Management

Getting a grip on management

Here’s a fascinating fact about kettles. As you put heat energy into a kettle of water, the temperature goes up steadily, just as you’d expect. However, when it reaches 100 degrees, the temperature stops going up even though you’re still putting energy into it. It’s like it’s hit a glass ceiling. The reason? Well, the water uses the heat energy to transform into steam - to become bigger, better, and able to do some real work.

I see something similar happening in business all the time. Managers and business owners work hard on their business, growing it and developing it. But many seem to hit a glass ceiling. They find themselves working at full capacity, often reaching overwhelm as they work all hours. They think they can hire people with specialist skills to give the business an extra shove, but often this just adds cost and achieves little, sometimes with the business even slipping back.

In other words, the energy going in is just not lifting the business. It’s as if it’s hit a glass ceiling which its just not possible to see through properly. So what’s the answer?

The trick is to look through the glass ceiling and see where you want to be, and to expand into something that you may already have seen, or that’s different in a powerful new way.

Its vital for all proprietors to take some time, to step back, and look at the future of their company. The time spent seeing where they want to be, and how to organise and manage the way there, will be richly rewarded.

Look through the glass ceiling, and watch your business go through the roof!!

With best wishes

Let’s start with a question: Do you have a strategy?

Trying to do a little better is not a business strategy. You see, when you think about it almost everybody’s strategy is invariably to do the same as everyone else but just to try to do it a little better.

And if you think about this a little more you’ll realise that this is not a strategy at all. How many business owners have fallen victim to this line of thinking, acting like an opportunist mistakenly believing that they are being strategic? Even though increasing revenue and profit they invariably work harder than ever before - often feeling frustrated, overwhelmed and exhausted in the process.

If this is you, then you have most likely been working harder than you need to for a fraction of the results you deserve.

What is a great strategy?
A great strategy beats the odds; because in the face of uncertainty, obstacles, and risk you decide what course of action leads to success. Indeed a great strategy is about knowing what path to take, what course to follow, what unique position to hold and what means will achieve the end result.

But where is the starting point? It is this; successful strategies are built on ‘creative insight’ and ‘doing what you do best’.

We will examine the subject of ‘doing what you do best’ in Module 4, below, but lets start with ‘creative insight’.

Before we do though, I want to begin with a caveat to emphasise the supremacy of creative insight. The issue concerns business planning. Many public and private institutions advocate business planning as a panacea for successful business; ‘sort the plan out and off you go’ is their cry! But it’s as well to remember that detailed business planning necessarily fails, due to frictions inevitably encountered in the planning process: chance events, imperfections in execution, and the independent will of customers and indeed competitors.

Instead, human elements: ambition, leadership, people, morale, and above all intuition, or ‘coup d’oeil’; (pronounced KOO-DOY) a quick recognition of truth — or opportunity, as the French say, are paramount.

The finest business owners and managers know that their biggest opportunity – and means of success – is rooted in a combination of creative insight and competence - not on today’s ‘rocket science’ or in technical advances that everyone is endorsing! They set only the broadest of objectives and develop profit producing activities to build up revenues based on the life-time value of their customers.

But the overwhelming majority of business owners are opportunity seekers! They have no insight and therefore no goal, no strategy, no business design, no management skills and no plan to carry the business forward to where it is intended.