Category Archives: Management

Brace Yourself. Success Brings Detractors.

Management, , ,

It’s funny — well, maybe annoying is a better word — how one of the so-called trappings of success is criticism. Get up in front of a crowd to speak, launch a website, develop and launch a product, start a business, and you’re in front of people. And that means you open yourself up to criticism. angry mob

I’ve been meaning to write about this since we talked about it together a month ago at Pam Slim and Charlie Gilkey‘s LiftOff 4 retreat in Portland. The subject that night was the negative thinking, the worries, the fear and the doubts that are part of launching a business. Somebody brought up this problem of dealing with critics. We talked about it, and agreed, basically, that it comes with the territory.

Reminds me of the cliche: If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.

What I like what my daughter Megan said in 5 things I learned From Haters, on her Part-time Perfectionist blog. This is point one of five:

If you have haters, it means you’re on to something. Think of all the cliches I can spout about this: the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference. All press is good press. Haters gonna hate. Trolls gonna troll.

Success generates detractors. Expect it. It comes with the territory.

(Image: Daliborlev/Flickr CC)

Never Do a Contract When a Letter Will Do

Management,

I admit I probably shouldn’t be posting this because I’m not an attorney, so I don’t give legal advice. This is just anecdotal, based on what I’ve seen in my business experience. Consult your attorney. I worked for years with a smart, honest business lawyer who — well, let me get to that later in this post. 

First, however, here’s what I’ve seen in several decades of running a business.

  1. Your should always get the specifics of a deal down in writing. They should be discussed, negotiated, agreed, and and signed. But that doesn’t often mean “a contract” negotiated with and by lawyers. A simple letter, and in many cases an email, is sufficient.
  2. The real purpose is getting an agreement defined well. Contracts are for special cases. In my opinion.
  3. I’ve never seen a contract end up with some judge or legal authority reading its details and deciding what gets done.
  4. I’ve spent excruciating hours, several times, working through the details in a contract full of formulas and hypothetical situations, none of which made any difference when the business relationships fell apart.
  5. In every one of those cases, we ended up in mediation. It all came down to negotiation at the end. The detailed contracts were just framing.
  6. I’ve several times failed to get a contract enforced when a big company was on the other side. “We don’t agree with your interpretation,” I was told in once instance. The unspoken challenge was “so sue us.”
  7. The real value of the vast majority of contracts is only the same as in a simple non-legalese written agreement in email or as a letter. It gets both sides clear on what they’ve agreed, and serves as a reminder later. And for that, you can get as much utility in a well-written non-legalese short letter as you do in an excruciatingly detailed contract. Do get it in writing. Do agree and sign. But call that a letter, not a contract.
  8. I’m not knocking contracts where they’re needed: employee-employer relationships, confidentiality, non-disclosure, consultant, programmer, author and publisher … these are usually boilerplate. They aren’t worked to death for each case.

This is just my opinion, and I’m a business owner, not a lawyer. Regarding the smart business lawyer I mentioned, he warned me more than once that spreadsheet and-of-contract formulas would be hard to enforce and would probably be moot anyhow, since disputes would most likely end up in mediation.

(Image: Mircea RUBA/Shutterstock)

Do Your Team Members Own Their Areas?

Management

I posted what you call management I call ownership last week on the Amex OPEN forum.  Here’s the gist of it:

… ownership might be the key to success in managing a business. I’m not talking about ownership as owning shares, stocks or percentages of a business. I’m talking about ownership as owning a job and caring about it. People who own their job care about it. They take pride in it. When their area does well, they’re proud and happy about it. And when their area does poorly, they’re worried about it.

I had two suggestions:

  1. Develop objective measures of performance
  2. Manage performance against plan

That’s on Amex OPEN if you want to read more.

Should Your Strategy Be Constantly Changing?

Business Strategy, Management, , , ,

I read Holly Green’s Shifting from Strategic Planning to Strategic Agility, on Forbes.com the other day. Ok, agile sounds good for a business. And the world does change rapidly, too. But what about this, from something I wrote about 10 years ago:

Better a mediocre strategy, consistently applied over time, than a series of brilliant strategies, changing rapidly, contradicting each other.

Is that no longer true? Here, in contrast, is Holly’s argument for strategic agility:

At its core, strategic planning involves a process of analysis. You do some research into what is and what is possible. You define a goal, break that goal down into manageable steps, and determine how to implement them while identifying the expected consequences of each step. It’s a logical, straightforward process designed to sequentially move the organization from where you are now to where you want to go.

The huge flaw in this is the assumption that the world is reasonably stable and somewhat predictable. Maybe a few generations ago. But anyone who has been paying attention the last few years knows that today’s world is neither.

That sounds reasonable as I read it, but in fact, I disagree. I don’t think strategic planning assumes that the world is stable and predictable. It does, however, assume that one core foundation of any strategy is your identity. It’s your uniqueness, what sets you apart from the rest of the world. That’s true for companies as much as for individuals. And that doesn’t change easily. You can change strengths and weaknesses only over a long time, and with a great deal of effort. So that part of strategy is relatively stable. And that’s a very important part.

Of course markets change, technologies change, and goals change; which is why the “agility” component is attractive. But strategic agility doesn’t replace strategy. I say good business strategy mixes long-term attributes with changing markets and focus, and of course it’s always a process, never fully stable. One element affects the other elements. It is never sequential. But strategy is also a matter of focus, understanding core identity, building positioning over time, and it takes consistency too.

What do you think?

The Vantage Point Problem in Growing a Business

Management

Have you seen the movie The Vantage Point? It was a suspense thriller, easy to watch, with an intricate plot, showing the same 20 minutes or so as experienced by six or eight different people.

As you can probably guess, what actually happens looks radically different through each different set of eyes and ears, not to mention location, and intention. I found it fascinating. Nobody gets more than a glimpse of what’s really going on.

I realized later that the vantage point problem is a real problem in growing a business. The view from different places — the owner, the receptionist, the programmer, the marketing person, the sales manager, the admin and accounting people — is all different.

How often is the sales people’s favorite customer the accounts receivable clerk’s nightmare? The marketing people see the product in a radically different way than the production people? What do you do, in your business, to get the whole view?

It’s Analytes Vs. Justdoers in a Battle to Business Death

Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Management,

In a darkened arena with a spotlight on a fighting ring in the middle, the crowd hushes as an announcer walks to the middle of the ring and announces the next battle.

“In this corner…” — his voice echoes through the arena — “… we have the analytes.”

The analytes can’t move without the numbers. They study. They research. In their world, answers are there for the taking, if you just do the numbers hard enough. You resolve uncertainty by looking harder at the data. Every problem has an answer. There is no uncertainty that can’t be resolved by further research. Their critics call it paralysis by analysis.

“And in this corner,” the echoing voice announces, “we have the justdoers.”

The justdoers trust hunches. They want action. For them, it’s all just guessing, so let’s take our best guess and get moving. They don’t worry so much about uncertainty because it’s all uncertainty, and the answer is to guess.

The justdoers drive the analytes crazy. “Come on,” they shout, “what are you waiting for? We’re going to miss the market. Let’s go.” meter

And the analytes drive the justdoers crazy. “That’s irresponsible,” they say, “we haven’t done the research.”

And, unfortunately, never the twain shall meet. I think the happy medium is somewhere in between. Especially with entrepreneurship and small business, I think you have to remind yourself to slow down and educate those guesses … and that you can’t ever study enough to eliminate uncertainty. The past doesn’t predict the future.

This difference in style is really significant. Each of the extremes makes the other extreme very, very nervous. We have the paralyzed vs. the loose cannons.

I’d like to think there’s a medium range in between the two extremes, where people understand that they are guessing, so they educate their guesses with practical research wherever possible, but they take only the right amount of time before taking their best guess and moving forward.

And I’d like to think I’m close to the medium, because I like to absorb the data before I discount it in favor of common sense. I hope the data affects my decisions, but only in a non-specific osmosis sort of way. And when in doubt, I know that it’s all uncertainty, so we might as well get moving.

Where are you on this scale? Where are your key cohorts? Are you compatible? What do you think: should everybody be the same on this scale, or is it better for a team if it includes a mix?

Can You Define Good Management Technique?

Business Mistakes, Leadership, Management, , , , ,

With due respect to some of the great thinkers who have, I don’t understand how anybody even tries to define, teach, or even predict good management technique.

Even if it’s just one manager and one person being managed, there are already three huge factors: the manager, the other person, and the situation. Both the people involved have their strengths and weaknesses and all that. And the situation itself, what’s going on, is an entire additional set of factors. Then there’s baggage from the past, and, well, it becomes an infinite problem. Higher math. Condemned to infinite case-by-case analysis. screen shot

I think about what I’ve heard about coaches in professional athletics. Sometimes a supposedly hard-nosed, tough coach will win the championship, and sometimes a supposedly “people person,” softer coach, will. And occasionally you hear about a coach who is either hard or soft to each individual player, depending on his sense of how that specific player responds. There too, though, with coaching, it’s a pretty complex problem, because it’s about the nature of the coach, the nature of the player, and the nature of the situation.

So too with wielding authority in your own business.

What reminded me today was Karen Hough’s Handling Tough Conversations in 3 Simple Steps, on Small Business Trends. She’s sharing data from interviews with more than 1,000 of managers in larger companies. She found that the hardest part of their job was “tough conversations.” Here’s a quote:

Conflict makes most people nervous, so we avoid having those tough conversations, even if we know it may produce a better outcome. A study of more than 1,000 project managers across 40 companies found that if project leaders were willing to break a code of silence, they could substantially improve their ability to execute on initiatives.

Although that study was done with middle managers in larger corporations, I know that it applies very well to small business and entrepreneurship. The code of silence is a reluctance to deal with poor performance, bad news, and negative feedback. It’s certainly a problem every manager has to face.

In her post, Karen shares is three-pronged strategy to break what she calls the code of silence, changing the motif from authority to coaching. It’s not a cure-all by any means, but it could help. And I wish I had a better solution to offer, but I don’t.

The Battle of Systematic vs. Case by Case

Management, ,

I’ve been dealing with this since I hired the first employees in my company and I still haven’t come to terms with it.  It seems like it comes along with being in charge, and can’t be avoided: rules and systems establish order and simplify processes, but they also cut into flexibility, and disempower common sense.rule book

As a business owner, or manager, you’re not going to win on this one. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Running a business is a constant stream of decisions. Do we buy this or that, do we change hours, what about customer returns, what about who signs checks … credit cards for some employees who travel? Beer on a Friday afternoon. And so forth. You know that.

The problem I’m talking about is that some people seem to live for carefully defined rules that cover every possible case.  And I always preferred general rules that empowered people to use common sense.

A snow storm is looming: do we let people out early?

A caller who bought an illegal pirated copy of our software on eBay for $10 is blaming us that it doesn’t work. Do we offer upgrade pricing?

If you try to guess all possible eventualities, in advance, and come up with the rules and policies for them, you go crazy.  But people are different. Not everybody wants to be empowered to make those case-by-case decisions. Some want only a set of rules they can follow without having to think about it. I don’t see how leaders and managers can accommodate both sides of this question. I never have.

Productivity is as Productivity Does

Management, Personal Productivity, ,

Work differs. The other day somebody told me about the problem of getting into some kinds of work. It went something like this (paraphrasing):

With computer programming it takes more time to get in and out of it. You can’t just stop to talk, or answer an instant message, and then continue. Interruptions make a huge difference. With regular management it doesn’t matter as much.

And that strikes me as true for several kinds of work. Writing a book, designing websites, and creating an original business plan are some things I’ve done that suffer the same need.

And management, on the other hand, is a hodgepodge collection of quick tasks and constant interruption. Distraction can be a problem sometimes, but it’s much more the rule than the exception. Emails and instant messages and quick conversations are the bricks and mortar of the management job.

In the concentrated content-creation work, interruptions are death to productivity. In management work, interruptions are the essence of productivity. I think I know: I’ve done both for decades.

A lot of us have the interesting problem of doing both. Is that you? Do you manage and create, as part of the same job? Lots of expert businesses, the bloggers, coaches, or consultants, are in that boat. Do you think you need to set aside separate blocks of time for writing, or other content work? Would it work to divide your day into pieces?

Company Culture Is What You Are Not What You Want To Be

Business Planning, Leadership, Management, , , , ,

I got this business plan question in email:

When you’re starting your business, does “company culture” have an impact in your business plan? Do you start your “culture” when the company is small and create one that will easily expand as your company expands. How important is that type of thing as you go forward (in picking your employees, in the benefits you offer, etc)

To me company culture is something that exists only when you’re not looking. It comes up a lot in articles and stories about business, but rarely in real life. Consultants see it. It makes some things easier, some harder. It exists,and it sometimes matters, but it’s not something you can grab a hold of.

While it’s important, it’s not something you can plan on and track. As you start a new company, and more so as it grows, company culture will be formed around the decisions you make. As more people come on board, your personal role in culture diminishes, and it ends up being a lot a matter of who you hired.

Company culture isn’t what you say nearly as much as what you do. Who gets the raise or promotion, and why; what happens at the meetings; what values you respect; and group dynamics. You can influence it, but not with plans or promises, just with actions. It’s all those decisions that you make, and, quite often, things as hard to influence as the expression on your face at random times.

The best positive example of company culture I’ve ever heard of was when Eli Halliwell of Jurlique told a group I was in how he built that company around values. It’s focused on natural organic cosmetics. Eli told a Princeton Entrepreneurship Network group that the common bond among his early team members was believing in the importance of the mission. He said that made the company stronger. But he didn’t refer specifically to “company culture.” And he didn’t imply that he’d set out to do that from the beginning. It sounded like he was saying it happened naturally.

I ran into big-time company culture in the 1980s when I was consulting with Apple Computer and the team I worked with established a strategic alliance with Xerox. I traveled with the Apple group to visit Xerox headquarters in Connecticut. The two groups were very different in management style and background, even dress, and the buzzwords and phrases they used. However, it was interesting more for curiosity value than anything else. It didn’t affect the business one way or another.

So it’s there, after a while, but it’s really hard to purposely influence. And I don’t think you do much with it in your planning, simply because it won’t work. It’s a lot like parenting: it’s what you do over the long term in all those collected moments of decision, not what you say. Trying to plan company culture reminds me of coolness as explained by one of my daughters when she was a teenager.

“Dads,” she said “are by definition not cool. And the more you try to be cool, the less you are.”

You may – just a chance, not a certainty – be able to talk about it later, when it’s established. But in your business plan, the most you can do is define the values you think are important. Then try to remember them every day from then on.