Julia's blog

The Keeper of the flame: the secret of the most successful CEO's

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 02:29:00 GMT

In my work I get to see many entrepreneurs in action with their teams. Over the years I’ve noticed how the most successful ones are always reminding their teams about ‘why’ they are in business. They really are the ‘Keepers of the Flame”.

A great example of this in action was a highly charged management team meeting I happened to attend a few weeks ago. The team were debating an important decision but within a couple of minutes the discussion descended into a complete and utter frenzy. In the middle of all this, listening, but slightly absent, was the founder CEO.

Eventually, and just before the most stubborn defender of the status quo got strangled by the just-off-the-plane-pom, the CEO coughed a few times, caught everyone’s attention and simply said “I just keep coming back to why we started this business.....”

And with those words the room quietened down, the discussion got back on track and eventually a good outcome reached.

I’ve seen this guy do it before. Whenever things go off course, an odd decision has been made or there is fiery disagreement, he never tells anyone they are ‘wrong’ he just gets them to look at the situation in the light of ‘why we started this business’ and they quickly work the issue out themselves.

So on that theme I have three questions for you:

Are you the “Keeper of the Flame” in your business?

If so, what are you doing to grow the next generation of flame-keepers?

If not, should you be the keeper of the flame?

If you are the “Keeper of the Flame” it would be interesting for you to see if anyone else refers to “why the business was started” when you aren’t around. If they do then you’re already growing the next generation of Flame Keepers, no work required!

If they don’t, it could be because they think it’s your story. If this is the case then I suggest you have a chat to a couple of your most senior people, explain why you use the “why we started the business” line and help them work out how they can use it as part of a story that feels right for them.

You might be reading this feeling that you have neglected your Flame a little recently. Fortunately it’s easy to resurrect it, (providing, of course, that you had a good reason for starting your business in the first place!).

Start by experimenting. The next time there’s a decision to be made suggest to the team that they “Look at this in the light of why we started the business”. Keep it up, at every opportunity be the “Keeper of the Flame” and see how you can reinvigorate the business by keeping the memory of “why’ top of mind.

The Daily Prioritization Technique - an easy way to improve efficiency and effectiveness

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 23:59:00 GMT

You don’t need me to tell you that time is our most precious resource. But in business we often don’t safeguard it very well.

Imagine if we looked after cash the way we looked after time? The monthly bank statement would be the size of the now defunct Encyclopedia Britannica, detailing pages and pages of tiny payments. And who would want to be the accountant trying to work out what it all related to? Not me for sure!

Of course it’s completely impractical to account for time in the same way as cash, but we can get better at helping our people spend it wisely in the first place. And one way to do that is to help individuals with their daily prioritization decisions.

“If it wasn’t alarming it would be funny”, said ‘Jim’ CEO of ‘Browns’, after he had experimented with the technique that I’m going to outline below. “I honestly couldn’t believe that half our people were getting their priorities so wrong, it was like they were working upside down. No wonder we were inefficient”.

Browns was a business that had grown quite rapidly in staff numbers and revenue but had a stagnant bottom line. Jim worked on a number of initiatives to improve the way the business worked. This is one that really seemed to make a difference, let’s call it The Daily Prioritization one:

For one week after the normal Daily Huddle (you do do one, don’t you?) Jim’s team leaders spent five minutes one-on-one with each team member :

On days 1 to 4 the team leader asked the team member to talk through the work they had on and in what order they were going to tackle it that day.
The team leader then asked the team member to keep a record of which tasks they actually did, and when
On days 2 to 5 the team leader and team member reviewed the time record for the previous day and discussed how the tasks had been prioritized
The team leader didn’t tell the team member how to prioritize the tasks but rather, asked them to explain how they had decided the order in which tasks were undertaken. And how they had decided which tasks not to do!

By the end of the week the team leaders found that most of the team members were making radically better daily prioritizations, simply because they were thinking constructively about what to do and when to do it.

A few team members did need a couple of extra pointers. And that’s because they misunderstood the relative importance of aspects of the business. These misunderstandings were quite consistent through the organisation so Jim then did a business-wide re-education program on the strategy and how the business made its money.

All up, it was The Daily Prioritization was quick and easy technique that got the employees at Browns using that oh-so-sacred resource, time, much better.

Have you got time to try it?

If you want to improve your bottom line, don’t overlook the simplest ideas

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 10:21:00 GMT

In a previous life I chaired an innovation committee. One of our roles was to filter ideas put forward by employees. We ranked ideas according to a number of criteria and a high score mean that the idea would move forward in the system and get ‘worked on’.

At the other end of the scale were the ‘small and insignificant’ ideas. On being given a ‘small’ idea to review we would, rather disparagingly, relegate them to ‘suggestion box’ and rarely give them a second thought.

Which is a shame, as it’s often the ‘suggestion box’ ideas that are the real gems.

I’m sure you are familiar with the ‘suggestion box’ concept. It’s a box put in a handy place (often in the kitchen area) where employees can drop notes of things that could be improved. Periodically the contents of the box are reviewed - and hopefully acted on - by someone in ‘management’.

The purpose of the suggestion box is that it’s an avenue to get ideas from ‘shop floor’ employees.These ideas are often regarded by the management team as minor because they relate to small matters of a day to day nature.

But it’s these ideas, and the problems they solve, that could just be the difference between efficient operations and profit lost through wasted time and silly mistakes.

I remember Marcus Buckingham (author and strengths guru) telling a story about a hotel that had high crystal breakage costs. The blame had been squarely laid at the feet of the kitchen workers for years until a new employee arrived. The new guy popped a note in the suggestion box saying that the dishwashers seemed to be shaking a lot. Yes the dishwashers hadn’t been properly fixed to the floor and the shaking was breaking the glass! It was an expensive problem cheaply fixed.

Suggestion box ideas can be great eye-openers. Sometimes they highlight processes that are a vestige from the past but seem to have no practical purpose today. Other times they relate to little day to day customer issues - not deemed significant enough by the employee to be raised through the usual channels but which often present a good opportunity when a senior-enough person actually gets to hear about it.

So my suggestion this week is to reinstate the ‘suggestion box’.

You need to do it properly though. Commit to reviewing the suggestions at least monthly, publicise the suggestions (so that others can be inspired to enter ideas) and always say how you have dealt with the ideas.

And never, ever, be disparaging!

What not to do in the face of competition

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 11:25:00 GMT

I’ve been reading about the evolution of the Early Learning Centre (ELC) this week and in particular it’s brush with the bad times.

ELC is a chain of educational toy stores which, over the years, has become something of a British Institution. You ‘re probably familiar with them as there are a number of ELC stores in Australia. I, being both English and a mum of four, am almost intimately acquainted.

As the story goes, the ELC was doing phenomenally well. They were the go-to people for educational toys and were one of the most highly regarded retailers in Britain.

As often happens when a business is doing a great job, ELC’s success made the educational toy market look very attractive: enter the competition.

ELC’s response to the new players in the market was not unusual. Rather than tackle them head on ELC decided to diversify. Soon the ELC stores carried an enormous range of other products including clothes and nursery furniture.

But the diversification was not a great success. ELC got so absorbed in it’s new business that it lost sight of it’s core. At the time a ‘turnaround’ team came in to save the company it hadn’t developed a new toy - the core of its business - for over five years.

It’s an interesting story that plays out in many small and medium sized growing businesses.

When you are a very small business you fly below the radar. You do a great job but because you are pretty small your business doesn’t look fabulously attractive. Yet.

The time does comes though when people wake up to the success that you are having, and, quite literally, they want to have some of it too.

This is when you start feeling the force of tough, and sometimes unethical, competition.

What course of action you take next very much depends on your individual circumstances. But one thing’s for sure. You don’t want to jettison the very thing that made you successful.

So if this sounds like the position your business is in right now, take a moment to remind yourself:

What made your business great?
What is your business best known for?
What is the ‘bread and butter’ of your business?

In other words, keep doing what you do, and do it well. Even if you add more product to the mix, keep on ‘developing the games’.

Is your profit low because you are doing too much?

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 00:08:00 GMT

Phil runs a medium sized business. Although top line revenue was good profitability was poor. Phil decided the business needed some new ‘growth initiatives’ to boost profitability.

So Phil and his management team locked themselves away for a couple of days with a pen and a flipchart to brainstorm new things the business could do.

Phil was delighted. At the end of the two days the team had filled twenty sheets of flipchart paper with new ideas. They bounced back to the office filled with excitement and enthusiasm for the year ahead.

The management team shared the very long list of growth initiatives between them - the eight person team had a total of 5 projects each. They acknowledged they were going to be busy, but were game to give it a go.

A year later the team headed off for their two day retreat in a somber mood. They had worked harder than ever over the past 12 months but profitability was still low and not one of the new growth initiatives had flourished.

The story of Phil is very common. Broadly speaking small and medium sized businesses suffer from having either no growth initiatives or way too many. It’s almost as though we do nothing of a strategic nature for ages and then rush to make up for lost time when the mood - or necessity - finally takes us.

The 20 page list of initiatives fails because all businesses have limited resources. It’s always better to focus those resources on just a few initiatives than to spread them across many.

Successful global companies know this - they have just three strategic priorities to Phil’s 40 - but smaller businesses like to run with many.

Although you may feel that you are hedging your bets by taking on a number of initiatives at the same time (on that basis that if one doesn’t work at least you have a stack of other ones that might) you are actually setting them all up to fail.

It sometimes helps to think of this like a fairground game.

At the fairground you keep adding weight to a set of scales and at some point the weight will reach the secret amount which is just enough to trigger a water spray and soak an unsuspecting passer by.

Each growth initiative is like one of these games. You keep adding resources until you reach the magic point when it triggers results.

The trouble is that you don’t know when the magic point is, and when you are filling lots of different scales, at the same time, with the limited resources you never have enough in any single one of the scales to get results.

Think about your business. How many strategic priorities are you working on? Cut it down to three. No ifs and buts. Just do it!

I make all the decisions in my business, but I don’t have time to make them well. Help!

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 02:57:00 GMT

A friend of mine runs a business, has done for years, and I know it’s not been an easy ride for him. He works long hours and is an incessant worrier. But the business has performed well, he makes a good living and the company has a great reputation.

Last week my friend was in a particularly dour mood. The reason? His right hand man of five plus years had had the ‘tenacity to ask for a payrise’.

I was surprise that my friend was so offended by the request. He’s always been a generous employer and I thought he would have been open to a talk about pay. So I said as much, and he retorted with a grumble that sounded like ‘it’s not about the pay”.

Feeling a little tenacious myself I carried on digging until I finally got to the heart of the problem.

It turns out that my friend is cranky with his senior employees. To be blunt he thinks his senior team are ‘a bunch of wimps who won’t take charge and make decisions’.

Probing a little deeper I discovered that my friend actually quite likes taking all the business decisions himself - though he’d never admit it- and that his frustration is more because he doesn’t have the time to make decisions properly.

The problem of course is that he’s never going to have ‘enough’ time. Not unless he scales down his business considerably. So my friend doesn’t have an option - needs to find a way to get his team to make some of those decisions for him.

So I set about finding out a little more about the senior team and why, in particular, they weren’t the decision-making type.

Thanks to a mole I have inside the business, the answers were quick to find.

It turns out that my friend, who socially is a gentle, humble chap - is Mr-Know-It-All in the business. He is heavily involved in almost every facet of the business, rarely gives his senior team any meaningful authority and requires everyone to seek his sign off on even the smallest matters.

So having had to get the OK on everything for years the team now simply defer to my friend on every matter requiring a decision. After years of being made to feel incapable of being taking charge the team are now living up to th low expectations.

So what can my friend do to remedy the situation?

The best place for him to start is by asking his senior team for some help. If he can bear to admit that he doesn’t know how to fix everything his senior team will quickly get back on board to help find the answers.

By showing his team that he’s not perfect they will soon love my friend again (we all love an underdog) and they will be fired up to help the business kick some goals.

The role of CEO is often said to be lonely. And it is if you can’t let anyone see you as anything other than perfect. But if you have a good senior team who you hired precisely because they are good at stuff that you aren’t, well then it needn’t be lonely at all.

Two of our departments are at war. Help!

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 23:41:00 GMT

Back when your business was small, it hummed. The different parts of the business all worked well together, the teams understood and respected each other, and they helped each other out.

It wasn’t hard to get the business to behave in this way. After all, the ‘head’ of inventory was the only person in inventory and he sat next to the ‘head’ of sales, who was also a one man band.

They were a jovial pair, laughs in the office, drinks after work. Of course they listened to each other’s issues and made sure that their ‘department’s’ activities supported each others.

But that was when the business was just a handful of people. Now you’ve got departments with whole teams, big teams. The ‘head’ of inventory really is the ‘head’ of a team, a team he works with, sits with, drinks with, jokes with and grumbles with.

He doesn’t see the ‘head’ of sales much. Not because he doesn’t like him, but because their paths don’t cross. Except for in management meetings, company days and work ‘situations’.

And there have been a few situations of late.

Depending on who you speak to, it seems that ‘Sales’ have been making promises to customers which ‘Inventory’ have then stuffed up. Or, as the opposition would tell it, that ‘Sales’ are making promises to customers without checking first with “Inventory” that the promises are possible.

The departments are at war. And it’s spilling over into the rest of the business.

If this is happening in your business then a radical, but stunningly effective, solution is to swap the heads of the warring departments round.

Yes, the Head of Sales goes over to Inventory and the Head of Inventory goes over to sales. Permanently (or if you can’t stomach permanent, at least three months).

I did say it was radical, and it’s not for the fainthearted. But if you are really committed to changing your business, it works/

The swap has the most amazing impact on the organisation. The swapped ‘heads’ bring new ideas into the departments, they learn better how the business really works, and they get almost instant clarity on how to solve the previous ‘situation’.

And you don’t have wait until you have a ‘situation’ to get the benefit of this. A manufacturing company I know swapped all the department “heads’ around in one fell swoop. After a month or so of, er, mayhem the business stepped up to a different level. It’s been on fire - in a good way - ever since.

How to use your start-up story to re-energise your established business

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 23:41:00 GMT

I often think that the most interesting story of a business is the one that tells the tale of why and how it got started in the first place. I've read many business biographies and have always felt quite attached to the businesses I've learned about, even long after the book itself is a hazy memory.

I remember reading the Cadbury story years ago. It's the tale of English Quakers searching to find an alternative to coffee and alcohol, stumbling across the cocoa bean, struggling to turn it into something tasty, initiating the concept of social welfare, making pots of money, being conflicted by wealth, giving wealth away and turning into a modern day business. Phew.

By the time I had finished reading I was not only devouring the chocolate but I was beating the drum for Cadbury.

We all love a story but we rarely tell our own. And in that we are missing a trick.

Once your business gets to a decent size and employs people that don't remember the start up days, you have a team who don't know your story.

They don't know why you got started, what you believed in, and why you persisted in business when the outlook was dour. They don't know how you felt and what you sacrificed. And they don't know why your business is so damn important!

So they seem a little indifferent to the business. Not as motivated or as excited as you would like. Certainly not as driven. All very frustrating. You've built this business, you do good stuff, yet no-one seems to care like you do.

You can fix it by telling you employees your story.

Using your own words and style of talking tell them:

why you started in the business
what motivated you
what 'wrong' you were trying to right
what you believed in
the struggle you had to make your first sale
the near-death experience when you almost ran out of money
the delight at taking on your first employees

and so on, and so on.

Hearing your story will be like watching a movie. Your employees will be absorbed in your tale of the underdog who makes good and they will be willing you to succeed.

And when your story finishes at now - the present day - your employees will be excited to pick up the baton and continue the race.

Try it!

Is a bit of sloppiness eating your profitability?

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 00:19:00 GMT

Years ago when coffee beans started getting expensive some of the instant coffee manufacturers replaced a little of the good coffee with a cheap substitute. At first they replaced just a few granules. Customers didn't seem to notice a change in the coffee taste, but the manufactures got to make it a little cheaper. Bingo!

Over a number of years the coffee manufacturers gradually replaced more and more of the good coffee beans with the cheap substitute until the point when a significant proportion of the coffee wasn't really coffee at all.

It wasn't a decrease in the number of existing customers that got the issue noticed. Existing customers were still buying plenty of coffee. The change in taste had been so gradual that they barely noticed.

But there was a chronic shortage of new customers. Young adults weren't buying coffee. It didn't taste good so they didn't get into the coffee habit.

It took a new coffee experience - Starbucks - to reverse the move away from coffee. And they brought coffee back by getting it to taste good again.

A similar thing happens in many businesses - although more by accident than design.

When a business starts out it does everything to the highest standard. Delivery dates are met, phone calls returned, customer issues investigated etc

Sooner or later, unintentionally, something doesn't get done quite right. A delivery, let's say, is a day late.

The business waits for the fall out. But nothing happens. The customer doesn't scream. The world doesn't fall apart. It's business as usual. Phew!

But because the missed delivery wasn't such a big deal the business starts to relax a bit. A few more late deliveries, no dramas and slowly the business changes. Instead of doing everything possible to get deliveries made on time, the business (or rather, the person in charge of that area) decides on-time deliveries are a 'nice to have' rather than a 'must'.

Eventually customers do feel a bit cranky but they accept that that's the way you do business. 'Always-a day- late' may become your nickname but it's not a big enough deal to make a fuss about. They don't tell you.

So does it matter?

Well existing customers are still buying so all good there. But they don't sing your praises any more, they don't refer you to potential customers and if a better option to you presents itself they are likely to go.

It's a silent problem and by the time it's noisy and you do hear about it, it's too late.Sloppiness destroys by stealth.

So what can you do?

A great way to identify sloppiness is to get a group of your oldest employees together and ask them the question "What don't we do as well as we used to?"

Employees love to talk about 'the good old days' and you will almost certainly uncover some gems. Recently businesses that I have worked with have identified areas such as customer calls being returned late, phones unanswered, late deliveries, short deliveries etc. All small things that go largely unnoticed by the management team but are large enough to make an impact with customers.

The good thing is they are easily fixed.

A clever way to help all your employees feel important and respect each other’s roles.

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 01:09:00 GMT

When your business is just a handful of employees it’s a fun team that understands what each other does and it hums with mutual respect and support.

But as your business grows and the team expands it’s astonishing how quickly you get to the point where some of your employees have only the vaguest idea of what their brethren actually do.

Of course all your employees have a title. Probably something along the lines of ‘Joe, Purchasing Manager’ and ‘Bob, Accountant’. But for the 99% of your employees who aren’t the Purchasing Manager or the Accountant, these titles don’t shed much light on the mystery of what ‘Joe, Purchasing Manager’ actually does; and the title never reflects the importance of the role to the business.

On the surface, the fact that employees don’t ‘get’ what each other does, might not seem so important. After all employees can’t be expected to be across the details of everyone in the business’s role.

But when employees don’t understand what someone does, and how important it is to the business, they can get quite antsy about the behaviour of their fellows. Water coolers become the scene for grumps about ‘that guy from accounts whose always nagging me for stuff’ and grumbles because ‘that chick at the front desk is always too busy to run errands for me’.

Groan. The actions always seems so obvious when you have a birds eye view of the business, but at ground level these misunderstandings create at disharmony, sometimes even mayhem.

So what can you do?

A fun and effective way to give employees a flavour of the significance of each other’s roles is to change the job title from the org-chart template description such as ‘office manger’ to something which wittily encapsulates the true importance of the role.

How do you do it?

1. Start by searching out a few titles that other business are using, this will help get you in the mood and set the scene. Here’s two to start:

Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg calls his office manager the ‘Anti-chaos engineer’.

Jack Daly urges people to call their receptionist ‘Director of first impressions’

2. Get your employees together in groups of about 10. Mix them up so there are a few people who know each other well and a few that rarely cross paths

3. Get each employee to tell the group what they do at work. Get them to use everyday language not business speak

4. Ask the group to think of newly worded job titles that suit the people in their group. Get the selection written down. Don’t worry about finding the title at this stage.

5. When you have suggestions for all employees get together with your management team and have a look at them.

6. Some of the suggestions will be perfect. And so they should be! After all they’ve been created by and for exactly the people who need their roles explaining.

6. But some of the suggestions won’t be quite right. And that’s to be expected because this is actually a much trickier exercise than you may at first think. It’s not just about thinking up funny titles - that would be easy - it’s thinking about ones that truly encapsulate the important of the role as well. Get your management team to rework the titles for the ones that aren’t yet nailed.

7. And finally, don’t forget yourself. You’ll be amazed (and possibly disappointed) at how few people understand the role you actually play in the business!

I know that sharing strategic plans with employees is encouraged, but do we really need to bother?

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 00:08:00 GMT

Last week I wrote about the benefits of sharing goals. This week it’s about sharing strategic plans.

If you’ve ever shared your strategic or annual plan with a large group of employees you may well have wondered whether you were wasting your time. Were your employees interested? Did they really care? Did the sharing of the plan actually make a difference to the organisation or is it, really, just a fluffy waste of time?

Actually there are good neurological reasons for sharing your plans.

The human brain is happiest when it’s operating in a familiar environment. When it sees a situation as ‘certain’ the brain moves into auto pilot mode and saves energy. This is not necessarily a good thing. While it enables you to do two things at once (drive a car while talking on the phone) it means you’re not really engaging your brain. So in business a ‘certain’ environment lets your employees coast - they do the job but aren’t attentive to it and they are present but not energized.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, a very uncertain environment puts the human brain into a state of alarm. When this happens the brain diverts energy from other useful tasks to worry on the ‘problem’, gets into fight or flight mode and releases a swathe of stress related hormones. The result of this is poor performance, a lack of focus, panic and bad decisions.

There is a middle ground though which is a great place to be. It’s when our brains perceive mild uncertainty; and when this happens we become energized, curious and great problem solvers.

In business then, our best place to be is in the position of mild uncertainty.

Uncertainty itself is not hard to find - there is a fair amount in most growing businesses; growth means change means uncertainty. But in the unlikely event that you do have employees in ‘coasting’ mode a little change to their environment will probably move them into the mild uncertainty zone and unleash their usefulness.

More concerning is that many businesses are facing significant uncertainty. No one knows, for example, how the European situation will unfold, nor its ramifications on local business. It may be a major uncertainty for your business but it’s not going to help you at all if everyone perceives it like that .

One of the best ways to move the perception of uncertainty from major to mild is to share strategic and annual plans with employees and to articulate how the decisions contained within have been made.

Of course employees know that things rarely go according to plan, but that doesn’t seem to matter. It seems that simply knowing that there is a plan in place creates enough certainty to get the brain into optimum mode for this uncertain world.

Should we be secretive or open about our 2012 goals?

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 02:49:00 GMT

December is a popular month for businesses to set or revisit goals. With a fresh new year on the horizon we are revitalised; in business terms our 2011 goals are all but done and we now have the opportunity to make good a less-than 2011 with inspiring goals for 2012.

An interesting question I am often asked in this regard is "Should we keep our business goals a secret?"

Businesses usually give two common reasons for wanting to keep their goals private:

The first, of course, is that if you don't let anyone know what your goals are you don't have to worry about suffering the ignominy of not achieving them. And the second is the notion that the less you make public about your business the more you protect yourself from unwanted attention from competitors.

But keeping your goals a secret is a big mistake.

Way back in 1961 Jean Nidetch accidentally discovered that publicly sharing goals is a very simple way of significantly increasing your chances of achieving them.

Jean was rather overweight and had enormous trouble sticking to diets. In a moment of despair she invited a group of friends to her house and told them about her weight loss goals. It was the birth of Weightwatchers.

Weightwatchers is famous for its meetings where, for those of you not in the know, would-be-slimmers share their target weight goal publicly. It is the goal sharing (rather than the diet sheets, special food etc) that is credited with getting the best weight loss results.

Many psychological studies back this up showing that a person's private decision to lose weight is often too weak to withstand temptation, but that a public commitment beats temptation hands down.

And it is the same for business goals.

When we take a stand that is visible to others - a public commitment - our subconscious brain is driven to making it happen. It seems our brains are wired to appear consistent to an audience that matters.

So when we share our business goals publicly we are significantly more likely to achieve them. We'd be daft not to share them.

But what of the fear that sharing goals gives too much information to competitors? It's a good point but, as we all know, the goal setting is the easy part, making it happen is the tough bit; and you aren't going to share your secret sauce for that.

Constrain your business and fire up your creativity

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 00:57:00 GMT

The human brain is a funny old thing and often behaves in unexpected ways. One of the surprises is that it is far more imaginative if it is constrained in some way.

The way it works is this. Every day the brain is subject to a cacophony of activity and if it didn't chose to ignore most of it we'd go bonkers. The brain works so hard on ignoring stuff that the rest of the time it has to be mega efficient. The result of this is that when the brain is asked to think about how to solve a problem it doesn’t bother digging too deep for a clever solution, rather it just grabs the closest answer.

But when you put an obstacle in the way of the brain so that it can't grab the nearest information it steps up a gear, and magic happens.

First of all the brain sorts through it’s impressive store of information and then it plays with it, matching seemingly unrelated bits of information in various permutations and combinations until, amazingly, a clever solution appears.

So how can you use this knowledge of how the brain works to improve your business?

Well think back to when you were a start up. You had no money, and (because you had few staff) little time. But you had to get going, you had to get your product ready and customers buying it. You had to make your business work on a shoestring or give up.

Can you remember the amazing results you achieved?

I recall a story of a start up that was trying to win a major bank as a first client. All was going well in discussions until the bank said they wanted to have a meeting at the start up’s premises. Problem, there were no premises! Undeterred the start up rented a small space, hired some furniture, gathered friends to be ‘employees’ and, well, when the bank came for their meeting they saw a fully functioning office and hired them on the spot. What a creative solution!

But when your business get’s beyond start up, when it has a (modest) amount of cash, available, and when there are more than a handful of staff, the obstacles to getting stuff done are less. So what does the brain do? It reverts to being efficient and it stops digging deep for those clever answers. Your business becomes less imaginative, less creative, less innovative.

So if that's the bad news, how can you get back some of that start up spark?

By imposing constaints.

The two most obvious constraints are time and money so you want to look at ways of making time frames tight, and be even more frugal on budgets. But the constraints need to feel authentic, not of the made-up-by-the-boss variety.

One way to achieve this authenticity it to promise clients that you will deliver to a tight deadline. This provides a genuine obstacle and your team will engage their deeper brain to achieve the timetable.

But the benefits don’t just stop there. There is a sort of hangover effect for your brain. By activating your deeper brain and reminding it how to use those neural pathways, it’s more likely to dig a little deeper the next time.

The brain likes obstacles, it likes to be constrained. Think differently - being short on money and time is not a curse for the brain, it’s a blessing

Is your business really innovative, or are you stuck in a time warp?

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 23:37:00 GMT

As a kid time passed pretty slowly but as an adult, well it races by without us realising. And it happens to businesses too.

When did you start your business? Five, maybe ten years ago? You were the new kid on the block, the exciting, innovative business, the one that was going to shake things up for your competitors.

Where are you now? Are you still energetic and nimble? Are you still creating new stuff and consternation for your competitors? Are you still a young-at-heart business?

Or have you slowed down a bit, become a little complacent, settled into the status quo and, even - dare I say it - become a little middle aged?

In the course of my work I've spoken to many businesses and few, very few, have admitted to becoming middle aged. That in itself doesn't surprise me. First up no-one wants to think their business has become a bit humdrum and secondly, it's easy to miss it. A business just doesn't have the same ageing indicators as their owners - birthdays, grey hair, wrinkles.

But it's very important for a business to realise it's getting middle aged, because it's a sign that it's getting stale.

So how do you do it? Essentially you want to hold a mirror up to the business, but until that's invented, the following technique works pretty well.

Ask three questions of the business:

What percentage of your revenue comes from product and services that you didn't have 8 years ago?
What percentage of your revenue comes from product and services that you didn't have 4 years ago?
What three significant changes have you made to the way that business operates behind the scenes ( for example technology and processes)

The questions are simple but revealing. You will quickly know whether you're business is moving forward or stuck in the past.

If your business is feeling a little middle aged, kick start innovation in your business. And if you are a young business - what are you going to do to ensure that the ageing process doesn't happen to you?

We'd like to put together an advisory board for our business, but who should we invite to be on it?

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 02:09:00 GMT

An advisory board can give your business a huge bost. But how do you decide who to invite on to it?

A good place to start is to articulate why you want an advisory board. ( Oh yes, if you want a quick recap about advisory boards - I have written about them previously)

In practice I find that there are many more purposes of an advisory board than a business initially considers. So,to help you think more widely, I recently asked a few businesses to be specific about what they get out of their advisory boards. Here is a selection of their responses:

Strategic insight - 'they help us see a different way of reaching our goals'
Industry insight - 'they provide deep, deep industry knowledge'
Accountability - 'having someone to report to helps us keep our commitments'
Challenge us - 'they ask the difficult questions which we are too close to the business to think of'
Connections - 'they have introduced us to industry influencers and potential customers'
Gravitas - 'they have added a much needed sense of seriousness to our young business"
Technical know how - ' one of our advisory board is a finance guru and he has given our finances a little more rigour'
Entrepreneurial wisdom - 'we've had practical help from someone who has been there before'
Risk management - 'they opened our eyes to a whole gamut of things that could wrong'
Enthusiasm - 'our advisory board are amongst our greatest fans and are great for a jolt of enthusiasm on a bad day'

Once you have a list of purposes for your advisory board (which -hint, hint - may look a little like the one above) you can do the following to fill it:

Write down the names of people you know who could fill one or more of the "purposes"
Asterisk any names that are "must haves", that is, people who you want on the board irrespective of who ever else may join. The composition of the board is important and the presence of an asterisked name may preclude someone else joining. An asterisked name may be, for example, someone who has been fulfilling this role in an ad hoc manner to date.
Look at the list of "purposes" for which there is no name allocated
Consider what sort of person (character, network, technical ability, background) could best fill that role
Ask your network if they know of anyone who who fits the description in (4) above.
Invite your asterisked people to be part of your advisory board. Discuss the composition of the board with them and ask them for help in identifying other board members
When you have a good list of names for the board start to narrow it down to your dream team. This is not an easy process but think, for example, who would work well together, who wouldn't, and who can be dispensed with because they are too similar to someone else

Of course this is only the beginning. You then need to scope out the workings of the advisory board (How often will the board meet? What outcomes are you looking for? How will the board be compensated?) and invite your chosen team on to it. But it's worth spending a good amount of time getting the 'who' right first.