I read this book, and it was so good that I have summarized it for everyone!
Here are 10 bold steps that define gutsy leaders in relocation; thanks to Robert J. Herbold.
1. Devise a Demanding Game Plan to Confront Reality
You need to lay out a clear vision, develop aggressive strategies to achieve that vision and select actionable measures so that you know you are achieving the strategies. As the old saying goes “You can’t manage what you don’t measure”, so you must measure the vision to make sure the job is getting done, and also make sure that your strategies are actually helping to achieve the vision. If they are not, you may need to change them.
2. Staff For Success
You must maintain a high-quality performance appraisal system. This makes every member of your organization aware of his or her strengths or weaknesses, and maintains a track record over months and years that enable you to defend any decision to move poor performers out. You need to confront poor performance early, and you want to stretch and challenge your best people to prepare them for crucial needs when they arise. It is also advisable to move your people around every 2-3 years.
Use employee surveys to help determine, which managers are strong leaders and which are struggling, and in general to gauge whether you have the right team to achieve your game plan.
3. Clean Up The Sloppiness
You must keep systems and processes as simple as possible. The systems must be robust and not allow endless exceptions, but you also need to make sure they don’t become complicated and complex. Ideally, one person should be held responsible for each process or system, as sharing the burden makes it difficult to keep accountability. You want to have minimal layers of management with maximum spans (up to 8 people per manager?).
4. Institutionalize Tight-Fisted Cost Control
Keep any budgets under your control under constant pressure. Always be looking for ways to decrease cost to less expensive vendors or by outsourcing to another part of the world. Consider outsourcing non-strategic activities, but make sure to choose the right location for strategic activities. You must know your budget well, and you must kill obvious cost mistakes or unsuccessful projects as soon as possible.
5. Insist on Functional Excellence
You must maintain strong functional excellence in areas such as finance and accounting, HR, tax, general administration, etc. Functional excellence comes from driving simplicity, efficiency and effectiveness in the company through these functional areas. Not taking this seriously, or not having strong functional management that challenges business units can fragment the overall efforts of the company or put your company at risk. This means considering not only costs, but safety, worker health and general risk management. Staff in these positions should be tough and stubborn, principled and always strive for simplicity and be on the outlook for new trends.
Furthermore, operations should be given enough flexibility to operate on their own and not be too centralized. There should always be good focus placed on the projects operations is committed to; you don’t want to take on so many projects that there is no focus, Focused projects should be lead by your best people, but they should not further burden already burdened groups. Clearly define what the focus is and report it back often to your employees.
6. Create a Culture of Innovation
You must highly value Innovation. The book refers to “Commodity Hell”; that you never know when your competition is going to launch their next product that will drive your product into commodity hell and you end up competing on price only. To avoid commodity hell and everything depending on price, you need to continuously innovate ideas that make your products exciting and distinctive in the market place. You must communicate the goal of innovation regularly, you must encourage and inspire innovation and you must reward innovation.
Fresh thinking should be rewarded also. However, you do want to define success as being fresh ideas and excellence in execution and you should only reward innovations that have a measurable impact.
7. Demand Accountability and Decisiveness; Avoid Consensus
You should set clear accountability, goals and measures for innovation. However, you want to get away from consensus decision making. You need to clearly make certain people accountable for innovation; put one person in charge. Carefully define what success looks like and agree on the measurement of success, then keep the focus on impact not on internal politics. Some input you receive will be useful, other input could be just to protect the status quo or someone’s position, so you need someone accountable that can work through all of this. However, when you discover that something is not working, you must kill it quickly; once again, not with consensus decision-making.
8. Exploit Inflection Points
This is making use of opportunities that arise due to changes in laws, technology, etc. It is the ability to “trend spot” and find new ways to bring things to market or find an emerging customer trend. Be the first company in your industry to do things; make this part of your culture, and encourage early experimentation.
9. Value Ideas from Anywhere
Everyone should be on the lookout for ideas. Create a culture whereby ideas are shared from the top to bottom of your organization. One important part of collecting ideas is visiting and observing your clients to understand their likes, dislikes, habits and practices. You must understand your customer’s experiences.
10. Shake Up the Organization
In order to be innovative, your organization needs to be flexible and ready to change. You can’t afford your organization to become convinced that everything is OK and there is no need to change. So, you
- Shouldn’t let people get set in their ways- often you need to insert fresh talent to remedy stagnant situations
- Shouldn’t always make the obvious choice; surprise people a little with staffing decisions
- Should always try to evolve and encourage your employees to use new technologies or learn them, etc.
You need to continuously reorganize around your new efforts.
I highly recommend this leadership book;
http://www.amazon.com/Whats-Holding-You-Back-Leaders/dp/0470639016
