Thought Provoking Questions for the Top Executive

1 “How’s business?” is often the first question people ask. Is your business at or above forecast and accelerating?

2. As Diana Ross sings in the theme song from Mahogany says, “Do you know where you’re going to?” Do you have a written business plan that is known by all your managers and guides their activities and decision making?

3. People want to know how to make their company successful. Do you have clear business goals and do your employees understand their specific role in achieving them?

4. Our people take personal ownership in creating success for our company. Who has the ability within the organization to make decisions and do the right things to achieve goals to which all have agreed and committed?

5. Do what you do best. That is what made you successful in the first place. What are your core competencies? How are these reflected in your business plans?

6. Fire fighting is draining and not overly productive in a comparative sense. Have you identified the key challenges and bottlenecks facing the company and do you have a specific plan in place to address each issue?

7. Branding and positioning can mean higher margins. We have written about that here before. Do you have a clear marketing and sales positioning for both the company and your products?

8. Business experts agree that you have to meet customer needs. Do you delight your customers? Is there a clear customer focus across the organization? How often is someone from your senior management team in contact with your top 5 clients?

9. Accurate forecasts mean profitability from better use of resources. Are your revenue and profit results usually very close to forecast?

10. Focus on the bottom line and the impact of actions on it makes for successful businesses. Are your financial measures and results understood broadly beyond just the executives?

11. What you measure gets attention. Do you have clear metrics that measure the progress on each of your business plan strategies and the advancement toward your long term goals?

12. A learning organization is a growing organization said Jack Welch, ex-CEO of General Electric. Is it acceptable to take risks in the organization? How is the learning captured?

13. Do you take advantage of the synergies of working with other companies to extend your effectiveness? Do you have alliances with other companies that extend your capabilities cost effectively?

14. Bill Gates said “R&D is the lifeblood of long term company success.” In the U.S., a typical ratio of R&D for an industrial company is about 3.5% of revenues, high technology companies between 7-14& and pharmaceutical companies 14-25%. Are you growing your investment in the future of your company?

15. A great percentage of new products fail in the marketplace because they are not well thought out from the customer or the supply chain point of view. Do new products make up a growing percentage of your business and are their market introductions at or ahead of forecast?

16. Speed, efficiency and profitability can be accelerated from sound processes in all aspects of the business. How sound are your processes?

17. Information overload is common and yet many can’t get the information they need, on a timely basis, to do their jobs properly. Are your people able to get the information they need to perform effectively?

18. The 80/20 rule is true for employees, both in terms of their impact and in reverse terms as to how much of management time they take. The best employees contribute the most. The least effective take the most management time. What are your plans for motivating and retaining your best employees? How will you manage out the least effective?

How did you do? What are your weakspots?

Let us know how we can help.

John

John Maver
President
Maver Management Group
(925) 648-7561
Maver Management

Marketing and Selling to Professionals

Doctors, dentists, accountants and CEOs are people too. Even lawyers, despite all the jokes. The same is true for the remaining groups that are referred to as professionals. All are people too. If you look at what they do during their non working time, you will find that their interests are pretty “normal”. Family, activities, sports, cars, investments, travel and searching for the right purchases. While they generally have a higher education and possibly intellect than the average, the personal interests are not unusual.

So what? What does this mean to you?

It means that they will respond to marketing and sales messages very much the same as the rest of the population. It used to be thought that in order to communicate with professionals most effectively, one needed only the intellectual presentation of facts, since they were smart enough to draw their own conclusions. Clearly, that isn’t selling and really isn’t even communicating. Thankfully, we have gotten smarter.

Our experience with marketing and selling to professionals over the past thirty plus years, offers some insights. I’ll comment on two here.

The first is “What’s in it for me – the professional?”

In communicating with professionals, we often focus on what’s in it for their patients or clients. We forget the personal aspect and don’t answer the question of what’s in it for me - the professional. I have written about this several times before regarding customers or consumers. The same idea is true for professionals. Doctors not only want their patients cured they also want some peace of mind and less complexity. They have so many new pharmaceuticals and treatments on which to be current and so many other pressures. How can you and your product or service help them out? Dentists have an amazing array of mechanical products with new upgrades coming out all the time. How can they stay current, not buy the wrong materials and not go bankrupt? CEO’s, executives and lawyers have multiple opportunities every day to be distracted and actually add to their burdens, instead of giving them peace of mind. How can your product or service make their life a little better and even give them some joy.

The key here is to put yourself in the shoes of the professional and understand not only their medical or business needs, but also their personal and emotional needs. What would you want? Simple research can add to your analysis and conclusions. I have seen doctors and dentists stand in line at medical conventions for long periods to try their hand at miniature golf for a prize or to get a free take home gift for their kids. Could they do that on their own? Yes! But this was “free”. It gave them that little joy. During their wait there were many opportunities for selling/

The second is “How do you get them to take action?”

Create a simple trigger that makes them think about your product and what it can do for them when they see or hear the trigger. In the dental business at Procter & Gamble, we were marketing a product for mild to moderate gingivitis. Few dentists knew what was mild to moderate, so we created a trigger. If the patient saw bleeding gums when brushing or flossing, they needed our product. It worked and sales skyrocketed. For doctors, in treating patients with Urinary Tract Infections (UTIs), a burning sensation when urinating is a trigger. It means prescribe a certain pharmaceutical and there is no need generally for complicated and time consuming testing. For CEO’s and executives, fighting fires every day is a trigger that all is not running smoothly. There are some simple solutions that can be used to stop the fire fighting.

Professionals are people too. We have had experience over multiple years in communicating successfully with professionals in many different industries. We have found that the principles for communicating effectively with dentists, doctors, lawyers CEOs and other professionals are the same. The execution may be different but the principles are the same.

We suggest these two ideas as a start. There clearly are many more. Contact us and we can help you understand your professionals and find the right triggers for your market as well.

John

John Maver
President
Maver Management Group
(925) 648-7561
Maver Management

Believe It or Not: An Original Take on Leadership

Tom Peters posted an article this week entitled “Believe It or Not: An Original Take on Leadership”.

He recommends a book by Dov Frohman, a pioneer in the semiconductor industry. With Rob Howard, Dov has written Leadership the Hard Way: Why Leadership Can't Be Taught—and How You Can Learn It Anyway

Some of his thoughts are unconventional and yet right on. What do you think?

" In a chapter titled "The Soft Skills of Hard Leadership," Frohman astonishes as he insists that the leader-manager must free up no less than 50% of his-her time from routine tasks. To wit:
"Most managers spend a great deal of time thinking about what they plan to do, but relatively little time thinking about what they plan not to do ... As a result, they become so caught up in fighting the fires of the moment that they cannot really attend to the long-term threats and risks facing the organization.

So the first soft skill of leadership the hard way is to cultivate the perspective of Marcus Aurelius: avoid busyness, free up your time, stay focused on what really matters. Let me put it bluntly: every leader should routinely keep a substantial portion of his or her time—I would say as much as 50 percent—unscheduled. Only when you have substantial 'slop' in your schedule—unscheduled time—will you have the space to reflect on what you are doing, learn from experience, and recover from your inevitable mistakes. Leaders without such free time end up tackling issues only when there is an immediate or visible problem.

Managers' typical response to my argument about free time is, 'That's all well and good, but there are things I have to do.” Yet we waste so much time in unproductive activity—it takes an enormous effort on the part of the leader to keep free time for the truly important things."

Yet another surprising idea from the same chapter is "daydreaming":
"The Discipline Of Daydreaming": "Nearly every major decision of my business career was, to some degree, the result of daydreaming. To be sure, in every case I had to collect a lot of data, do detailed analysis, and make a data-based argument to convince superiors, colleagues and business partners. But that all came later. In the beginning, there was the daydream.

By daydreaming, I mean loose, unstructured thinking with no particular goal in mind. In fact, I think daydreaming is a distinctive mode of cognition especially well suited to the complex, 'fuzzy' problems that characterize a more turbulent business environment. Daydreaming is an effective way of coping with complexity. When a problem has a high degree of complexity, the level of detail can be overwhelming. The more one focuses on the details, the more one risks being lost in them. ... Every child knows how to daydream. But many, perhaps most, lose the capacity as they grow up.”

The 50% amount of time to freed up is high based on my experience but the concept is absolutely correct. We must have free time to think and day dream. The most valuable asset of any company are the brains and yet we constrict them constantly. Unleash your brain power and that of your organization.

John

John Maver
President
Maver Management Group
(925) 648-7561
Maver Management

The COO – The Conductor of the Business Orchestra

As the Director of the San Ramon, California Chapter of the Chief Operating Officer Business Forum, I have the opportunity to work with a number of COOs from a wide variety of industries. In addition to sharing best practices and helping with business acceleration, we work to help define the role of the COO in organizations. The CEO role is well known and many have written about it, including me in my “CEO Tips I Wish I had When I Started” series. But the COO role is different. It is complex and often varies depending upon the CEO’s particular strengths.

There is a lighthearted analogy that may be appropriate - an orchestra conductor. Musical theater and particularly the big Broadway musicals are multifaceted just like a business. The story and the score are written, comparable to a strategic plan. Many different functions are involved, generally under the leadership of the producer and the director. They co-ordinate everything right up until show time, similar to the executive team. And there is a product to sell for revenue and profitability.

Show time and the conductor takes over. This is comparable to how the COO takes over as businesses reach the market and everything comes together. The performers, the business units if you will, the production team for lighting and sound and stage movement, the product supply, and even the ushers, the customer service people, are under his direction. He starts the show by a tap of his baton to focus everyone’s attention. He then brings everyone to action and the show starts. He determines the volume of the music. The right level sets the tone of the score most effectively. If it is too loud, it will drown out the performers and their roles will be lost. If it is too soft, the melodies are lost and the “imperfections” in the casts’ voices can be uncovered. He sets the tempo to facilitate the delivery of the songs in the score. His fine hand on the controls with his baton can build up the performers on stage and make them stars. If he fails, he can destroy not only the show, but the singers as well. Careers are in his hand.

How is this similar to the COO? The COO is charged with the operation of the company. It is their responsibility to make certain that the execution of the plan is done with excellence and that all of the functions work in harmony, just like the orchestra. Certainly, all of the functions and senior executives have their roles just as the actors and actresses do in the stage production, but they must be co-ordinated well. The results of the conductor’s work can be seen in the box office receipts and the results of the COO’s work can be seen on the bottom line profitability of the company.

How important is the conductor to the production in the eyes of the cast? Here is what happens at the end of every performance. After the performers have taken their bows and received the accolades from the audience, the lead performers steps forward. They direct the cast’s and audience’s attention to the orchestra pit and to the orchestra director. Then the cast applauds the conductor. They recognize his critical importance to their success and the success of the show. The audience leaves the theater often singing or humming parts of the score and continuing the tribute to the conductor.

The orchestra conductor is a critical factor in the success of the musical business. The COO is a critical factor in the success of a business. One may very well say that there is much more that a COO does to make a company successful and that is true. However, it serves as a good analogy for the critical role of the COO.

So applause, applause.




John

John Maver
President
Maver Management Group
(925) 648-7561
Maver Management