"Management is always the Problem"?

Dear Stomper,

Do you like surprises?

I do

But I bet that if you took a poll, most people would say No, don’t you think?

I was pondering this a couple weeks ago when I was hanging out with nine other people in the home of Jay Conrad Levinson, the father of Guerrilla Marketing, for an amazing three day mastermind meeting.

He was sharing the characteristics of great marketers – things like optimism, patience, and passion.

And I was continuing a mental riff I’d been working on, a lighter version of what Robert Persig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, called a Chautauqua.

Why is it that some people can hear a great idea, and make it happen? And other people, and many if not most businesses, seem to go from idea to idea, and absolutely struggle to execute – to actually get things done.

In a word, it’s “Mindset.” But that means several things at the same time. First, are you hard–wired to “strategerize,” like me, or do you self–identify as someone who likes to “get things done?”

Most people who build a business to a certain size tend to be good at getting things done. But when it comes to getting an entire organization to execute, so many companies seem to hit an absolute brick wall.

So there’s a talent, or hard–wiring issue. But once you’re operating with a team, it’s a whole different deal. You’ve got to get everyone pulling on the same oar, and it takes many different types of personalities to build a world–class team.

So second, they call it “Focus.” But focus on what?

If you’d not only like the answer, but a way – a System – to Track and Measure it, this week’s lesson, part 2 of 3, is for you.

What gets measured gets improved. And if you’re measuring and continuously improving on your Make or Break that we talked about last week, the one key thing that if you succeed will make all the difference, then you’re on your way to building a team, of any size, with a scalable system for world class execution.

The right System causes you to focus on “What matters most.” (As we observed the sage advice last week, “Do first things first, and do second things never.”)

So I hope you enjoy Issue #2 of the new Free Line Report.

Until next time,

Keep on Stomping!

Brad Fallon
CEO, StomperNet

“If you want to get rich, keep your eye on the ball.

And do not forget which ball.

It’s the one marked, ‘The money is here. ’ “

˜ Felix Dennis, poet and billionaire, in How to Get Rich

Killer Execution – Part 2 of 3

Last week, we talked about creating a culture of world–class execution. It should go without saying, but doesn’t, that if you want your organization to execute like a well–oiled machine, it’s not about “better project management” or “holding people accountable”, or any one initiative, like “performance–based compensation plans.”

It’s about implementing and using, week after week, a core system that automatically creates the proper culture for execution. The culture becomes all about execution – automatically.

Indeed, a rigorous focus on execution is the culture.

Though other aspects of the culture count, it’s hard to think of anything that’s more important than the ability of your entire organization to get the right things done…to execute.

And good or bad, if you’re at the helm of a business, what the business gets done is what your leadership is all about. If you can’t lead your team to accomplish its core mission, nothing else matters.

It may be nice to hear the band playing while the ship is sinking. But it’s still sinking, and you’re the captain. Worse, if your net worth and your ability to put food on the table are wrapped up in your business . . . you’re the captain who goes down with the ship. Ultimately, it’s up to you to lead the entire crew to get the right things accomplished – better, faster, and more effectively than the competition.

Real life isn’t like the simile of hidden icebergs, mostly sitting there quietly, minding their own business. In the real world, your competitors are piloting other vessels, actively trying to ram you into oblivion.

And it’s your job to make sure that doesn’t happen.

So make no mistake, for all the things leadership means, in your business it means getting things done. Executing like there’s no tomorrow, because if you don’t, there might not be.

As Sun Tzu wrote in 400 B.C., “Weak leadership will destroy the finest strategy – while forceful execution of even a poor strategy will often bring victory.”

That’s what leadership in business is all about – doing the things that enable, or cause an entire organization to execute on a shared vision. That’s why, as we discussed last week, your first job as CEO or the top of the food chain in your department, division or any other tribe, is to Articulate the Vision.

This week, we’re discussing your second responsibility: Drive the Culture.

“Management is always the problem.”

Whatever your culture is or isn’t, it starts at the top. As they say, “A fish rots from the head.” And if you want a culture of execution, according to large–scale execution expert, Dan Barnett, it’s simple.

If you want to move your organization from where it is in terms of execution effectiveness, here’s what to do:

• Step One: Make sure everyone in the organization understands what the Make or Break is, and why it’s important. (See last week’s Free Line Report to review this step.)
• Step Two: Determine the sequence of actions that create the value you want to create your Make or Break, called a Value Chain, and then measure and track the data for each action, and format the data in a consistent, weekly dashboard that everyone can see.
• Step Three: Drive the entire culture with your consistent “stump speech,” based on your overall vision, and two key manager weekly meetings that we’ll discuss next week. These two special weekly meetings (30–minutes each) are totally focused around your one Make or Break and, as we’ll see, the predictive data. As a result, you can implement corrective actions at the earliest possible moment, every week.

This Make or Break system is “simple” (just three easily understandable parts). Yet, it causes everyone in the organization to understand the overall vision and your most important objective – the “Make or Break.” What’s more, it effectively focuses everyone’s attention, week after week, on the entire organization’s progress vis–à–vis this fundamental goal.

And the best part is, once you’re tracking the proper data, that is, the steps in your Value Chain, the sequence of actions that create the result you want – revenue, profit, ecstatic customers, etc. – those are the actions that are in fact predictive of how you’re doing in terms of executing on your Make or Break. As a result, you’ll have the ability to, early enough to make a difference and correct the course, early and often enough to make a difference.

Pilot Your Organization Like an Instrument Aviator

While learning to fly a plane only by instruments, without being able to see anything except the panel in front of you, I learned something that’s very helpful when you’re steering a whole organization.

At first, you tend to move the controls like a pendulum. “Now we’re too high, push the nose down.” By the time you get your altitude where it’s supposed to be, and you level off, you’ve overshot. Then you pull back, and the same thing happens. You lurch from one course correction to another, overshooting, and disrupting everyone who’s involved in the ride.

For many business organizations, this “lurching,” erratic behavior is a way of life. And like so many things, we unconsciously accept that it’s just the way it is. As we discover we’re off course, of course we need to make adjustments.

In instrument flying, the key is to make very frequent, minor corrections. With practice, you develop a “feel” for where a movement of the controls is going to take you, eventually, so you let up before you actually see the result. And you don’t have to recover from your recovery.

Unfortunately, in a larger business organization, the actions you take today might not be “felt” on the bottom line for months.

And therein lies the problem: Most all of the financial reports that we get, such as an income statement, merely reflect the inevitable result of actions that were taken days, weeks or months earlier.

As a result, most business leaders are trying to fly their planes blind, with instruments that only tell them where they were several miles ago. When you’re trying to “stay ahead of the plane,” that just doesn’t work.

No wonder so many businesses fail to execute so badly.

Without a way to predict where we’re going to be from the actions we’re taking right now, in time to do something about it, as a pilot friend of mine once said, “We’re so far behind the airplane, we could take a picture of the crash.”

And if our quarterly profit and loss statement shows a crash, it’s far too late to do anything about it. The game, for that quarter at least, is long over.

The Value Chain: What Activities Cause Your Make or Break

The truth is, you need monthly financial statements. But you can’t run your Make or Break with them. You can’t drive execution with them.

If you really want to be effective – we’re talking world–class execution – you must develop your entire data dashboard around your Make or Break, and run your meetings and drive your culture according to it, week after week, month after month.

Next week, in part 3 of 3, we’ll learn exactly how to drive this ongoing, critical focus – with two key meetings that literally ensure that minor corrections are made, at the earliest possible to point, to keep everything on track. With the correct focus, the correct predictive data, and consistent follow through and instant corrections, your team, department or organization will fly circles around any competitor who’s flying blind.

What Gets Measured, Gets Improved

In aviation, one of the most common causes of fatal crashes is “continued visual flight into instrument conditions.” In other words, you need to be able to look out the window and see where you are. And when you can’t, you’re in grave danger.

To many business owners, this feels very familiar. Many of them simply accept, unconsciously, that their feelings of “blindness,” of being completely unsure of what they should be doing about a “sinking feeling” are unavoidable. They may feel the hair on the back of their neck standing up, but they’re not sure why, and they’re not certain of what they should do about it anyway.

The good news is that if you want to lead a business organization effectively, it doesn’t have to be that way.

Imagine what it would be like if you had a single dashboard of visual data that told you were you are right now, not with the ultimate result, but with regard to all the key actions that will cause the result you want, whether it’s weeks or months down the road.

That’s what tracking each step in the Value Chain of your Make or Break can do.

Simply put, the key to Killer Execution is to track the actions that predict success, evaluate that progress every week, and take corrective action instantly. As Felix Dennis would say, that is the ball marked “The money is here.”

Key Action Step for Week 2: Write Out Your Value Chain

So this week, here’s what you do:

Step 1 – Draw Your Value Chain

Get your whiteboard and your key players together, or sit down with yourself and a blank piece of paper, and write down all the actual activities that “cause” your Make or Break to happen. What are the physical activities that cause sales to happen, what are the physical steps that actually lead to revenue in your business?

Think about everything from your actual sales processes to staffing, working with sales reps or affiliates, creating new products, market segmentation, lead generation, traffic sources, front–end/back–end offers, cross–sells/up–sells, continuity billing, etc. Try to get it down to six or eight (or so) key activities, think about the order, and draw and label the series of rectangles to show the activities in your Value Chain.

Step 2 – Determine the Measurements to Track for Each Key Activity

Determine how you are going to measure each one of these activities. Keep in mind that you might have to think hard and dig down to figure out a way to measure certain things. Don’t give up, and you’ll often be surprised at how many things actually can be measured if you work through it. What gets measured gets improved should be your mantra as an execution–oriented leader. The corollary, of course, is that what isn’t measured, doesn’t improve. If you’re the leader, another way to say it is, “Your team members will respect what you inspect.”

As you do this, try to think about “ratios” or how certain numbers should be considered as a percentage of another number. For many steps in a typical sales process, each opportunity (site visitor/prospect – “traffic”) has a “conversion rate” that’s worth tracking.

For example, it’s not just “total opt–in’s” to your email list, but opt–in’s per 100 web site visitors, the ratio as a percentage. Or, not just “Number of customers who order twice or more,” but “Percentage of Second Sale Buyers.”

In other words, you’re trying to build the framework of a dashboard that you can view on one page of a spreadsheet. Don’t make people “do the math” or “connect the dots.” Make your dashboard do it for them, visually. Don’t just track your operating expenses. If you’re growing, it’s fine that they’re increasing, but track your overhead as a percentage of your revenue, and draw them on one graph. Ideally, you’ll see them going down, by percentage, even as they’re increasing.

Step 3 – Graph the Elements of Your Value Chain

There’s something magical about the “feel” you get for your business when you graph your key activities over time. As you look at your “flight instruments,” they’re only a snapshot, devoid of important context. But when you begin to graph and view your key ratios, and watch them week after week, you’ll have a develop a sense of exactly how you’re doing on the things that matter most like never before.

One tip: Always lean toward tracking anything as a moving average. You want to see how you’re doing, overall, above the short–term “noise” or ups and downs that occur in the normal course of moving organizations. A 12–month, or 52–week moving average will actually remove the noise, including all seasonality, and show you how you’re doing in two seconds. If the new line is pointing up, that’s good. If it’s down, that’s bad. (For more on this, read the chapter on Trailing 12–Month Charts in CEO Tools, by Kraig Kramers. And the rest of the book is great, too.)

So go ahead and take a run at plotting the Value Chain of your business. If you want to build a culture of killer execution, there might not be anything you can do this week that’s more important.

If you missed the call that Brad had with Eben Pagan the other night, it was great. The feedback we’re getting is that Eben’s Guru Blueprint program is the Real Deal if you’re interested in developing and selling information products for maximum prices.

Listen to the replay here:

http://www.gurumastermind.com/cd8/blueprint/teleclass_replay.asp

And the Guru Blueprint program is getting close to selling out, so be sure and check out Eben’s great video here:

http://affiliates.getaltitude.com/z/106/CD8/

No matter what you are selling, be sure to sell the RESULTS & People don’t want to hear about the ingredients, they don’t really care about how it’s made, they just that decadent chocolatey goodness they can just taste in their minds eye.

“If you really want to be with the people who are making the income online, and know what they’re doing, and learn how to market yourself on the Internet, StomperNet is where you need to be.”

-Jackie Tulos
TargetedLocal.com

Tell Us What You Think!

Copyright © 2010 StomperNet, LLC.