I hear it all the time “Google Docs doesn’t do tables as well as MS Word”, “Google Spreadsheets doesn’t highlight the cells in an equation like Excel”, and the list goes on and on and they are right.
But.
They didn’t weigh the ROI on collaboration when they started complaining about functionality. It is pretty rare that we work alone these days. We leverage teams and the diversity that they bring to make the result greater than the sum of the parts. An online shared doc is an instant collaboration machine with no version control or collation nightmare and no waiting for someone to finish before the next person jumps in. It leverages the crowd.
Look beyond the features that are lacking and calculate the ROI on collaboration before you forgo cloud based documents, spreadsheets and presentations.
Robert Fritz has a simple approach to those difficult, emotion charged management situations that we would always rather avoid and we just wish they would solve themselves. Problem is they never do and if left, they fester and get even worse. His approach is so simple that once you get it and start applying it you have one of those “ah ha” moments where you wonder why I never thought of that.
It starts off by not avoiding the problem. Face it head on. Define the situation for what it is, no adjectives, superlatives, long stories or excuses, just the facts about the situation please. Once everyone has a firm grasp of the situation and they all agree, then, and only then, talk about cause. What caused this situation to happen?
You will be surprised as to how easy it is to determine cause once you take emotion, stories and the blame game out of a situation. And once you have cause nailed down it is pretty to easy to look at the list of causes and take them out 1 by 1 with corrections. Corrections that are actionable; a clear outcome, 1 owner and a due date.
And to wrap it all up every situation, cause and correction analysis needs a follow-up to close the loop on the execution. By when will you all come back together to review and make sure this situation is closed and behind you. Which by the way is one of the primary tenets of another favorite book of mine Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan. I especially liked the audio book as the authors read it themselves and you could just feel the conviction and years of experience coming from the words as they spoke them.
As always there are a allot of subtleties to the above and my summary doesn’t come close to doing the book justice The Managerial Moment of Truth: The Essential Step in Helping People Improve Performance by Bruce Bodaken and Robert Fritz – second hand news is just that, second hand, go to the source for the real deal. Hardly a week goes by that I don’t use this in one form or another.
Good leadership is really clear about where it is going, aligning goals and collating ideas, feedback and suggestions all while enforcing the rules of how everyone works together. It doesn’t careen wildly in knee jerk reactions to every complaint, criticism or failure. It has a firm and fair hand.
I think of it like a bus. Everyone knows the destination, knows it isn’t up for debate and realizes that the passengers have to adhere to the bus rules. And everyone knows they don’t have to take the bus if they don’t want to.
My bus rules or the way I like to work together include:
- We don’t “doubt” what can be done, we “wonder” what we can accomplish
- We have purpose, we don’t wander
- We respect each other, are polite but direct, honesty comes before diplomacy or conflict avoidance
- We are independent; we don’t need cheerleaders, hand holding or face time to make each other feel better
- We know time is of the essence and we never waste it
- We don’t quit and we never say “just tell me what to do” we instead say “I suggest we do this”
- We live for vibrant dialogue; we are passionate about our ideas but our egos are checked at the door
- We seek the truth and don’t make stuff up to make ourselves feel better when we just don’t know
- We can just as easily say we are wrong as we can we are right
- We’re never done – mediocrity isn’t in our vocabulary – we continually improve ourselves and our work
- We live to learn, learning inspires, doesn’t scare us
- We set the bar high to see if we can beat it, we don’t set it low to make it easy for ourselves
- We are mindful in everything we do, never mindless, if something becomes mindless we tear it up
- We work hard but never to the point of burn-out, we take our vacation and return recharged
Everyone should know where the bus is going, they should appreciate that the destination isn’t up for a vote – but ideas and suggestions are welcome, and they should take their decision seriously:
- Do they want to get on?
- Is it going where they want to go?
- Are they looking forward to the journey?
- Is there another bus they would rather take?
- Maybe it is time to take a breather and stay off the buses for awhile?
Or maybe all of these buses suck. It’s time to start your own bus! Where will it go? What will your rider rules be?
I want a leader who pushes me and everyone around me to do better – to raise the bar.
I don’t want them to give me excuses as to why I can’t do it, create long stories to rationalize my shortcomings, or make it so cozy that I just don’t mind missing my targets.
I want them to tell me clearly what the goal is, describe honestly where I am at, and then demand that I get rid of any discrepancy between where I am and the objective I have. If the goal is what I want then I’m going to be into it, I’m going to be inspired to be pushed to achieve it. If I’m not inspired and I don’t really want it then a true leader is going to push me to poop or get off the pot, so to speak.
This is leadership from my perspective. It aligns mutual goals and pushes all of us to achieve more than what we could without it. Too bad it is such a rare commodity.
Live within your means or spend money you don’t have on a gamble that could pay off big.
I’ve done both and my personal experience has been that I have always done much better slow and steady, living within my means. Despite how much I hate admitting it.
There is allot of truth to the expression “necessity is the mother of invention”. Sticking to what you can afford and letting necessity drive your creativity rather than creating by throwing cash you don’t have at something seems to always work better for me – and if it doesn’t work, it is so much easier to recover from.
I’m running so fast I can’t stop and talk to you. I have to get there right now and have no time for all your questions about where “there” is. Get out of my way! Coming through!
Too bad. Because they will probably run in circles before they find “there”, or run right past “there” and never find it, or run head down into a wall and not live to see “there” or worst of all get to “there” and realize it isn’t where they wanted to end up anyways.
Sound familiar?
We shut down servers and went SaaS (software as a service rather than software we install and maintain) to fully embrace the same model that we have moved our software products to. We felt we had to walk the talk and learn from our experience to be in the best possible position to continually improve the SaaS product that we provide (Rise Display Network). This didn’t start out as a money saving thing.
I just finished reviewing our annual fixed asset count and I am blown away by how much hardware and software is marked “No Longer In Use”. I cringe when I look at the total purchase costs. And when I add in the hire that we are about to make and the existing person we freed up whose job it was to maintain this IT monster I am real glad we decided to “Walk The Talk”.
Our move to an all SaaS (well almost, still a couple of things left to convert) has allowed us to focus on what we do best and to redirect the money saved into the value we create, not the administrative IT overhead that was a constant distraction. Why SaaS for us? To better understand all aspects of the software as a service model that we provide and it’s a money thing. We saved and are saving substantially.
If you find yourself cutting and pasting mindlessly just to get somebody to shut up and get off your back. Stop. Tell them you don’t get it, or their an idiot and they don’t get it. If after that discussion the work becomes mindful for you and you thoughtfully pursue it or they agreed it was stupid and you stopped. Great. Stay. Have fun. Enjoy. If not, quit. There is no point hanging out somewhere that requires and rewards mindless work.
Our fiscal year just ended in September. And like for most of us in business this wasn’t the easiest year that I have had to navigate through. Advertising networks dried up and customer bad debts piled on, revenue targets were missed, cost over-runs and missed deliverables proliferated.
But despite all of this we didn’t run, we didn’t put our heads in the sand, we looked at the situation for what is was and didn’t fool ourselves. From this honest, albeit painful perspective, we made tough decisions and adjusted. My thanks to Robert Fritz and crew for teaching us the importance of “reality”. Can’t recommend him enough and if you can’t get to see him in person do yourself a favour and read at least one of his books – my favourite is The Path of Least Resistance for Managers.
How did we adjust?
We restructured our SaaS company, repositioned the offering and lowered our cost base.
We parked a new company with a great product that was about to launch so that we could consolidate and focus our resources. Hopefully to be reborn before the close of this fiscal year.
We invested in our complete digital signage solution product and went looking to make acquisitions (more on that soon if all goes according to plan).
And it all worked. In the end revenues beat budget by 9% and grew by 47% over last year while our digital signage management subscriptions grew by 200%.
My hat goes off to my peers! What a year, what a turn-around.
