Business

Rev 3

Contents

Best Practice

Collective Bargaining

Data

Enterprise Architecture

Equality

Loyalty

Manager or Leader

Methodologies

Mistakes

My Way?

Offshoring

Outsourcing

Recruitment

Rules and Regulations

TQM

Transformation

Best Practice

Best Practice is just an excuse to copy someone else rather than use your own innovation and initiative to create a process that works for you in your particularly specialised circumstances ie you and your staff.

‘Best practise’ takes time to consider and publish. In the meantime, the market sector leaders on which it is based have themselves moved on. Why implement what your competitors were doing three years ago?

One for the long grass.

Collective Bargaining

(And similar communist rhetoric)

“But that’s just blackmail, Mr Bergstrom! That’s not legal!”
 “Only sometimes Tasmin, but it depends what you call it. Blackmail is illegal. Collective Bargaining is not – unfortunately”

(Excerpt from ‘Steve’s Year’)

Data

Data – its everywhere. And more and more companies are collecting it. Some legally, others less so.

So, if you are in the business of collecting data at least have some idea what you’re going to do with it. Its expensive so use it, unless your only reason for collecting it is to sell it – and even then you need some idea of your target market.

For in-house users, you need the vision and inspiration to invent or identify a commercial advantage that can be gained from a correct interpretation of the data. Analysing it using sophisticated mathematics is one thing; understanding what change to implement based on the results is quite another.

Ensure you are in control of your infrastructure. The more data you collect, the more infrastructure you need. The temptation would be to outsource this, but that can become expensive. You need a lot of it, and then it needs backup, and mirroring and simultaneous update systems and zero downtime resilience . Wait, no, it doesn’t. But if the operator of your infrastructure is being paid by the box, then there’s a cast iron guarantee that you’re going to be paying for more (and more) boxes.

Collect the data you need, not the data you can.

Enterprise Architecture

Origin - Enterprise Architecture has its origins in IT. It goes something like this.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I shall begin.

Once upon a time there was an IT guy who could actually think.

As usual, he was mindlessly building the system that had loosely been described to him by a bored business analyst who had been asked to provide a workaround for a technical problem in an unnecessary step in a value destroying process.

And what he thought about was 'How is this actually helping the business, and how does it fit with that other workaround I coded last week for those other guys in the business who are doing something very similar' 

And he wondered 'How does this all fit together' and he wondered who knew these answers.

But when he started asking these questions, he got a D in his review and was told ' If you answered all of that, there would be a fraction of the work to do in this IT department, and that would mean we'd need a fraction of the staff, and that would make you and lots of other IT guys redundant'

But worse than that - it would transfer control and power from the IT department, to the business units - Oh! Heresy!  

Looking at the entire Company or Corporation as a single entity is Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise Architecture (EA) has its roots in IT. But it isn’t IT.

EA doesn’t care which billing system is used (that’s Applications Architecture), but it will dictate the features that are necessary.

EA doesn’t care what hardware is used, servers, disks, backup regimes (that’s Infrastructure Architecture), but will dictate response times and availability.

EA doesn’t care who the outsourced suppliers are, but will dictate which processes are outsourced (That’s a competitive tender)

EA is about how to achieve results from processes

EA is about business interfaces

EA will control IT development and supply, process definition and implementation, and organisational design

EA is the corporate Design Authority. It is sponsored from the highest level (CEO or Chairman) and its objective is to maintain corporate efficiency and profitability over and above individual business unit efficiency.

Equality

Am I a fan of equality? No. I actively disapprove of equality in every way, shape and form.

Is it not about time that everyone simply recognised that every single one of us is an individual – each of us will be better than others in some respects, and will be not so good in other activities. Everyone is different. It's easily seen, it's always been the case, but somewhere along the line someone somewhere has dreamt up the notion that we should all be the same. Except we're not, so we're expected to try to be the same, except we don't want that. It's unnatural. What we want is to be different, to have different hair styles, wear different clothes, be different people.

Neither should we all be treated equally. Career criminals should be treated more harshly than first offenders.

No. Kick this garbage into the long grass. Be yourself, be different and do not even try to implement equality. Equality breeds subservience and subjugation. Differences lead to innovation and progress.

No one should be encouraged to be the same, to be equal. Everyone should aspire to be exceptional.

Loyalty

If you think that everyone is working in the best interests of the company then you are either deluded or too junior to know any better.

Junior staff work largely to the company agenda. Senior staff work to their own agenda while being paid by the company. It is worth remembering this when presenting any proposals or ideas to senior staff. Don’t assume that they’ll be in favour of it just because its best for the company. Keep one eye on ‘what’s in it for them’ or you will be sadly disappointed.

Manager or Leader

 Many companies confuse Leadership with Management, and Leaders with Managers. And they do this deliberately because they are mainly staffed with Managers whose egos tell them they should be leaders.

A Leader is a visionary, but the vision is not unattainable

A Leader knows what they’re talking about – they know where they want the organisation to go and who they want to go with them, and what the obstacles will be

They can explain this in terms you’ll understand, using language and words that you’ll recognise. The message won’t be disguised in a jargon that is specific to a different level within the organisation, and that means a Leader must be able to talk the language of all grades.

The Leader talks sense. Because their solution and vision resolves real issues that are giving problems, even (or especially) when these problems have not been specifically identified

Leaders are born. You cannot train someone to be a Leader.

(Although I know of one company that was swindled out of several hundred thousand pounds paying a consultancy for Leadership Training which was actually their management Course with the headings changed)

So what does a Leader not do?

A Leader has no use for Benchmarks or Best Practice. Benchmarks will only compare to other organisations, they will not move the organisation forward. Achieving Best Practise is only catching up with where the opposition were when the Best Practise was published, usually several years ago. No, a leader has vision to take their organisation to a new level, and has the internal invention to create that vision for themselves.

Leaders have no need for Methodologies. All these do is try to reduce a complex process to a series of simple steps so that it can be followed and implemented by people who have little or no comprehension of the whole picture and what the real issues are and will be.

A Leader does not Manage. They don’t need to. Because once the Leader has explained the objectives and the route (destination and journey, if you want to be clichéd ), volunteers will step forward and make things happen. The team – however loosely you define it – will be able to make progress and take decisions on their own, because they understand the vision.

The Leader will identify many of the obstacles they should anticipate along the way, but the team will find their own solutions

One of the major differences between managers and leaders is simply that Managers are focused on delivering their objective. Leaders are focussed on their team delivering the objective for them. Some Leaders are managers, Few Managers are Leaders

Management is often a matter of  big stick, fear and domination. And, incidentally, you'll find that many managers are managers because they prefer to focus on domination. This can be for many reasons, but an inferiority complex in a prominent one, particularly amongst women. - that is, ‘I feel that you may think you're better then me, so I have to prove you're wrong’.

Methodologies 

- Especially Project Methodologies

The purpose of a Methodology is to reduce the task to a series of simplified processes, with the objective of ensuring that any doughnut head can do the job. The amount of money that has been wasted by employing mindless morons to follow a Methodology like sheep is incalculable. Not including the extortionate sums paid to Consultancies to provide the initial brainwashing (sorry, Training). The issue only surfaces when something goes wrong and no-one involved has the slightest clue how to discover why or when the problem occurred and even less chance of correcting it. They’ve followed the recipe, step by step and that’s all they can do.

The next step is to bring in a bunch of Consultants who can think outside the box and discover a solution – these wouldn’t be the same Consultants that recommended the Methodology and provided the initial training in the first place, would it?

Why would this published generalised process be the efficient solution to your specialised issue?

Throw all methodologies to the wind and, instead, employ someone with a modicum of intelligence and a bit of nous.

Mistakes

Oh my !

So much has been written about learning from mistakes. So you need to make mistakes in order to learn and get things right?

Oh my, what bollocks.

You don’t need to jump off a cliff to recognise that you’re near the edge and should take a different direction before its too late. 

And that’s if you’re a reactive person. If, however, you can think and plan – and not many can – then you will know where the cliff is, and plan to avoid it – or fit yourself with the appropriate hang glider.

Making mistakes and learning from them does not mean you’ve learned how to not make mistakes. If you’re the sort of person prone to making mistakes – most of which are avoidable through sensible planning – then get an accomplice, someone who can independently and knowledgeably check the direction each step of the way.

There is a fundamental difference between making a mistake, and choosing a course of action which subsequently turns out to be suboptimal.

Having a key employee walk out and quit because you yell at them is a mistake. Adding up next year’s budget incorrectly is a mistake. These can and should be avoided by the appliance of common sense.

However, finding yourself at a cross-roads and not knowing which direction to take may lead to the second scenario. You choose a path – even if there is little evidence to suggest that one is better than the others – and you monitor the progress. Soon it becomes evident that this is the wrong direction. So you return to the cross-roads, or as near as you can get considering that the world will have moved on in many respects, and you choose a different path. This new path may be better or it may be worse, but progress along it will tell you. These forays into the unknown are experiments, rather than mistakes and careful monitoring will ensure you do not make the mistake of following the wrong path for too long

Mistakes are all avoidable, and should be avoided through planning and foresight. They are not needed in order to learn.

Having said all that: If you do make a mistake, it is another mistake not to analyse where you went wrong and learn from that.

But be aware : you can only implement this learning ‘next time’ if there is a next time.

My Way?

“I did it my way” 

 “By Bobby Darrin”

“I thought it was Frank Sinatra?”

Yes, Sinatra sang it, and in his style, so yes he did do it his way. But Darrin wrote it. He invented it and expressed it his way. Loads of people have copied Sinatra, and then claimed it was ‘their way’. And then they’re credited with the end result. And that’s one of the main issues with companies. They’re stuffed full of people who DO things. And that’s really quite easy when you are told what needs doing. And when they do it they do it their way. The more important part and the part that is usually forgotten is the inventor, the designer, the architect, the person who has the original thought of what needs to be done.  If that person or these people exist in a company, and often with a small company it’s the person who established it and is now CEO or MD, then that company has the opportunity to grow successfully. If that person (s) does not exist, as is common in large organisations, they simply evolve into being reactive. Their management layers are stocked with do-ers who react ‘their way’, but with no foresight of what may need to be done, no vision and no probability of implementing the best solution for the future. Reward is for sorting problems, not for avoiding problems - although that would be more profitable for the company. Successful companies need to evolve ahead of the curve, but in that direction. Those that have suffered disaster have not employed the visionaries who can get it right, and operate sub-optimally. In a competitive world, this is the beginning of the end. In the non competitive world, such as utilities, this is the norm. 

Offshoring

Offshoring is getting part of your business to operate overseas.

It’s immoral.

The country’s economy is dependant on money going round in circles, being passed from one person to the next.

Like this – you get paid (and pay tax). You spend some of that money in Tescos (and pay vat). The checkout operator gets paid some of that money (and pays tax). She spends some of that money in the beauty salon (and pays VAT). Tesco’s pays corporation tax. The beautician buys petrol for her car (and pays VAT and Fuel Tax)…

You get the idea. At each stage the Government takes its slice in tax of one kind or another and provides services. These services are provided by public servants and supply contracts which employ people – who pay tax and everything goes round in circles, all fuelling the UK economy.

Until you offshore. At that point the money-go-round moves to that other country and develops wealth there instead of here.

Anyone caught offshoring work should be tried for treason.

Outsourcing

There is no business case for Outsourcing.

The Outsourcing company will have its own overheads and Management tiers. This is all paid for by you, the customer. How is it possible that they can do this work and pay their own costs, for less than you can employ these same ground level workers and do the work yourself. It cannot and does not add up.

So where’s the catch? The catch is that the work outsourced is not the same work as would be done in house. As an example, consider IT. In house the IT team would do analysis, programming and project implementation. They would also provide advice and guidance on business process and down stream effects. Outsourcing the IT will only deliver the specified project. All these other things would be excluded – and then done in house (Often under a different name and budget to cover up the commercial failure).

Ah yes, but the Outsourcing company are specialists in that area.

Ok. Hire yourself a specialist

Recruitment

Be wary of interviews.

Your job in conducting an interview is to establish if the candidate will be suitable for the vacancy you have. That is: is this candidate better than all the rest, and if so, in which respects?

One of the reasons for the interview is so that you can find someone who will fit into your team and either replicate or compliment the skill set of your other team members.

Qualifications are relatively easily checked, but there’s so much more to it than that. Of course you need someone who is qualified to do the job, but do you want someone who is joining your team because they see this as a medium term move or just a short term stepping stone to something better. You have a responsibility to your team not to hire someone that will inflict pressure on them – such as taking maternity leave immediately after completing their training.

And hobbies! Are they all individual like marathon running which would indicate that they’re not really a team player. Would they proactively help each other because if they’d just sit there and watch each other flounder into making mistakes then the resentment would spread around the office like a mould.

Ah but! You’re not supposed to ask questions like that because it could discriminate unfairly!

Interviews by definition are discriminatory! That’s their purpose. And its not unfair discrimination. It’s a perfectly reasonable way to protect the rest of your team from having to pick up the pieces. So, you need to ask these questions before you take the risky step of hiring someone. If they don't want to answer, they can say so - but then that tells you they may not the kind of open, sociable team player you want to hire in the first place.

Rules and Regulations

Do try to avoid them! They’re so restrictive in getting things done, so ignore them – until you get found out by someone suitably senior to matter. In which case you should claim extenuating circumstances – this includes a description of the company benefits of doing it your way instead. Anyone senior enough to matter will be more interested in corporate profit.

TQM

100% happy customers

What’s the function of your business ? No! Don’t explain what you do, or what market sector you’re in or even how tough it is out there in the big wide world.  No, the purpose of your business is to make money. If you think the purpose of your business is to make objects – candles, cars, widgets, then it’s a hobby and if you think the purpose of your business is to make people happy, then you’re running a charity.

In a business, happy customers, and the output from the production line are simply a means to an end.

Perhaps if you’re of a certain age you’ll remember TQM - Total Quality Management. It was a manufacturing idea in the latter part of last century. The concept was that by producing faultless goods (eg Toyota, at that time) then less would be spent on after-sales service and recalls, and happy customers would generate more sales, increase market share and ensure repeat business. It worked.

But then the concept was expanded to customer service. That is, pleasing all the people all of the time. 10 out of 10 for customer service. 100%!! But there were the few heretics (I wonder who that might have been?) suggesting that more than 7 out of 10 was simply wasting money. How many of your customers are going to score your service (beware – service not product) as 7 out of 10 and then issue a complaint about it? How many would go to the opposition?

So sorting your Business Architecture out to be perfect is simply not an achievable goal. Its not commercially viable to achieve it and its not sustainable – because processes always evolve – even if you got close. What’s important is sorting out the major issues and those are the ones that are losing you customers and costing you most profit.

And anything more than 7 out of 10 for service is pouring money down the drain.

Transformation

Transformation – how many companies have actually achieved this in any part of their organisation? Precious few, and for obvious reasons when you think about it. A transformation would fundamentally change the processes that are followed. This involves not only wholesale retraining of the staff, but also persuading them to think differently with different high level objectives.

Most companies actually work. That is, they make a profit from whichever line of business they follow. And most companies evolve. Some evolution is due to staff gaining experience and implementing efficiency shortcuts. Some is in changing processes to meet market demands.

But that hardly qualifies as Transformation

On the whole, the only people  who like change are Consultants. And even then its limited to other people changing. Change means they have to think differently about what they do, and that’s harder than just doing whatever it is the way they all did it yesterday and the day before. Evolutionary steps are small and can be readily assimilated. Major change – Transformation - is seldom effective because it can not be readily understood by the ground level staff.

I was at one major event where the Consultant was presenting the ‘new’ processes which would be operational when the ‘Transformation’ went live. She was nearing the end and the 200 staff had listened patiently, when one of the supervisors stood up and interrupted with

“I’m sorry, but you’ve got it all wrong. That’s not the way we do things round here”

However, there are exceptions. I know of one company where every manager made their set target and was paid their due bonus. Except the company overall made a loss. That case demands Transformation. But with a company culture so obviously flawed, would the management ever implement it?

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