JB Bryant - Maximizing Employees, Transforming Processes, and Building Customer Loyalty

School’s Out! How to spend your company’s “Summer Break”

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Summary: The United States recession we are experiencing is not unlike summer break when we were in school. Fewer external demands are dictating our schedules. How you utilize your “free time” will affect your success both now and when “school” starts again.

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I have to admit it – I was a terrible student in High School, and not much better in my early college years. Somehow, in my Junior year of college I experience a sudden awakening that permanently changed my attitude and approach to life and its demands. I wish I could remember just what it was that caused the shift but, alas, the memory of those years is failing. What I do know is that whatever it was, it greatly contributed to my successes throughout my Master’s program and later career.

Throughout recorded history, the US has averaged one recession every decade. They tend to last about 10-12 months.

We are officially experiencing a recession today -– commonly defined by economists as two quarters of negative GDP growth and defined by the National Bureau of Economic Research as "...a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales."

School’s out. It’s summer break. How are you spending your “free” time?

The most successful students in High School (whom, I admit, I thought were weird as I slept in until noon) spent summers in development camps, studying topics of their own interests, participating in academic competitions, or working summer jobs to save money for a car or college. That is, the little time they had free from external demands they spent pursuing internal demands of self-development. This served them well when they returned to “business as usual” in late August.

If your customers are not placing enough external demands on you right now, what are you doing? Are you sitting back griping and worrying? Are you cutting your staff – the very people who make your company do what it does?

It’s a strange cycle, staff reduction. Business is down, cut employees, increase the unemployment rate, reduce the amount of spending money available in the economy, sales drop even further, .… You get the picture.

What if instead, you spent this summer break in self-development? What if you used this opportunity for much-needed reflection and creative thinking to identify where your waste really comes from (the bulk of it is likely not in your employees) and to develop innovative areas for growth? What if you invested what little you might have by developing your employees into truly effective members of your organization?

Heck, how much time do you really have to do these kinds of things when the market is strong?

If you have insights or questions on how to thrive in a weak economy, please start a dialog in the comments section below and I will reply.

If you’d like to know more about how to process improvement and employee development can costs, increase innovation, improve employee morale, and pay for itself several-fold, Contact Me.

Arrows connected by boxes: Focusing on your real opportunities

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Summary: The real opportunities for your organization’s growth and profitability lie not in the boxes of your flowcharts but in the arrows that connect them.

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First, a quick announcement for my dedicated readers. I’m gradually working on integrating this blog with my organizations website. Why be in two places? Over time, this blog will be found at the Strategic Alignment Group’s site. The transition will not be an easy one, Rest assured that when it’s done I’ll announce it here and the current URL will still redirect you there.

Throughout my career I’ve diagramed perhaps 500 or more processes – office workflow processes, manufacturing processes, thought processes, software processes, you name it.

From a distance, they all look about the same: Variously shaped and positioned Boxes (representing events, activities, people, output, decisions, etc.) and arrows (representing process flow and associations).

Processes and their diagrams can be simple – such as an inner-departmental process – or quite complex – such as a “Quote-To-Cash” process in a custom manufacturing environment.

Regardless, the flowchart boils down to boxes and arrows.

I think it’s fair to say that the most attention is typically given to the boxes. Is it because they are prettier? Because they are easier to identify? Easier recognize? Contain better labels?

In reality, your greatest opportunities for growth, cost reduction, return on investment, and innovation are in the arrows.

Arrows are deceptively simple splatters of ink. But consider what they contain for a moment.

Take a simple example, part of a Claims Receiving process (we’ll call the circled envelopes “round boxes”):

Now ask the following questions for each arrow:

1. How does the Material Handler move from one box to the next?
2. What decisions must be made?
3. What information does the Material Handler need to perform this step properly?
4. What are the ramifications of not having the correct information?
5. What skills and knowledge are necessary to perform this step well?
6. What are the ramifications of not having the adequate skills and knowledge?
7. What attitude is necessary to perform this step well?
8. What are the consequences if the Material Handler has a bad attitude?
9. What could slow down movement from one box to the next?
10. What could speed up movement from one box to the next?
11. What if progression between these boxes is omitted altogether?
12. How much time and money is spent between one box and the next?

Do you see the importance of the arrows? Many more such questions could be asked, and a different process would elicit different questions. This is a relatively low-impact example, too. Plug in your own, and ask the questions that matter.

The point is, it is the arrows rather than the boxes that provide the most opportunity. The arrows contain knowledge, information, data, culture, methods, conflicting priorities, procedures, policies, talents, technologies, attitudes, materials, time, costs, and a whole lot more.

The arrows of your organization are its lifeblood. Look there to increase your profit.

If you have insights or questions on this topic, please start a dialog in the comments section below and I will reply.

If you’d like to know more about how to process improvement can costs, increase innovation, and improve employee morale, Contact Me

Knowledge What? An Intro to Knowledge Management

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Summary: A high-level, low-jargon, "fun" introduction to Knowledge Management, describing its approach, specific concerns, and methods.

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Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? 
– T.S. Elliot

Knowledge Management. That odd phrase has been popping up a lot for the last decade or so. What in the world is it? I Googled the phrase and came up with 15,100,000 hits. I promise to condense it here.

As I answer the question, think about all the “brain work” it takes to make your company work. Some estimate that only 10-20% of the average modern company’s assets are physical. The rest are intellectual assets like patents, business processes, market share, brand loyalty, employee skills, databases, corporate image, and a host of other stuff. That takes a lot of brain work!

I remember first being struck by this in 1999 when Microsoft purchased Hotmail. Hotmail’s physical assets were worth about $100 Thousand. Microsoft paid them $400 Million.

Imagine that for a minute. I want to buy your lemonade stand. We agree that your cardboard box, jar of Country Time, pitcher, and paper cups are worth $10, but I offer to pay you $40,000 for it!

What made Hotmail worth 4000 times as much as its physical property was worth? It was Hotmail’s “brain” - its intellectual assets.

If you have only been part of your company for a short time, your experience has probably been similar to the following: Your finished product is pretty simple – some sort of widget or wadget that is delivered to the customer in a simple package. Procuring and fulfilling orders for your product, however, can be surprisingly complex. Selling, making, and delivering such a simple product requires a whole lot of very smart people doing a whole lot of very smart things together. Coming in from the outside, you have a certain advantage. You aren’t bound by the way they’ve “always done it around here.” You bring insights from the successes and mistakes of previous employers.

If, on the other hand, you’ve been with your company a long time, you’ve seen things become more complex over the years. You have a significant advantage. You remember a day when things were simpler. It’s easier for you to see through the complexity to the core business. The things newbies get distracted by are just ways of accomplishing the things you’ve done since the beginning. No matter what smart ideas new people bring to the table, you have learned to deal with the complexity and you can see how simple your business is at its core.

All of that – what new and established employees contribute, including what they’ve learned about products, business, and service there and elsewhere – is part of your company’s intellectual assets.

I’ll describe knowledge management now. As I do, think about how important communicating and learning are to performing all that brain work…but you’ll need to expand the normal use of the words “communicate” and “learn.”

In the modern world people communicate with other people and with computers. Computers communicate with people and other computers. Similarly, both people and computers learn from both people and computers.

So communication and learning happen people-to-people, people-to-computer, computer-to-people, and computer-to-computer.

That’s a large part of what makes your company go ’round, and that’s where knowledge management focuses its attention. Knowledge management is a way of thinking about communication and learning. It’s also a way of acting to ensure communication and learning are effective. It really boils down to this:

… Help people know what they need to know when they need to know it …

Knowledge management accomplishes this by developing good processes, developing good people, and developing good tools. You might think of it as Just-In-Time for knowledge.

“Managing knowledge” sounds a little weird. Can knowledge really be managed? Not really. We don’t really manage knowledge; we manage the processes, culture and tools that help people communicate, learn, and apply. But that’s too long to put on a business card.

Basically we manage knowledge creation, capture, transfer, flow, and application. To what end?

• Knowledge management can help established employees get the knowledge they need right now more efficiently – without poring through multiple systems or wasting time finding someone who knows.
• Knowledge management can help new employees see how it all fits together more quickly.
• Knowledge management can connect the pieces of the company together in a way that nurtures innovation and discovery.

And I think you’ll especially like this one…

• Knowledge management can help employees spend more time doing what they love – their core jobs – and less time preparing to do what they love.

I’ll close by describing some core beliefs in knowledge management. Hopefully they sound like common sense…

• Collaborate – All of us are smarter than any of us. your company is smartest when its people think together
• Simplicity – Communicate simply so you can learn quickly
• Some learning isn’t necessary – The better a system is designed, the less people need to learn to use it
• Only what matters – Remove all the information that doesn’t matter right now. You only need what you need; everything else is distraction
• Recycle – No need to reinvent the wheel. Reuse knowledge as often as possible
• People are better than tools – Tools are necessary, but people communicate better than computers and learn better from each other than they do from computers
• Respect experts – People at the front line know more about the details than people up the line. People up the line know more about connections between the details than people at the front line
• Process-based – Most useful knowledge in a company is directly connected with a business process. In fact, business processes are simply knowledge in action
• Results are king – Knowledge is useless unless it is linked to action. Put ideas into action as fast as possible. Understand what you want to do; determine what you need to know; decide how to communicate it; and then do it

That last one is really important. Managing knowledge – or, perfecting corporate communication and learning – has a very specific goal: Deliver quality products to customers efficiently. Or, as I repeatedly say, “transform knowledge into profit.”

If you have insights or questions on this topic, please start a dialog in the comments section below and I will reply.

If you’d like to know more about how to transform your organization’s knowledge into profit, Contact Me

Organizational Maturity

"We cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are."
~Max Depree, American author

Tori is a wonderful young lady, exactly the girl I would want my own daughter to be if I had a daughter of my own. I am blessed to have the chance to co-parent her and be a part of her development.

One great thing about Tori is her sense of responsibility. Another is her willingness to change as she grows and learns.

A case in point is how she has been learning to participate in common family tasks. You know the ones I mean – things like clearing the table after dinner. We used to have to define specific roles:

“Tori, you take the plates; Mom will take the serving dishes; I’ll put away the leftovers.”

But she is gradually learning that things get done best when everyone sees what still needs to be done and does it. As a family, we are beginning to function like an effective team. One of us collects all the plates and silverware they can carry, someone else grabs the glasses, someone else puts away leftovers, etc., each of us making trips to and from the kitchen until the job is done.

Of course we each know our capabilities and limitations, and we do have loosely defined roles, but we get the job done without rigid job descriptions. And we do it very, very well. (OK, I’m slightly exaggerating– we’re getting there, but there’s still road to travel).

The first time I realized Tori was really learning this was a few weeks ago: We thought we were done, but Tori noticed a crumpled up paper napkin that had been left behind. She threw it away without being told.

As parents, we call this “maturity.” A number of different words have been applied to the same quality in business: Teamwork, Agility, Adaptability, and Instinctiveness are perhaps the most common. But what’s wrong with the phrase “corporate maturity?” I think it has a nice ring.

As I write this, I’m thinking of a company where I once served, which I’ll call “Acme Widgets” (I know, that really lacks creativity. Sorry).

AW was 40 years old. We expect people of roughly the same age to have a certain amount of personal maturity. We expect them to be on some sort of career path, to have grown intellectually, to have developed responsible personality traits, etc.

AW certainly had a mature career path: They were a market leader! AW was intellectually mature, too: They were innovative. And AW was mature in responsibility: They functioned by clearly defined values, were financially responsible, made quality products, and would go to all ends to ship orders on the promised ship date.

This outstanding company, like so many others, had one glaring maturity flaw that could prove detrimental to them down the line: They did not change easily, that is, they did not learn well while they grew. They were not internally adaptable.

“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”
~Henri Bergson (1859-1941), French philosopher

There are a few questions I like to ask employees that help more clearly assess a company’s adaptability. Here are a few. Take a moment and answer them for yourself:

1. In your own job, how likely are you to recognize when what you do needs to change, i.e., that your job needs to evolve because of external changes?
2. How likely are you to recognize when how you do things needs to change to accommodate your evolving responsibilities?
3. Do you feel free to communicate needed changes to your supervisor or manager? (
4. Do you feel your observations and suggestions will be truly considered?
5. Do you openly make such suggestions to your supervisor?
6. Do you feel free to make changes yourself?

Finally, here’s a tough one for many people:

7. How likely are you to do something just because it needs done, regardless of job titles and without complaint or resentment? Are you more likely to throw away the paper napkins because no one has done it yet, or are you more likely to complain that the Paper Napkin Tosser didn’t do his or her job?

21st Century businesses are going through rapid, exciting changes. I trust yours is one of them. Next year will most certainly look different than this year, and each successive year will bring more change and growth potential.

Do your answers to the above suggest that you are ready to embrace the changes?

“Maturity of mind is the capacity to endure uncertainty.”
~John Finley, English historian and mathematician

If you have insights or questions on this, please start a dialog in the comments section below and I will reply.

If you’d like to know more about how to develop a mature, adaptive culture in your organization, Contact Me.

Territorialism Over Teamwork Results In Boredom and Lost Value

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Summary: In every instance where employees feel bored on the job, the corporate culture supports territorialism over teamwork.

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Before getting into the topic of boredom at work, a brief note to my regular readers...

If you've noticed a delay between articles, I have a good excuse -- I'm working on a huge project for this blog. It will be available very soon.

The topic will be how unemployed mid-level professionals should go about finding their next career in a troubled economy. I'm currently culling the advice of some of the top experts in the employment game. Stay tuned.

Now, on to the not-so-boring topic of boredom at work.

One of my professional specialties is assessing corporate cultures, diagnosing business problems based on cultural indicators, and aligning cultures to support strategic priorities.

I’ll make a bold statement here, but one that will stand up to scrutiny - with the added benefit of feeling like common sense!

In every instance where employees feel bored on the job, the corporate culture supports territorialism over teamwork.

It is a rare employee who truly doesn’t want to be productive. Employees who don’t seem to want to be productive generally are either jaded or unaware of how they can be productive.

People don’t want to be bored. Given the opportunity, they’ll be productive to their fullest ability.

The problem comes in when Jane has some down time and wants to contribute in a way that is outside her regular duties or job description. She’ll look for and find those opportunities as long as there won’t be backlash for doing so, and the company will be much better off for it.

A culture of Territorialism tells Jane that if she steps outside her defined role, she’ll be invading someone else’s turf and she’ll be punished for it. Rather than face that risk, Jane will just go on being bored and less productive than she otherwise would be. In fact, she may not allow herself to be bored at all -- if she's resourceful she's more likely to do personal emails, write her own blog, spruce up her MySpace account, plan her next house, or research a topic she's interested in all on your company's dime. Wouldn't you rather pay her to put that energy into your company's success?

The attitude of Territorialism Over Teamwork pervades many, many businesses that could be infinitely more successful if they would methodically replace territorialism with collaboration and teamwork.

Seem impossible? It isn’t. It can be and has been done.

Your Action Items:

• Read Marilyn Gardner's article in the Christian Science Monitor, "Bored At Work? Read This," which quotes part of the article you are now reading.

• Sound off on this topic in the comments section below.

• Contact me. to discuss maximizing employees, eliminating boredom, developing productive employees, or assessing your corporate culture.