New Episode of Jack & Suzy Welch's Show at Domino's Pizza #IEB

I just finished watching the latest episode of Jack and Suzy Welch's new reality show called It's Everybody's Business. This episode is focused on helping Domino's Pizza brainstorm ideas to grow their business.

One of the things I like about this show is that it gives an inside look at how true consulting should take place. Jack and Suzy do a great job framing the issues and helping the team clarify their direction. As the old joke goes, "a consultant is someone who asks you if they can borrow your watch and then tells you what time it is." But that's not always a bad thing. If a consultant can be the catalyst to help a company clarify their priorities and take action on the things they already know, they're worth much more than the high fees they charge.

I'm a consultant now but early in my career I had an experience that made me hate consultants initially, but appreciate them in the end. I was a business unit IT project manager in the call center organization of a Fortune 500 direct marketer and manufacturer of personal computers. We were growing rapidly (from $800M to $8.8B in top line growth in the 6 years I was with them) and need our call centers to keep up with the growth. Our team was responsible for the processes and technology needed to make this happen. The challenge was that management wasn't listening to our ideas on what needed to happen. Then they brought one of the top 5 consulting firms in to help us define what we should be doing to plan ahead for this rapid growth. This firm brought in a bunch of rookies straight out of college and had them interview all of our key players in the call center IT group. Then they proceeded to package up our ideas (the same ideas we had previously been trying to sell management on) and present them to our management team. Of course, the proposal was approved once it had the firm's stamp of approval.

Looking back at this experience, it became clear to me that the consulting firm served an important purpose. We couldn't sell our ideas on our own. What the consulting firm did was add a "credible" outside opinion to the decision process and helped us frame the issues and clarify our direction. Ultimately, this helped us get the approval we needed to do what needed to be done in order for the company to continue it's rapid growth. That was worth every penny the company paid the consulting firm.

So watch the episode and then take a look at your own organization and ask yourself if there is clarity on the priorities and if you're getting traction on achieving those priorities. If not, perhaps you should hire a consultant to help jump start the process.

Enabling Opportunistic Tactical Decision-Making

Does your company capitalize when a market condition creates a significant short-term opportunity? Recently, big box retailers missed 2 opportunities in the NW:

• Power Outage: Two winters ago, the Seattle area was hit with a storm that took out power in the whole region for 1-2 weeks. Generators were sold out immediately and nowhere to be found until power was restored 1-2 weeks later.
• Heat Wave: Last week, the Seattle area had record heat. Every big box retailer in the area had sold out of portable ACs on the first day of the heat wave. The guy at Lowes said they had 60 people lined up at their door at 6am for a shipment they received of 35 generators.

In both cases, by the time the catalyst occurred, it was too late to capitalize on the opportunity. Only 13% of homes in the NW have AC. My guess is they could have sold a several thousand portable ACs if they had them in stock. Not bad in these tough economic times.

First, what triggers can you proactively put in place in your company to capitalize on short-term opportunities like these? Second, what policies do you have in place that would allow regional management to make decisions quickly to act on these opportunities?

CEOs Define the Framework for Decision-Making

Recent Post from Peak Portfolio 

Decisions are made at all levels of an organization, spanning short-term tactical to long-term strategic, unimportant to critical, low-risk to high-risk, simple to complex, and common to unusual.

How does a CEO improve and influence the full range of decision-making at all levels of their organization? The wrong answer is for the executive to insert themselves in more levels of decision-making. Instead, CEOs should focus on defining the framework for decision-making. The framework should clearly define the criteria (objective and/or subjective) that will be used as the basis of a specific type of decision.

For example, in the May 2009 edition of the Harvard Business Review, A.G. Lafley, CEO of Procter & Gamble, describes the following decision framework used to determine which business(es) they should be in: 1) Structural attractiveness of the business: low capital, high margins, and relatively high growth, 2) P&G’s leadership position relative to its competitors: global sales and market share, and 3) Strategic fit of various industries with P&G’s core competencies and strengths: consumer understanding, brand building, innovation, go-to-market capability,and global scale. Instead of evaluating each decision on a case by case basis, the decision framework helped P&G improve their decision-making for all future business portfolio decisions.

Reduce Input to Increase Decision-making Output

Recent Post from Peak Portfolio 

I was listening to Leo Babauta's interview of lifestyle design expert Tim Ferriss and something Tim said caught my attention. He was talking about all the different sources of distraction competing for our attention and that he found he could write more productively if he eliminated the possibility of distraction. In other words, he reduced the input so he could produce more output.

This can be applied to decision-making as well. Instead of getting caught in a reactive decision-making mode, executives should delegate all the small and medium impact decisions to their middle managers. By reducing or eliminating the continuous incoming flow of small and medium impact decisions, an executive frees up the time and mental bandwidth to focus on the high impact decisions. This increase in focus on high impact decisions should produce a greater output for the organization, assuming the right decisions are made (but that's another post).

Take an inventory of the decisions you make over a period of time to see if you are spending too much of your time on small and medium impact decisions. Then ask yourself which of those decisions you will delegate to your middle managers? By delegating these small and medium impact decisions, you will free up your time to focus on the high impact decisions and at the same time give your managers a chance to hone their decision-making ability.

Create a Culture of Decision-Makers

Recent Post from Peak Portfolio 

I once worked with a technology executive who was an exceptional decision-maker. She worked her way up from developer to executive within a decade in a rapidly growing Fortune 500 company. Because she had worked at all levels of her organization, she knew as much or more about how things needed to be done as anyone in her organization.

Unfortunately, as often is the case, a leader's greatest strength can become a weakness within their organization. Because she made all decisions for her organization, she didn't allow room for her directs to grow their decision-making skills and experience. What she ended up with is a team full of influencers. That's not a bad skill to have but the problem with this is that influencing another's decision doesn't include any accountability in the outcome. Improving decision-making skills requires experience making decisions along with accountability for the outcome

How well are you developing your future leaders in terms of decision-making? Are there decisions that you are making that could be made at a lower level in your organization? If you let your team make decisions, you will learn who your high-potential leaders are and gain new opportunities to coach those who have room to grow in their decision-making. This will create to a culture of decision-makers and lead to success well beyond your leadership of the organization.

Don't Underestimate Small Decisions

Recent Post from Peak Portfolio 

Look back at the most significant decisions you've made. Then ask yourself: was the impact of that decision clear when I made the decision? If you're like me, several small decisions led to opportunities that you couldn't have predicted at the time you made those decisions.

Small decisions often lead to significant change and impact. On the other hand, not making a decision will only lead to the status quo.

The take away is to improve your decision-making skills and then make decisions, including the small ones. A decision may appear to be small and insignificant but, as we've just discussed, the impact may be more significant than you know at this point in time. Therefore, give yourself a reasonable time frame to make a quality decision, based on what you know at the time, and then make the decision.

Additionally, don't let your big decisions crowd out the small decisions. If you're an executive, you can't afford to make all decisions, big and small. Therefore, educate your management team on decisions that should make it onto your plate and decisions they should make promptly themselves. In a future post, I'll be discussing how executives can create a Decision Framework to improve decision-making at all levels of an organization.

Would you Rehire your Staff?

Recent Post from Peak Portfolio 

If you had to fire your entire staff and a week later you could hire them all back, would you? Additionally, would you hire them into the same positions? If the answer is no to either question, why haven't you already taken action?

A common investing/trading tactic is to sell all of your holdings, regardless of whether you're up or down on the investment. Then decide whether to buy the investments back at their current prices. This enables you to look more clearly and objectively at whether the expected future performance justifies the investment at its current price (without factoring in past performance). Often, investors hold on to an investment that is down because they don't want to admit they made a bad investment. I've been guilty of this myself. You convince yourself that the best approach is to wait it out and hope the investment eventually turns around. But ask yourself, would you would be willing to acquire more of the investment at its current price? If the answer is no, you're holding on to the stock for the wrong reason. The objective decision is to sell anything that you wouldn't be willing to buy today at its current price.

Why not apply this same logic to your hiring decisions? If you wouldn't hire one of your staff members today, knowing what you now know about them, why are you holding on to that bad decision? As a manager, your most important decisions are hiring and firing.

2009: A Year to be Bold or to Circle the Wagons?

Recent Post from Peak Portfolio 

While in 2008 everything connected to housing and finance suffered, in 2009 everything connected to consumer spending will suffer due to job losses and the damage done to the consumer's financial situation in 2008. So what is the appropriate strategy for business in 2009?

• Circling the Wagons: This approach includes taking a defensive posture with actions like hiring freezes, layoffs, eliminating overtime, reducing hours, reducing layers of management, closing facilities. In short: contracting and protecting what's leftover.
• Making Bold Moves: This opposite approach means making bold moves with actions like acquiring businesses, putting price pressure on struggling competitors, adding value while holding prices, or investing in organic growth. While this strategy could be the end of a company low on cash, it may be the perfect time for companies with strong balance sheets to be bold and use their cash advantage to gain new markets and market share on their competitors.

While it's prudent to circle the wagons during tough economic times, cost cutting and contracting your business can also be taken too far and do too much damage to the future prospects of the business. I recommend taking a balanced approach of circling the wagons where possible while at the same time making bold moves in the areas that matter the most.

Evaluating Project Managers

Over the past 16 years, I've had the opportunity to interview for project manager roles, be evaluated as a project manager, hire project managers, evaluate project managers, and coach and mentor project managers. Through this experience, I've learned that it is very difficult to identify a great project manager without first seeing them in action. I've read hundreds of resumes that had all the right titles, big name companies, and marketable projects only to be let down during the interview. I would find out that the candidate wasn't the lead PM, didn't manage the project end-to-end, or wasn't really in charge of driving the project and making it a success. So how does one size up a project manager? I've found it helpful to focus on a project manager who is balanced in experience, knowledge, and soft skills. It takes knowledge to have the right tools to manage a project, it takes experience to know which tools to use, when to use them, and to what extent, and it takes soft skills to navigate a project through a corporate bureaucracy. Here's the list I like to use when evaluating or coaching a project manager: PM Experience Some people just focus on the project manager title and number of years with that title. I don't find either to be relevant without knowing more about the projects. Here is a list of things to consider when evaluating project manager experience:

• Extent of Experience: Number of years in a PM role, number of projects managed, size of company, and status of PM (employee or consultant).
• Scope of Experience: Experience in the lead PM role of a project. Experience managing projects through the full project life-cycle.
• Size of Projects: Size of project in terms of budget, team members, and vendors.
• Complexity of Projects: Complexity of a project can be in the form of environmental or organizational complexity, complexity of the product or product integration, or complexity due to project dependencies, risks, or issues.
• Types of Projects: Types of projects (ex: software development, systems integration, vendor selection, process improvement, technology deployment, etc…).

PM Knowledge I have met some really great project managers in my career who didn't know very much about project management. They were successful based solely on their personality and soft skills. With that said, having a large toolbox of skills and techniques can be very valuable to a project manager, especially as the size, complexity, and number of projects being managed increases. Here are some categories for evaluating project manager knowledge:

• PMO: Knowledge of the concepts, processes, and tools commonly used to improve an organization's project management capability via a PMO.
• Portfolio Management: Knowledge of the concepts, processes, and tools commonly used to align programs and projects with business strategy and objectives via portfolio management.
• Program Management: Knowledge of the concepts, processes, and tools commonly used to manage a collection of projects as a program.
• Project Management: Knowledge of the concepts, processes, and tools commonly used to initiate, plan, execute, control, and close a project.
• Formal Education: Project management training programs or college courses.
• Certifications: PMP or other project management certifications.

PM Character And finally, it is very rare for a project manager to become successful without developing outstanding soft skills. How many successful project managers do you know who have zero communications skills or confidence? I'm betting not many. Here are some categories of soft skills that are important for success in project management:

• Ethics & Integrity: Gains the trust of leadership, stakeholders, peers, and team members.
• Composure: Able to maintain composure and perspective while leading teams through tough situations. When a project is in a state of chaos, the PM keeps the team focused and moving forward.
• Dealing with Ambiguity: Able to successfully function during times of uncertainty and changing priorities. Able to lead innovative projects that don’t have a clear roadmap to rely on for guidance.
• Relationships: Able to build strong relationships with key individuals/allies throughout the organization.
• Political Savvy: Able to recognize, understand, and maneuver a project through corporate bureaucracy and individual politics.
• Results Orientation: Able to drive a team to overcome obstacles and achieve results. This is especially important during the last 5% of a project.
• Communication: Adapts communication style as appropriate for the audience. Able to speak confidently in front of large groups. Good listening skills.
• Confidence: Doesn’t need to sell anything. Able to make decisions and move forward without having to ask for permission. Has a sense for when it’s time to escalate a decision.

How do you rate in these categories as a project manager? This list should help you identify your strengths and weaknesses so that you can develop a game plan for becoming a more balanced project manager. If you manage project managers, how does your team rate using these categories? How can you use this list as a tool to develop more balanced project managers? Copyright © Allen Eskelin, All Rights Reserved