical, day-to-day utility that has probably never been marketed beyond the end of the box. Yet, it works well, addresses an annoyance that every consumer has experienced, but, somehow the solution has remained unused, probably by most consumers.

Note that once you learn of this little push-in tab, you will probably look for it on the end of every box of roll goods you buy. You may wish to follow this discovery on the Web, search on Google for “press here to lock end”tab pushed in

A further example of hiding innovations comes from a customer advisory board meeting for the Albany NY region of a major telecommunications provider. During this meeting, attended by many major customers from health care, high tech, industry, and government, a number of customers said, in response to the comments of other customers attending, “They provide you with that service? I did not even know that they offered that!” Here were major customers of a large, successful telecom who were not aware of significant service offerings. Needless to say, this telecom learned that their marketing efforts were ineffectual and needed more work. If you current customers do not know of your product or service offerings, how could potential customers discover them?

Have you made innovations in your products or services but never told your customers about them? Do you make innovations without even involving customers? When was the last time you actually asked your customers what they like about your products? Have you examined how customers use your product or service? Do you have a formal process to gather customer feedback? Do you have a Customer Advisory Board to drive innovations?