New Blog site for In-Synk

I have a new blog site that is part of my website.  Go to http://www.in-synk.com/blog/

All my previous posts have been loaded up there.

Thanks for following me

U of Memphis has a chance to TopGrade the Department and Football Program

Dr. Raines take note:  This is an opportunity to TopGrade your Athletic Department and Football Program.

Take one important step before hiring your search firm and creating a search committee(both things that need to be done).  It's the first step in "TopGrading" an organization.  Write a scorecard for the positions of Athletic Director and Head Football Coach.  Not a job description, a scorecard.  When one writes a job description, one lists the duties and responsibilities for the position and hope a great outcome is delivered.  With a scorecard, you define the desired outcome for the position, the results the person will deliver if  you hired the mythical, ideal candidate (an "A" Player).  Then work back to define the attributes and activities and skills needed to deliver the outcomes.  And the support needed by the university to help win.

Then start compiling your list of candidates based on the scorecard, not just personality or ties to the school, or alumni influence.  You hire the best match of candidate with what you can afford to spend.  The scorecard then becomes the plan of action for the department or team.  Both the university and new hires know their part of equation for success and can be held accountable to it.  Forward progress ensues.

So Dr. Raines, if the outcome you want for your department is major conference membership, and a solvent program, define what a new AD has to do to deliver the outcome.  For the football coach, define the acceptable level of winning, and the type of players you need, and the kind of victories you want.  Hire the people who have the experience, and core values to deliver in the reality of the situation right now.

Give the scorecard to the search committee and search firm and ask them to follow it, it's your TopGrading plan.  Don't hire anyone that doesn't have what it takes to deliver the outcome you want, not matter what his background is.  If you don't, your candidate will end up in the trash heap, just like Tommy West and Larry Porter, and Rip Scherer....And it won't be his fault. 

You have a chance to turn this around and make a real difference in future of the University of Memphis. 

TopGrading is a strategy that winning organization use on to get the right people on the bus, in the right seats, doing the right things to succeed.  It works.  It's hard. But it's worth it.

Call me if you want to make TopGrading a practice that drives your growth and success.

Executive Improvement Day at the Growth Summit

Day two at the Gazelles Growth Summit.  Different tone for today.  Personal improvement.  Worked hard.  Lots of improvement to be done. ;-)


Todd Klein author of Built for Change.  He worked on ideas for having courage to face change.  Companies and their leader have to be Unconventional, Structural(more on this later) and Aspirational to face the changing world.  Not all the companies he studied were new ones, not all were tech companies.  Studied the gamut.
--Fearlessness.  It's a myth.  The companies that navigate change are risk adverse.  The take calculated risks, based on this key Question.
--List five things that you know about your customers that we know better than our competitors or our competitors don't know.  The answers reduce risk and give courage.
--Irreverent:  Myth that they break all the rules. They set different rules and follow them. 
--What industry metric do you measure regularly for no good reason?  Stop tracking it. (example:  Zappos doesn't measure call time to keep calls short.  They reward 4 hour call center calls.  They brag about them.)
--They measure employee fun, not employee satisfaction.  Count informal interactions.  Proxy having fun.
--Detachment: Another myth.  The lonely executive at the top figuring it all out alone.
--They are proactively Inactive--Schedule down time. Disciplined about taking time to screw up.  And work the front line.  Produces insights:  (Bezos of Amazon packs boxes in the warehouse for a week every year.  Not as undercover boss either.  To clear his head.
--Schedule an offsite to do something. In the next ninety days.
--Process Another myth.  They only "process" what they can control.  Not what Goliath does either.
--This is called synthetic creativity.  Create boundaries for just a few important ingredients for success and get out of the way. 
--Find one thing you can do tomorrow that you enables someone with half your experience to do a portion of your job with 2x the outcome.
--Banish Small Thinking  Reality not a myth.  New ideas are fragile.  They protect them from small thinkers.  Let them incubate. 
--Long term planning at these firms go three layers deep. 
--Is there a customer advocate in your firm?  Not a customer service rep.  Someone responsible for reporting how your customers are doing overall, not just with you.  Then how we are doing.
--Universality.     Can a single word capture the universality of your business.  Trust, Self Confidence. 
--Mine is Clarity or Forward Progress
--Appetite for Destructions A myth.  They are not crash and burn people like Chainsaw Al. 
--But they are willing to sink the boat if they have to (change the model, turn things upside down) to compete.
--If you were fired, but could hire hire one person to come with you to eviscerate the firm, who would that be. 
--Meta Lesson:  Sustainable Transformity is difficult to do without Passion.  Hard to sustain passion.

Sally Hogshead--How to Fascinate--7 triggers to Persuasion and Captivation
--She has developed a model for determining the aspects of your personality that you use the best to persuade others.
--Problem solving model as well as a way to gauge your own persuasiveness strengths and capitalize on them
--Seven triggers:  Power, Passion, Mystique, Prestige, Alarm, Rebellion, Trust.
--Has a neat free assessment.  I recommend you take it.  Go to www.SallyHogshead.com and click on What is your F-Score
--I found it very interesting. Can you guess my primary and secondary triggers and my dormant trigger.  I'll buy lunch for the first person in Memphis who gets in right.  I was quite surprised.

Travis Bradberry: Emotional Intelligence 2.00
--Really reinforced for me that all of us need to work on being more aware of our emotions and those of others.  Being good at this only helps your succeed.  58% of ones performance is tied to emotions yet only 36% of us can accurately identify the emotions as they happen.  And we let them control us.
--Those with average EQ outperform those with highest IQs 70 % of the time. 
--His book has an assessment with it, similar to Strengthfinders 2.0.  The assessment tell you where you stand on your emotions and recommends three strategies in the book for improving your EQ. 
--I'm going to buy the book and take the assessment.  You should too. 

Rabbi Barr next.  A rabbi comedian. funny message about this.
--Teach people how to think about their problems and they will solve them.
--One other nugget.  "When you meet a couple who says they don't have problems, they will be divorced shortly."

Greg Crabtree:  Simple Numbers, Straight Talk, Big Profits.  
--Finally, an accountant who understands building businesses.
--Two Great Metrics to use to make sure cash flow grows. GP$/Labor$  and GP$ /Management$
--The denominators are total labor expense and total management expense.
--Think of them like the NFL Salary Cap.  Will help you focus on profitable business only.

Writing this in the Atlanta Airport.  Great summit.  Make plans to join me at the next one in Atlanta.  The Gazelles Leadership Summit May 15-16.  Jim Collins is the Four Hour Keynoter. 

I'm exhausted but refreshed at the same time.  See you soon.
-
 Travis

Notes and Quotes from the Gazelles Growth Summit

My quick video summary



Details:  

From Youngme Moon, author of Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd
--99% of Business leaders think their product offering is different, yet most regular people(their customers) have difficulty seeing any difference.  Products seem the same.
--Ask yourself this questions:  if you went out of business tomorrow, where would your customers go and would they even miss you?
--There is no formula for being different. But every differentiated brand does the following:  Says no to many of the benefits their competitors offer, and offers many things (saying yes) their competitors would never offer.
--Great case studies:  IKEA and Mini Cooper.
--They turn negatives into personal positives for the customer.  Their competitors turn positives into negatives
--'Different' brands provoke friction, an emotional reaction that focuses the customer's decision.
--Deliberately push away groups of customers--not for everyone.
--The negative is where the "gold" is.
--Too many companies pay too much attention to competitors, ending up duplicating them
--Customers can tell you what they want, but can't really tell you how to be different.  When they tell you how to be better, they are telling you how to copy competitors. That's why this is hard.
--Different and crazy look the same when you start.  Give crazy time to incubate before criticizing it.
--Passion plays a big role in being different.  Makes you mystical.  It helps to have a culture of passion to be different.

Daniel Pink, Author of Drive:
--What most of us "know" about motivation is wrong.  Based on Folklore and Intuition.  Not Science.
--What we do to motivate our people actually hinders their motivation and hurts your business.
--If/Then compensation works well with repetitive mechanical like work.
--Works horribly with even Rudimentary Cognitive work.  Most work today requires at least Rudimentary Cognitive Skills.
--If/Then compensation says to the employee that this is no longer their work and hinders creativity
--You must pay fairly.  If compensation violates basic fairness the motivation game is over.
--You must pay people enough to take money off the table as a motivator.  When they aren't worrying about money they will think about their work and perform much better.
--Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose are the motivators. 
--Management is a technology from 1850.
--When you ask people to describe their best bosses.  They say  "High Standards, and They game me "Freedom" to do the job.  Not "He hovered over me and watched everything I did."
--Autonomy can be synonymous with Accountability
--Mastery--Getting better at things is very motivating. 
--Annual evaluations are awkward kubuki style events.  Don't measure progress
--You must increase the metabolism of your feedback.
--Purpose:  Help people understand their contribution and the difference they make.
--Spend 2x more time on why than how.
--Sales commission:   Higher base with profit sharing always works better.  More collaboration.  Customers like it better.  See them as agents not sales people.
--People are not slightly taller, less smelly, biped donkeys, why do we treat them this way?

Alan Miltz--See my previous blog post from Monday.  Covered the same material.
--But the key question is are you borrowing to fund growth or pay for waste?

Alexander Osterwalder--Business Model Generation.  I've got to get his book.
--3 things business people don't do well 1.  discuss their business model.  2. Design their model. 3 Test them before they build them.
--He advocates the business model canvas.  Draw the picture of it to discuss it and design it and test it.  www.businessmodeltoolkit.com
--The temptation to quit comes right before your model starts succeeding.

Looking forward to today:  And then coming home. 

Lots of Learning Today--Here's a summary of the best ideas from the Gazelles Growth Summit Coaches Day

Feel like someone opened the top of my head today and poured in a bit too much knowledge.  Lots learned today, that will take a few days of digesting.  Looking forward to sharing it when I get back.

On building community.  Three elements have to exist.  Members have to be authentic, have to feel safe, and have to serve each other.  This begs a question.  Are you building a community with your organization?  When you build one, you move faster.

We spent lots of time learning about strategy.  Here are some quotes that resonated with me.
--Many companies "had" a great strategy, but lose it along the way.
--Strategy = Tactics in Context
--The executive team gives me good information, but the charts tell me the truth.  (a quote from Alan Muhlally of Ford, explaining why he uses dashboards.
--Opinions are the most dangerous data in business.
--Strategy=choosing what not to do.
--Performing operational excellence is not a strategy. Can't be sustained.  Can be copied.  Leads to the "seduction of streamlining" which is a trap.
--Strategic Planning = Strategic Thinking and Execution Planning

--We had been operating in a Supply driven economy prior to 2007.  For the first time since WWII we are operating in a Demand driven economy. 
--We need to discover profit pools--they exist. 
--Define a list who you are going after.  Have sales report on who they have gotten off the list buy landing them, instead of finding new clients.
--Consider having sales people call in every day to report on their funnel.  Record it and don't make them do reports.  The technology exists to do that.
--Jack up Marketing
--Sales people's degrees are in partying.  Marketing people's are in history, physics and math.

Innovation is a dimension of strategy.  Hot, sexy word right now.
--Have to have a design attitude right now. 
--We reviewed different Strategic Frameworks that drive Innovation.  Too much to share in this blog.  But loving it.

--Spent time with Kevin Daum, of Roar, learning how to use humor to enhance messaging. 
--Look  forward to sharing with you a video I'm having made to explain what I do and the outcomes you get from coaching.  It's funny.

And I won a coaching award from Gazelles at the dinner this evening.  Living a Gazelles International Core Value.  "For the Good of the Order"  Very humbling to win it. 

Revenue is vanity, profits are sanity, cash is king.

I'm at the Gazelles Growth Summit this week in Phoenix Arizona.  Sharpening my axe. 

Spent a half day with the other Certified Coaches yesterday afternoon.  Spent a good two hours working teaching the People Decisions of the Four Decisions(tm) Model.  Great session.

The the insight I want to share this morning is from the next session.  Cash Flow: Blind Spots in your Financial Dashboard.  Alan Miltz, a cash flow thought leader was the presenter.

Banks look at your ability to service your debts.  Period.  Do you have or are you generating the cash to cover your obligations.  You should be looking at your business this way as well.

You can improve your cash by revenue growth, or better management of assets, or both.  But must American business owners get lulled into the revenue growth only, and don't manage the assets and end up borrowing 40 cents on the dollar to generate 30 cents on the dollar in revenue growth.  Bad formula.

One other interesting insight from Alan.  A client of his outsourced his inventory from China, almost crippling his Cash Flow.  He thought, mistakenly, that the higher margins due to the lower cost of goods would deliver higher profits, which it did.  But killed his cash.  Because he had to hold more inventory, eating up cash, and he had to pay the Chinese for the inventory upfront before they shipped, eating more cash, creating more debtor days.  And he though he was doing well.  (another reason to question the almost automatic move to outsource suppliers overseas).

Looking forward to more insights from Alan later in the week, as he is doing a keynote later in the full summit.

More tonight, the night after, and the night after than.   

The importance of identifying and moving "Rocks"

Final post in a series of posts on "Moving Rocks."  I'll be covering this in depth at the next In-Synk Huddle.

At the risk of sounding repetitive, here goes:

Finding and moving your rocks is super important to sustainable growth.  In the past, many of us achieved organic growth or "rising tide" growth.  We had a pretty good product and processes to support it and we executed.  And we grew.

Anyone notice that the economy is flat.  And will probably be that way for the foreseeable future.  With a few exceptions, most growth will have to come at the expense of competition.  Riding the tide is not really an option.  To get the competitive advantage needed for growth, you have to find the rocks that will sustainably move your forward the furthest.  And then the next one, and so on.

The biggest trap in this is mistaking "Weeds" for "Rocks."  You still have to pull the weeds.  But weeds are not Rocks.  Got to get to the Rocks and move them.