Category Archives: Management

Business Owners: Are Your Ex-Employees Your Enemies?

Management, , , ,

Goodbye in mirror bigstockphoto 8510869

If you own a business, check your business culture: How does your business feel about people who leave the team to take a different job? What about people who leave your business to start their own business? Are they your team alumni? Do you wish them well? Do you take pride in their new successes? 

Of course ongoing businesses generate ex-employees for lots of different reasons. People move on, get better jobs, and change. Teams break up. People evolve and needs evolve. 

Ask yourself this: Are ex-employees more likely to be enemies or friends of the business? Do you see a trend? What does this tell you about your management style? 

(image: bigstockphoto.com)

How To Consolidate All Your Blog Posts From Different Sites to One Site

Management,

(Edit note: Eight years later, Rebelmouse still exists and is going strong. But the free site described in this 2013 post is no longer available.)

Problem: how do I consolidate my blogging into a single site? I post here on my main blog, but also on Up and Running, smbplans, gust.com, Huffington Post, Entrepreneur.com, SBA.gov, and elsewhere. For a while we had an employee building a database of links.

Tim Berry blog post site

Solution: Rebelmouse. That site consolidates all my posts, pretty much in the order they come. And it happens automatically. I have the RSS feeds programmed into the site so that when a new blog post is published on any of them, it automatically shows up on my consolidated blog site (that’s shown in the illustration below).

That’s done with a new Rebelmouse feature that lets me take a blogging site and set that to be a Rebelmouse site instead.

Although Rebelmouse does a lot of different automatic feeds, like the classic Twitter and Facebook steams, in this case it’s just RSS. What I love about this is how my new posts show up automatically. I just do the blogging and the site refreshes itself.

Is Yahoo!’s ‘Come Home’ Policy Save the Buzz or a Buzz Killer?

Management, , , , ,

Last week Marissa Mayer, new CEO of Yahoo!, issued a memo telling employees they aren’t to work from home anymore. Starting in June. Apparently a lot of Yahoo! employees are unhappy about it. So the confidential memo was forwarded to media. Often. (click here for the memo at AllThingsD.)

Marissa Mayer CEO of Yahoo Huffington Post

According to David Heinemeier Hansson, partner at 37 Signals, in No more remote work at Yahoo:  

What this reveals more than anything is that Yahoo management doesn’t have a clue as to who’s actually productive and who’s not.

Sad. Yahoo ruled the web-search world in the middle 1990s, in the days before Google. It’s been through a lot. And Marissa Mayer has a great track record in the industry. And maybe she needs to pull things back together. But is this one going to work?

The memo proclaims the reasons for keeping together: 

From Sunnyvale to Santa Monica, Bangalore to Beijing — I think we can all feel the energy and buzz in our offices. To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side.

But this is 2013. The world is flat. Productivity isn’t a matter of keeping seats warm. Productivity needs leadership, motivation, metrics, accountability, and — especially as companies grow — management. Managing expectations and feedback. 

The buzz that followed the memo was far from the energy and buzz in Yahoo! offices. It was much more the buzz from disgruntled employees. Kara Swisher reported in her piece in AllThingsD:

The tone and tactics have infuriated some at the company. Wrote one impacted Yahoo employee to me: ‘Even if that was what was previously agreed to with managers and HR, or was a part of the package to take a position, tough … It’s outrageous and a morale killer.’

This reminds methat larger companies struggle with structure and the management they require. I’m glad the business world is splintering into smaller units, much more individuals, much more freedom. What do you think? 

A Conflict-Free Organization is Near Death. Really?

Leadership, Management,

I saw an interesting post on Inc.com last week, with a title that was hard to resist: A conflct-free organization isn’t great. It’s near death. Hmm … there’s one to think about. It was posted by “serial CEO” Margaret Heffernan. 

Margaret had spent a day at a Centre for Effective Dispute Resolution in London. Here’s the key point: 

The big problem with conflict isn’t the conflict itself but the fear and anger it invokes when left unresolved. Most people are afraid to wade into an argument because they don’t feel confident they will be able to manage it, and they’re afraid they’ll become embroiled in something they can’t control and are unlikely to win.

The solution to that, of course, isn’t to keep avoiding the problems. It’s to train people how to deal with conflict effectively, calmly, and fairly. Yet only about a third of managers have any training in coping with conflict of any kind.

The headline bothers me a lot. Granted: Sacrificing ideas, progress, change, and solutions to just to avoid conflict isn’t good. But conflict isn’t good either.

And I question the research. Margaret writes:

In a Roffey Park survey, 57% of managers reported that “inaction” was their organization’s main method of conflict resolution, and cited “avoidance” and “pretending it isn’t there” as a regular course of action. Sound familiar?

Yes, it does sound familiar. Sounds to me like middle managers forced to interrupt their busy day to take a survey enjoying a passive-aggressive revenge with their answers. 

Come on, it was a survey. Do you think the respondents told the truth? 

Here’s my favorite way to avoid conflict: Talk about the ideas, the problems, the issues, the opportunities, and don’t personalize. It’s an idea or an option, not Ralph’s suggestion or Mary’s. Watch your tone. Keep your mind open. Listen. They are ideas, options, problems, but not people. 

Maybe it’s a bit like physics, with conflict like friction, and friction what happens when things move forward. A friction-free vehicle would be really cool until you tried to steer it. 

10 Ways to Be Smart in Business Discussions

Advice, Leadership, Management
  1. Listen. 
  2. Look at the eyes of the person talking. 
  3. Don’t be thinking about how to interrupt and make your point; absorb that person’s point first. change your mind
  4. Keep your mind open. Smart people don’t win arguments; they gain insight. Let your argument go. 
  5. Acknowledge points made by others. Absorb those points. Get them. Get them before you try to counter them.  
  6. Understand counter examples. If somebody says trees lose their leaves in the fall then pine trees are a counter example. Counter examples can narrow or disprove a point. The can be logically significant. 
  7. Understand analogies. One of my favorites is “paying somebody to write a business plan is like paying somebody to exercise for you.” Analogies can shed light on a subject. They can also be off target, and not apply. 
  8. Question the assumptions. Make them explicit. Ask about underlying or hidden assumptions. Help to get people into the right context.  Question them if that’s appropriate. 
  9. Never be shy about asking what you don’t know. “I’m sorry, I don’t know that term” makes you smart, not dumb. Lots of businesses develop their own insider acronyms and forget that nobody else knows what it means. Don’t assume that the term you don’t know is a commonplace term and you should have known it. 
  10. Change your mind sometimes. Often. Smart people listen, think, acknowledge, and, learn. They have open minds. And open minds will change when they absorb new ideas and new angles. Changing your mind makes you smarter. 

Gratitude is Good for Your Health

Management

Tomorrow is the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States. It’s supposed to be about getting together and giving thanks.

My contribution to the Thanksgiving holiday is to recommend a Google search on the correlation between gratitude and health. It turns out that there are indications that being thankful is good for us all. It’s good for our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health.

Of course that’s not just for today, the holiday. That’s all year.

And here’s my picture for the Holiday, a view of the cliffs in Zion National Park.

Zion National Park

(Note: I’ve posted this before.)

3 Ms for a Dragging Strategy: Map it, Manage it, and Milestones.

Management, ,

Here’s a good suggestion: Map your strategy to get the best results. That’s a post by Karen Keller, an executive coach. She makes three good suggestions for this situation: 

So what do you do when your strategy doesn’t seem to be working the way you think it should? You need to take the time and find the right direction you want to be heading.

She suggests three conceptual mapping tools: a strategic map, a compass, and landmarks. 

I like the metaphor because it fits the real world of management and planning process. The plan is like the map, tracking and metrics and regular reviews and revisions are the compass — tells you what direction you’re going — and milestones are landmarks. The milestones, like landmarks, tell you where you are. 

For more on that, my summary of strategy, planning process, and milestones. 

Pop Quiz: Do You Know How to Start a Business Plan?

Business Planning, Management, , ,

People often ask me how to start a business plan. Sometimes I’ll say it depends on you, your preference, and your style, so some people do a sales forecast first, some do a vision statement. But the right answer is that you start by scheduling your monthly review and revise meeting. That’s by far the most important first step. For everybody.

Each year, as you get ready to publish the next year’s plan, schedule the plan review meetings. Use some regular meeting schedule such as the third or fourth Thursday of every month.  All the managers committed to the plan will know way ahead of time so there are few reasons to miss a meeting.

Some excuses will come up. There will be events like trade shows or client events that some managers have to attend. However, with a preplanned schedule for review meetings, these problems won’t happen that often.

If your planning process includes a good plan — with specific responsibilities assigned, managers committed, budgets, dates, and measurability — then the review meetings become easier to manage and easier to attend.  The agenda of each meeting should be predetermined by the milestones coming due soon, and milestones recently due.  Managers review and discuss plan vs. actual results, explain and analyze the differences.

At Palo Alto Software, we review coordinated milestones once a week, Tuesday mornings, in about 20 minutes.  The monthly plan vs. actual review includes financial results and other measurables — product milestones, support calls, sales events, etc. — and takes just two hours a month.

It doesn’t take that much time, but there is very little in management more valuable.  It makes your plan a planning process.

This is one of the core concepts of my Plan as you go business plan method. 

(Image: bigstockphoto.com page of the calendar) 

Understand the Critical Difference Between Ideas and Opportunities

Business Planning, Management, Starting a Business, , , , , ,

Ideas are a dime a dozen. Opportunities are much more important. An opportunity is an idea that’s passed the test of planning. It has potential. You can implement it. An opportunity has some of the following elements:

  • Industry and market potential: look at market structure, industry structure, growth rate, margins, costs, etc.
  • Economics: capital requirements, fixed costs, cash flow, return on investment, risk.
  • Competitive advantage: degree of control, barriers to entry, availability of sufficient resources.
  • Management team: people who know the industry, the market, the operations, the logistics, the road to market. filter_istock_small

The business planning process is about filtering the opportunities — a precious few, requiring focus, and planning — from the ideas.

Whether you’re working on a new start-up business or growing an existing business, you need to encourage lots of ideas and then use your planning to filter them down into the real opportunities.

Remember displacement … recognize that you can’t do everything. You want your plan to help you focus in on the best opportunities among your longer list of ideas.

There is no external meter of good and bad opportunities. What you’re looking for is the right mix between business potential and your ability to reach that potential, given your position, core competence, strengths, weaknesses, and resources.

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