Unlimited capacity - wouldn’t it be great to be able to deal with immense volume without experiencing stress or conflict?

Much of the challenge exists from pressure below and above - pressure below comes from a multiple of staff that need to direct information to or access information from their boss. From above, the challenge is “I deal with twice the volume you deal with, so cope”. It presents an unhealthy scenario for all parties, and increasingly I believe provides risk to organisations in terms of the negative health effects of these kinds of jobs.

However, how can you progress if you can’t deal with stress? Can you be Superhuman - it seems that the leader must be someone with greater appetite to work hard, and must be really smart in solving problems.

How do you fix it and focus? Concentrate on a bunch of things you will not do any more - cut, cut, cut and focus on those things that deliver the results that you are measured on. Share the challenge on priorities with your boss and make sure your relationship with your boss stays strong. Take some time out to breathe. Push back on requests for your time - if they don’t add to the goals you have been set, then avoid doing them.

This is partly a time management question, and partly a question of negotiation.

If you have had a scenario where you felt you had to be the superhuman boss, please share your experience - or if you feel your boss seems to be superhuman and your admire them for it - or are worried about them - then share that too. I look forward to your feedback….

When someone suggests they want a portal the very first question to ask is, “what does a portal mean to you”.

Portal, like CRM - and many other terms in IT - tend to be all encompassing words designed to solve a complex raft of problems.

“We can’t get to our information easily” “I spent ages trying to find a document that I know is here somewhere and gave up” “We have heaps of copies of the same document” “I want a dashboard or traffic light to let me know when problems have emerged so I can immediate action” “I am sick of signing in to lots of different systems”

There is actually a fair bit of complexity in this - but the answer seems to be Portal (or intranet / new enterprise content management system - take your pick).

Same with CRM:

“I can’t get a single view of our customers” “..no one understands who is doing what with whom” “I was trying to cross sell and they already told us they can’t buy it” “The client told me that they were already dealing with another of our divisions and our company should already have a heap of information on them already”

Again, complex issues - people, process and technology at play again.

So what do we do? Start with the business problems to be solved, then resolve the process issues - and then the technology solution becomes much more simple - and effective.

Any experience good or bad? Do share….

IF you are thinking of refinance mortgage, be careful. It is still a mortgage loan in the end. With every mortgage, there are always the chances of foreclosure.

I was speaking with a friend today who was feeling pretty frustrated. You see, he had purchased a CRM product for his business, but it wasn’t doing what he wanted. The vendor had considered that he had done his part - sell the product, install it on site, provide the user documentation, all thumbs up….

What the client actually needed was:

1. Assistance to clearly understand how to implement CRM as a strategy

2. Get the people on the bus committed to the approach

3. Define the new processes, and define these into an agreed requirements document

4. The vendor to configure the application to meet the defined requirements

5. The vendor to train the users and the administrator in exactly how to make CRM technology deliver on the CRM strategy

6. The vendor to come back and check / realign things after staff have been using it for awhile

My recommendation to you - be very, very wary of buying any software that runs across your business without buying implementation services (not just technical ones, but solid business analysis).

So, what is your experience? Please share the good, bad and the ugly, I’d love to get your feedback….

See my post on people, process and technology for more on getting software implementation right.

If you have ever found peformance issues and the reasons being given seemingly incredibly complicated, then perhaps distilling the essence back to the number only may be the answer you are looking for.

For example, let’s say sales performance is down. A person can provide any number of reasons, incredibly well argued, as to why their sales performance is off. Or why they missed their last deal. And if they are any sort of sales person, they should be able to be pretty persuasive in their argument as they probably have been constructing in their minds for some time!

So how do you reshape the nexus of this? Well, get back to the numbers and the causal factors of success.

Step 1: Fishbone the profit and loss statement to look at where the revenue comes from

Step 2: Drill into the customers spend to determine which customers, what product lines, and which sales when.

Step 3: Determine the causal steps ie activity, necessary to get the success you need. For example, to sell $10 million of a service, you may need to have generated a sales pipeline of $30 million if you close 1 in 3.

Step 4: Determine the metrics that make sense around the steps to get to the target. For example, to get to $30million pipeline, you may need to have qualified $60 million of opportunities. If each deal is $10 million, it is 6 deals. You then track activity to create deals - number of presentations, meetings, sales calls, product demonstrations, roadshows and events.

Step 5: Turn the above into simple numbers next to boxes and track that against performance. This will in turn drive activity that leads to success and also may provide some focus to improve success rates on each successive step.

Used correctly, the above approach can move to an empirical analysis of activity that reinforces the right behaviours, and also how you can help along the way, and quickly ends long and unfruitful discussions.

If you have had a good experience - or a not so good experience - in applying metrics to your business, please leave a comment, I’d appreciate your feedback.

If you have found yourself in a situation where the process seems to change, accountabilities are uncertain and deadlines are missing, then perhaps you have a people, process and technology problem. Getting all 3 aligned is absolutely essential to ensuring a change process will work.

And they have to be resolved in that order.

1. People - what are the key issues: who owns the process, who is involved, what are their roles, are they committed to improving it and working together and importantly are they prepared to do the work to fix the problem

2. Process - a process can be defined as starting with a trigger event that creates a chain of actions that results in something being prepared for a customer of that process. Starting at high level and identifying the key big steps is important to see the process from end to end. Then moving into more detail to capture the various layers involved and various exceptions. Focussing on the high frequency (Pareto principle) transactions can have significant benefit to standardising the process. But also remember that it can be the non-standard transactions where service is slipping most or the potential for significant failure in the process may exist.

3. Technology - Now that people are aligned, and the process developed and clarified, technology can be applied to ensure consistently in application of the process and to provide the thin guiding rails to keep the process on track - to make it easier to follow the process than not do so.

Of course there is much more to getting a technology project right - but get the above 3 sorted out and you will be a long way down the path to project success.

Got any experiences or tips you’d like to share? I am keen to hear from you, so please add a comment….

With bad credit, credit cards are usually proven useless. A Mastercard is not meant for credit card consolidation. A credit card should therefore be used sensibly.

Have you ever experienced the debilitating situation of not knowing what decision to make in a difficult circumstance? Or found yourself overwhelmed by the sheer volume of email and interruptions within your workday?

In case of the former it is caused by uncertainty (not enough facts) and a less than comfortable risk of decision failure.

In case of the latter, in many cases the day to day interruptions really get in the way of the big picture and most important jobs to be done. That type of continual interruption will make you highly ineffective - so you’ve either got to live with it, or change the environment.

I’m a big fan of getting time management in order, and my continual reference book here is by Alan McKenzie called The Time Trap. In this book he identifies the top 20 time wasters, and specifically how to deal with them.

My father would always say “Don’ta worry - what’s the worst that can happen?”. He isn’t Italian, but for some reason this simple sentence would provide some perspective and give the mind some necessary breathing space (distraction if you like) that allows the subconcious to trigger a logical decision.

Business and leading people can both be hard and easy.

Getting stuck in a mental rut is also easy, and no wonder as making a similar decision based on past experience makes a lot of sense. It saves time, allows you to move onto the next task. But it also can increasingly become dangerous without some benchmark or checking from time to time.

The Harvard Business School published a book on Decision Making, 5 Steps to Better Results.

After your first step (buy the book) the 5 steps are:
1. Establish a context for success which is about setting the stage for making a good decision and involving the right people in the process
2. Framing the Issue Properly to make sure you are tackling the right question with the right constraints on an outcome
3. Generate alternatives through brainstorming and other techniques
4. Evaluate alternatives
5. Choose the best alternative

The book also covers a range of other issues that are really useful in considering ways to get to a smarter more considered organisation and team.

When I was a child, my father would take us to school. Sometimes he would go a completely different way to normal and make us late. When asked why he was taking the longcut, he would reply, “you can’t get stuck in a rut”.

My children also complain when I take a longcut. When I tell them “you can’t get stuck in a rut” their response is, “yeah, but carts are from the olden days when Grandad was a boy, there are no such thing as ruts now”. I do remind them that my Dad also got to enjoy sealed roads in cars….

Thanks to Mark Eveleigh for permission to use the above pic - ©Mark Eveleigh. Visit his site at for a range of great pics…

If you are in a professional services firm, then one of my favourite books is called Managing the Professional Services Firm. The book describes what to do when you have extraordinarily bright people, smart consultants, who know what they should be doing - but just simply aren’t doing it. The book covers so much more than that, and you will find it really useful if you are in or trying to move to that kind of role.

Many of the themes in the book talk about ensuring everyone is aligned towards the same goals. For example, remuneration schemes encouraging the wrong kind of behaviours.

It was good to see my post on 3 Reasons Why Smart People in Organisations Do Dumb Things generated some interest, and a colleague of mine Bill Wallance got fired up enough to create a new blog succinctly called Stupid Leadership dedicated to the topic.
I am keen to hear from you - you will have your own ideas, and I’d appreciate your comments.

George Negus, who actually isn’t all that fond of being referred to as an aging sex symbol, gave a presentation in Perth at the wonderful venue of the Royal Perth Yacht Club.

He was discussing many things and was thoroughly entertaining, and at the conclusion of his speech answered some questions. I had my hand in the air to ask a question, and before he got to me, he launched on a tyraid about information technology:

“Ask yourself, what has information technology actually done ever done for anyone? Absolutely nothing..”. George proceeded to let rip and then asked for my question.

“Hi George, my name is Justin Davies from Ross Technology, a technology services company……”

Pause, and some general laughter….

“Well, now you mention it, the internet is pretty useful for research and I actually use it everyday…..”

George wasn’t at all wedded to a view that Information Technology and computers are useless; he just wanted a debate. He wanted to get stuck in and argue a point to get a better understanding. He particularly wanted people to think - he most certainly didn’t want people to just nod their heads. And he was also most generous, and I now have a signed copy of one of his books.

How does that relate to The Smell of Good Business?

In my view, not enough decisions or widely held points of view are actively debated enough. A bloody good heated debate, and judicious use of the F word does wonders in quickly test driving a proposition. But you must ensure it is the best idea and not the most strongest personality that wins.

So, I also invite debate. Let me know what you think….

I really enjoyed my early career in direct marketing. One of the things I found interesting was determining which promotional ideas would work and which wouldn’t. The idea was to spend only what was necessary to effectively acquire a customer, and to make the communication as targetted as possible.

We’d use promotional giveaways as relevent as possible to the product value proposition. An insurance one was a free pen for writing in to advise the date of your next renewal notice (we had a 50/50 chance if we knew when their insurance was due - otherwise they weren’t the slightest bit interested in insurance any other time of year).

Now we see plenty of credit card free insurance period offers, honeymoon home loan rate offers, mobile phone intro only deals and health clubs offering new members better deals than existing members. Everyone likes a good deal, but much of this activity just generates customer churn and reduces loyalty.

So, what has been your best promotion? Let me know….