woman leader

Executive Calm - How do they do it?

I constantly feel that I am some kind of see-saw. One minute things are going great and the team is pulling together. The next moment, employees and customers are unhappy with each other. This usually pulls  at my emotions too. Yet, if I give in to it, then I am feeding the problem. 

How do I become a countervailing influence to get things on an even keel?  I try very hard to ask questions that get to the root of the problem. It is not always easy but I find that having something constructive work on helps everyone regain some normalcy. As their thinking becomes more balanced it is easier to get everyone moving in a constructive direction. 

Now if only I could see the problems coming and avoid them!!

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Cutting Corporate Corners: aligning vendors and customers

I am beginning to feel sorry for a lot of companies. Their shareholders and their customers have been beating them up for not lowering their costs. If they go overseas in pursuit of cheaper suppliers they run the risk of sweatshops or adulterated supplies. Judging what is happening with peanut processing in Georgia, now they can stay home and get those same adulterated goods. 

So the big question is - what responsibility does a buyer have to police the sourcing and processing of its vendors? How far into someone else's factory and books should they go?  

The answer is probably that regular visits to vendors are a good thing. It is important to know if your vendors values are aligned with your customers' values. The only way to know that is to visit both. Things can change, so periodic visits are probably a good ides. 

Now, will someone please find the time and staff when jobs are being cut right, left and center to do this?

Marketing to reach the next gold mine

It has dawned on me, contrarian that I am, that 2009 is a marketing gold mine if I only knew how to capitalize on it.  I genuinely believe that there are significant opportunities, that there are some fundamental changes happening right now, and that they are not all negative, just different.

For years I wrote business plans, so I understand business plans and financial forecasts. But recently I have come to realize that we need to have a more cohesive marketing plan. There are just so many ways to spend our scarce marketing dollars. So I am now attempting to create a marketing plan and feel hampered by the fact that my last marketing course was many, many years ago in business school. Things have changed a little since then.

So how do I reach people with what I see as the new way forward?  How much is strengthening our internet presence, how much is public speaking? (and how do you get those gigs anyway?) Should we spend on print media or some package of all print and internet? Google Ad words? virtual exhibits, blogs, newsletters? It is a scary world out there.

The most basic question though is how do I convey the real us to the world that needs to know us?  

I hope to know more shortly.

how to find good board members

I never realized how difficult a challenge finding board members could be. If you are doing it correctly, you want someone who does not think the way you do and has a different background than you do and expertise that is different from what you already have on your board. This pretty much rules out your friends, the friends of your friends and the people you already work with.

You could go to a headhunter but search firms usually work only for the biggest of companies. Many searchers go through their lawyer or accountant, but that leaves the searchers in the same circle that they already run in. It scarcely comes as a surprise to anyone that most boards look very much the same, because the searchers have been unable to break out of their degrees of separation to find the "think different"  people they need.

I was reading recently a book called Fierce Conversations by Susan Scott. In it she describes the Beach Ball phenomenon.  This means that each of us stand on one color of the beach ball looking at the same spot but from a different location. If we don't stop to understand the point of view of the others we lose a lot of the perspective that we want to gain.

The challenge remains that finding someone with that different perspective is hard to do.

In my recent attempts to find new board members, we  determined what skills we were looking for and constituted a committee of two to do the interviewing. We were fortunate to know Toni Wolfman at the Boston  Club who has a great rolodex, offered us several options and allowed us to pick several relevant  resumes. Toni also contacted the ones we liked to see if they were interested in return. While not everyone was as interested in us as we were in them, one of the contacted actually took it upon herself to look through her own rolodex and introduce us to candidates we would never otherwise have met.   

We have spent countless hours reading resumes, interviewing people, selling the opportunity of our business and evaluating the expertise and collaborative natures of the people we met.  We have not filled all the knowledge base we would like to have on our board but we are substantially closer and have a far stronger board than we would have had, if we had gone the usual route. 

It can be done.

The Day after the Night before

Our economy is based on consuming more and when we stop doing that we have a hangover. 

Right now, we have a hangover. Everyone agrees. We have consumed too much: too much housing, too much credit, too much designer goods. And it sounds like many of us are going on a diet.  The problem is that some of us were living clean lives and not over-consuming but they are on the diet too. And others do not have to diet even though they consumed more than anyone else.  No one enjoys a diet and some diets can be very painful.

Before we get into fairness, let me remind you of what I used to say to my children, "Life is not fair. If it were you would be shorter, stupider, uglier and poorer. Remember the starving children in......"

How do we make life fair? What obligation do we have to create a social safety net for "those but for the grace of God go I?"

I know that I will have to make trade off decisions between spending on my perceived needs and the needs of others.

For the next three months, we will listen to American politicians tell us how they plan to make it better. One side says higher taxes; the other, lower.  I wonder if they ever have to make those personal choices. 

Maybe we will get lucky and it will become fashionable to under-consume. Everyone will out do the other to wear last year's clothes and drive beat up cars, like old time Yankees from New England. Of course, that might not please the manufacturers of clothing or cars.

So, what is the right basis for keeping on a decent diet that enables us to live a little better and not go overboard?

I wish I knew or that someone would give me a clue.

transformational change

I was reading an article the other day on how dirty oil leaking up from the ground in Pennsylvania came to replace the nice clean burning oil that whales were good enough to produce. It started, as these things do, with a a decrease in the local supply of whales which led to whaling ships which led to increased whale consumption and increased whaling fleets until the market tumbled. In 1846 whale oil was $.88 a gallon. in 1866,with a 700 ship fleet of whalers, whale oil was $2.55/gallon. By 1900, the whale ships numbered 75 and the price of whale oil was $.75./gallon because an alternative fulel had become available.

http://knowledge.wpcarey.asu.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1663

Last week I was reading an article about when reindeer were introduced to an island in a number that experts thought was sustainable, the number of reindeer on an island rose past the sustainable level to consume all of the available food. This led to a quick and substantial decline in the number of reindeer and the number subsequently remained below the sustainable level.

This then reminded me of the story a friend once told of giving up alcohol because he could not control his consumption. He did the same things with another substance until he chose a cleaner life.  He then became addicted to running until he hurt himself doing that.

So I cannot decide if, as a country or people, we are going to imitate the oil transformation, the reindeer transformation or whether we are just addicted to hurting ourselves in the long run in pursuit of short terms highs. The good news is that my friend pulled himself back, said "I am an addictive person and I will control this, now that I recognize it."

What do you think?

Strategy map & Balanced Scorecard

I have been working on our company strategy map. This a really cool and visual way to see where the company is trying to go. 

Most people start with the goal of making money or increasingly profits. But the really hard part is putting it in simple visual terms how you plan to do that and what are the steps below to accomplish it. Down the left side of my page are the Financial goals, followed by Customer Outreach, Internal Development and Sharing/Support. Going across we have three goals in each line except in the top where our only other goal is improving our cash flow. Some are obvious like expand market share. Some are less obvious like build a culture of safety, collaboration and performance. Each line feeds the one above and everything ultimately comes down to the culture of the company and improving the people who staff the company.

 I am now trying to ally this one page with a balanced scorecard.

On the Balanced scorecard I have 7 columns with headers such as Strategic Theme, Objective, Measures, Targets, Initiatives, Resources and Milestones/Risks. Each of our 11 objectives on the Strategy Map is a theme on the Balanced scorecard.  I am not sure I can fit it all into my boxes. But it helps to have the measure, target, initiatives and resource requirements next to each one so that we can constantly reevaluate what we do in light of our strategy.

The challenge is to keep it simple so that all employees understand, not to create extra paper work. I would love this to be a living document, not something that gets visited once a year at budget time. One thing I have noticed is that it helps me personally focus on what are the important things and what might not be so important -such as writing this blog. It gives me greater clarity in aligning my work time.

I would love to know if others have tried this.

Wall Street: price or relationship

Do you buy on price or do you want a relationship with your supplier?

Most people say relationship and complain about the lack of it. The truth is they buy on price because they boast about the best price they get, not the best relationship they have with their supplier.

When I was in corporate banking years ago, it moved from being all about relationship to being about the best price.  Now the price people (traders) have come to dominate the banking landscape. Price is short term, here today and gone tomorrow, with only the hangover left to remind us.

So let's talk about the intangibles of price and relationship. I listened to a guy talking last year about how his Chinese supplier of containers for his products (cosmetics) had started with a great price advantage but had deteriorated so far that his landed cost per usable container was now the same as his US supplier and he the customer did not have to worry about shipping time from the US supplier. My guy was shopping strictly on price and had forgotten that he needed a steady reliable supplier. This is not a slap at the Chinese supplier, because he knew that price was everything. He was just trying to make the price better each time and still make a profit. The Chinese supplier did not realize that the US customer cared about quality or about having enough usable containers on hand to satisfy his needs because that was never mentioned.

Then I was thinking about one of our customers who took a prototype machine from us which worked badly for their application. After threatening to drag it into their parking lot, they supported us while we worked to make it right for them. Now they let us bring prospective customers into their plant to see the machine they bought from us run. There is nothing in it for them to do this, It is part of a relationship.  They worked with us through the bad part and into the good. They were demanding but realistic. They hung in there. We support them.

Now remember, our machines are not a commodity: they are complex and customized for a specific application. This means that our customers want to be able to pick up the phone and get support from us. They cannot just ask the guy down the street, although each customer probably know as much or more about their machine as we, who built it, do.

Somewhere out there Wall Street is still living in the price, like the Chinese supplier, and has forgotten that a relationship with their customers and employees might serve them better in the long run. They sold on price, took the money and reduced the quality until we investors realized how bad it was. If we had demanded a relationship, it might have served us better, since we will be paying for all those expensive mistakes in the form of  reduced credit availability and higher interest rates for quite a while to come.

I think more and more highly of relationships, those that support us and those we support. We need the thoughts, insights and support of our vendors if we are to provide value to our customers.

Where do you weigh in?

weeding

I have been doing a lot of weeding in the noon day sun recently. The weekends have been hot and that is the only time I have for weeding.  I am not sure if this makes me a mad dog or an Englishman but it does cause interesting thoughts to crop up in my mind. 

Years ago I was told that a weed was a vigorous plant in the wrong location. Weeds clearly grow better than the flowers and vegetables I plant but they have to go, so that what I planted can do its job. They are especially vigorous in my vegetable garden. Last Sunday I had a couple of piles of weeds two feet high. (YES, I had weeded there once before this year!) I have discovered that weeds are good imitators. They are very good at having leaves similar to the plants you put in nearby. For instance, there is this creeping vine with strawberry plant like leaves. It spreads like a strawberry plant and it runs amuck once it gets going. And it tends to hang out near my strawberries. Clever weed!! Whoever said plants aren't smart?

Then a friend called me. She has a problem employee. The problem is that the employee is not really bad, but she is not good either.  She is taking up space that other employees could fill better and stifling them in the process. I was wondering if the employee was like my strawberry-like weed - a good imitator who is taking up valuable space and not doing the job that needs doing.

I realized that in order for the good plants to do their job well,  I need to weed, fertilize (organically, of course) and mulch. And I have to do it at work as well as at home. 

 I just wish I could transplant the weed to a better location for it and me. I guess it will have to find its own home or be my compost.