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

Can Knowledge Be Managed?

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Summary: Quick thoughts on what it really means to “manage” knowledge and turn it into profit.

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Knowledge can't be managed any more than a widget can be managed.

For widgets, you can manage the processes, tools, materials, and people it takes to make them. Raw material has no value if it just sits on the floor. For your company to benefit from that raw material, it has to be combined with other materials and used to make something that makes money.

The same is true of knowledge. Even though you can't see knowledge or pick it up, we all intuitively realize that knowledge that is applied can be valuable and knowledge that isn't applied can be costly.

No company can succeed without knowledge. But for knowledge to create value it needs to be combined with other knowledge and must be used to create something that makes (or saves) money.

What I refer to as "knowledge management" is managing the processes, tools, materials, and people that help us create and apply knowledge to improve the company's profit. This involves making sure data, information and knowledge are captured, communicated, retained, and applied toward profitable ends.

The value of Knowledge Management comes directly from how effectively knowledge helps employees deal with today's situations and effectively create the future. Importantly, knowledge must be available at the precise moment it is needed -- regardless of whether or not the one who needs it knows it exists.

If relevant knowledge isn't accessible at the moment it is needed, every situation is addressed only by what people know at the time. See my article on knowledge priority for more on this topic.

Conversely, if relevant knowledge is available on-demand, each situation is addressed by the sum total of everything anyone in the organization has ever learned about a similar situation.

Which approach do you think makes a more effective organization?

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 make sure knowledge is relevant, is available when needed, and generates profit, Contact me.

What is Knowledge?

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Summary: Identifies the many types of knowledge in organizations and provides a brief overview of what managing that knowledge entails.

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Humor me. Seriously. Take just a moment to jot down (or at least think through) a working definition of “knowledge” before you read this. Please?

Thank you. Now together we’ll define this rather elusive concept.

Knowledge may be almost as difficult to define as "Love." Just like you mean something different  (I hope!) when you say you love ice cream, love your dog, and love your spouse, you really mean different things when you say you "know" something.

If you're old enough, think back to Welcome Back Kotter. You can just hear Vinny Barbarino deflecting Mr. Kotter's questions with Who, What, Where, Why, When, or How. Those "interrogatives" (as they are properly called, though I doubt Vinny knew that) represent very different types of knowledge.

Here are different types of knowledge in a company that knowledge management addresses:

Know Who
How easy is to know who to contact for what? It may have been much easier several years ago when your company was much smaller, peoples' positions remained fairly stable, and most people had worked there since the company’s inception. But you've grown since then, brought a whole lot of new people and roles into the company, and shifted people around. Do you always know who to contact? When you do find them, are they willing to let you benefit from their experience?

Know What
Know what refers to facts (information) you need to perform a task or make a decision. This kind of knowledge can be written down in documents and manuals or embedded into computer systems. It can include factual information (such as a customer's shipping address), knowledge about relationships (how long a customer has been with you, what other companies they are connected to, how often they order, what kind of business they are, etc.) , contacts (who to call to resolve credit issues), and the like. You have plenty of "know what" knowledge both internally and externally.

Know Where
The reference librarian at my college once told me that there are two types of smart people: Those who know answers and those who know how to find answers. I think she was just trying to make me feel less stupid. :-) In reality, knowing how to find answers is a skill that some people have. Computer systems can be designed to make this happen well, but I no system will ever be produce results that a talented individual couldn’t improve.

Know Why
This is strategic insight, the "big picture" view of things. Have you ever had a job where you were not told how what you do affects the big picture of what the whole company does? Most people feel frustrated and de-motivated when they don't know why they need to do what they do. Most of us prefer to know why we are doing things, what we are trying to accomplish, how it would matter if we didn't do it, and where our work fits into it all.

Know When
Great salesmen and great buyers know just the right time to close a deal. Similarly, in your job you no doubt have honed the ability to know exactly when the best time is to say or do something. This is a sense of timing -- the best time to act, stop acting, or make a decision.

Know How
This refers to how to get something done. You usually can't capture Know How in a document or database; you teach it. Do you sit down with a young child and read her instructions on how to tie her shoe? Can you even imagine trying to write those instructions? How about "How to ride a bicycle?" Some things are simply best learned through a combination of mentoring and doing.

Conclusion
Knowledge has many faces. How many faces did you include in the definition you wrote down? Chances are, what you wrote down reflects the types of knowledge you work with most often in your job.

An integrated strategy for managing knowledge moves far beyond capturing "informative knowledge" (AKA, "explicit knowledge"). 

It also builds policies and structure into the company that allows the transfer of know how.

Finally, full-blown knowledge management goes much further than that. Rather than focusing on just capturing and transferring knowledge, it places its ultimate focus on creating new knowledge and applying it toward generating profit.

Commonly, that is called innovation. In reality, it is the only way for your company to remain viable.

If you’d like to know more about how to manage the flow of knowledge in your organization or how to spark further innovation, Contact me.

The Priority of Minding Your P's

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Summary: Cluttering people's workdays with information they don't need is as irresponsible as not providing what they do need. And it's expensive.

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Investing wisely...
Should your organization invest its resources in pushing knowledge to users (supply) or helping them pull it when they want it (demand)?

That question highlights a long-standing debate in knowledge transfer theory. Push and Pull are often called the "Two P's" of knowledge transfer.

The answer is really a no-brainer. There are plenty of things you don't realize you need to know (news, opportunities, changes, etc.), and those should be pushed to you. But when there's knowledge you know you need, you should easily find it (pull).

…The question isn’t big enough.

Choices, choices, choices...
You’ve been there.

The restaurant’s menu is a wee bit over-zealous. The variety is great, but deciding what to order is time consuming and frustrating with such an extensive menu.

     "Pull” is difficult when the volume of information is large.

Your server makes some recommendations. S/he is narrowing down your choices, hoping to entice you to make a decision. Unfortunately, the server’s choices aren’t appealing.

     “Push” is only helpful when the information is right.

You pick something almost at random. Invariably what your meal partner ordered is more appealing than what you received.

Let’s get this straight...
What if as you were seated, your server handed you a menu that only had food you were in the mood for at the moment? All you had to look at was what really mattered. How much more quickly and effectively would you order?

An important third P is necessary for an organization's knowledge to be turned into profit. We intuitively recognize it, but we easily overlook it.

Priority...
I'm not the first to recognize this. I've usually called it "relevance." David Moorcroft of the outstanding Royal Bank of Canada first called it "Priority." (1)

Restaurants may be a long way from offering only what you want, but modern technology and strategic method make this possible in today’s businesses.

In today's world, cluttering people's workdays with information they don't need is just as irresponsible as not providing them what they do need. And it's expensive. Very expensive.

Simply stated, if we do not evaluate how important and relevant particular knowledge is to a given situation, we'll spread around a bunch of information that doesn't really matter. Workers will end up with "infoglut," and no one will pay attention to any of it.

Evaluating Priority is not optional...
As Mr. Moorcroft wrote:
"For technology to truly make communication more effective, it must deliver information that is relevant, easy to find, and aligned with a strategy...for greatest impact."

Contact me if you’d like to improve the relevance of the information and knowledge you deliver throughout your organization.

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Footnotes:

(1) Mr. Moorcroft's article, Enabling RBC's employees to choose their own news, appeared in the Oct/Nov 2007 issue of Strategic Communication Management.