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Home Archive for category "Productivity" (Page 2)

“Everyone has a number.”

While monthly financial statements are essential to effectively managing your business, they are historical documents.  They tell you what’s already happened when it’s too late to do anything about it.  So in addition to monthly financial statements, you also need measurements that are predictive in nature to serve as early warning signs that something may

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Put the right people on the bus . . .

This is the third installment of a series on developing an “engaged” workforce . . . that is, a workforce that energetically supports your company and its goals. In the first installment, we talked about the importance of clearly communicating the company’s mission, vision, values, and culture.  Essentially, those four things (with apologies to business

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Stop Making Those Decisions

In a 1995 article by A.E. Carlisle entitled simply, “MacGregor,” Carlisle tells the story of the title character who is a plant manager with a remarkable management style.  At the core of MacGregor’s style is his refusal to make any operating decisions.  Sounds a little odd, doesn’t it?  Yet his plant (even though it’s the

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“Wealth continually grows from multiplying existing resources using existing technologies.” -Pilzer’s Law

Paul Pilzer is an American economist and best-selling author who promotes the notion that economic progress and wealth are driven by technology.  New technologies will continue to feed economic growth, but in Pilzer’s view, a lot of growth can come from properly utilizing the technologies we’ve already got. Most technologies used in small business are

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12 Critical Questions

  Awhile ago, we talked about Marcus Buckingham, a senior researcher at the Gallup Organization, and discussed his findings in his excellent book, “Now Discover Your Strengths.” He has more to offer us. Buckingham says a workforce can be divided into three categories: people who are loyal and productive, or “engaged,” those who are just

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“Goals produce results, not activities.”

Our last posting talked about consistency.  We talked about identifying “critical success factors” . . . operating principles that, when applied consistently, are at the core of a company’s success.  But operating principles are only half the equation.  They are the front end, the input side of things.  They are the consistent activities that produce

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“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit.”

In his outstanding book, Great by Choice, Jim Collins relates the story of Howard Putnam, a former CEO of Southwest Airlines. Putnam institutionalized the Southwest Airlines’ “recipe” for success. His “recipe” was not a strategic plan or a vision or a mission statement, but a carefully thought-out list of operating principles. That list included: Utilize

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Now, Discover Your Strengths

In his excellent book, “Now Discover Your Strengths,” author Marcus Buckingham and co-author Donald Clifton discuss the work they did for The Gallup Organization to find out what makes successful people successful.  What do those successful people have in common that makes them high achievers? So they sifted through over two million interviews that Gallup

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“Increased productivity comes from continually identifying areas where you can achieve 80 percent of your results from 20 percent of your efforts.”

Vilfredo Pareto was an early twentieth century Italian economist who gave us the 80/20 rule.  We hear it most commonly used in reference to sales . . . 80 percent of your business comes from 20 percent of your customers.  But the mistake we often make is to spend too much time trying to get

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“There is no point in doing well that which you should not be doing at all.”

It’s not unusual.  We just continue to do certain things in the business because we always have done them.  Or we continue to do them because it would be a pain in the neck to train someone else to do them.  Either way, we end up doing things that are not the highest and best

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