Showing posts with label strategy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label strategy. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Turbo Strategy

21 Powerful Ways to Transform Your Business and Boost Your Profits Quickly
By Brian Tracy

Businesses are run mostly on auto-pilot and any problem areas are only dealt with when they are already critical, but by then it may already be too late. Most business managers are too busy with the day-to-day work to sit back and look at the business critically in terms of its context and the direction it is going. Brian Tracey's Turbo Strategy provides a checklist of areas that should be regularly examined by all businesses to ensure that it remains on the right path towards success and profitability.

In the book, the author introduces practical techniques that will help you come up with strategies and more importantly turn up profit quickly:

The answers have changed – most businesses operate the way they do because they are “tried” strategies, not because it is efficient and profitable.
Flexibility is essential – from time to time, it is important to take a step back and reevaluate the situation, then do something about it.
The one true measure – two basic questions you need to ask everyday “What is working?” and “What is not working?”

Conduct a Basic Business Analysis

Whenever you go in for a complete medical exam, the doctors and nurses follow a set procedure. In the same way, there are basic business examination questions that you need to ask and answer continuously to determine the overall health of your organization. Remember the following:

The Customer as Centerpiece.
Determine What You Sell.
Define Your Competitor.
Set Clear Goals.

Design Your Ideal Future
Practice Idealization. To do this you must think of what your company would look like five years from now if everything were perfect. Then think in terms of possibilities. Are the goals you set achievable in five years?

Create a Mission Statement and Determine Your Values
A mission statement is essential to an organization because it gives meaning and purpose to the people in their daily activities and work. It inspires loyalty, commitment and become a key factor when making business decisions and when you are clear then you can easily revisit your mission statement and follow its guidelines.

Select the Right People
The two key qualities in finding the best people are that they can be counted on to get the job done well and to get it done on time. Another quality is that they should be good team players.

Market More Effectively
The four essential elements of marketing are: specialization, differentiation, segmentation, and concentration. All marketing elements are important but you should constantly evaluate what you are doing. Remember that the market is changing and changing fast! You may have to change one of your strategies or more than one at the same time.

Analyze Your Competition
You have to know your competition. You have to find out why the customers buy from them, what values and benefits do they get from buying from them. The biggest mistake you can make is to belittle your customers. You have to study them and learn from them.

Three Potential Areas of Superiority
1. Operational Excellence
2. Lead the Field
3. Be Close to the Customer

Change your Marketing Mix

Product – define your product or service in terms of what it “does” for your customers.
Price – be open to the possibility that you may have priced your products or services wrong.
Promotion – this encompasses everything you do in the process of marketing, advertising and sales.
Place – this is the location where the sale of your product takes place.

Position Your Company for Success
Social proof is a major influencing factor to determine whether or not people buy your products or services. Your reputation is the value that people will pay for. Building a brand trust requires personal experiences by people with your products or services. It is very much like a personal reputation that takes a long time to build but can be damaged or destroyed overnight with bad decisions.

Develop Strategic Business Units
The strategic business unit concept revolutionized multi-product or multi-service businesses; each of the products is grouped with similar products or services in different ways. The starting point of implementation is to have someone specifically responsible for the operations and results of the unit. To make this work, you begin by drawing up a complete business plan that would include sales revenue, costs and profitability.

Sell More Effectively The fact is that 80 percent of your markets have not yet been approached by your salespeople. No one has told them about you. Your business could be probably being selling twice as much if you could just find out how to sell it to them.

Eliminate the Bottlenecks
There are two important steps that you need to take. First, decide on your specific business goals; make them clear, measurable and time-bounded. The next step is asking the question: “why am not in that goal already?”

Reengineer Your Company
To simplify and streamline your operations so that it is more efficient, faster and more effective and therefore more profitable, you have to reduce the number of steps in each process. You have to simplify the processes and make faster and better decision.

Pump Up Your Profits Conduct a complete profit analysis on every product. You must also remember that labor has a real “opportunity” cost along with other use of other resources especially in a multi-product or multi-services business.

Focus on Results
All your customers care about is results. They do not care much about your problems with your people, products, processes or any other aspects of your business.

There are four questions that customers answer before buying the product or service. These are:
What does it cost?
What do I get for the money?
How fast do I get the benefits you promise?
How sure can I be that I will get those benefits?

Seven Steps to Personal Performance
Step 1: Set clear, specific, written goals for each important area of your business. Make them measurable and time-bound.
Step 2: Make a list of activities before you begin a day, put it on paper. The best time to do this is before you go to bed so the subconscious mind can work on your list as you sleep.
Step 3: Set priorities on the list you made. Apply the 80/20 rule and select the top 20 percent of your tasks to work on.
Step 4: Practice creative procrastination. Since there are only 24 hours in a day, decide in advance which of those tasks have little value or importance can you do away with.
Step 5: Select the one most important job and have the discipline to accomplish that first thing.
Step 6: Practice single-handling with the most important task you have identified. Resolve to work on it until it is resolved.
Step 7: Develop a sense of urgency. The faster you move, the more work you get done and the better you feel. This will create momentum

Monday, July 2, 2007

Good to Great

"Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't"
Jim Collins, co-author of ‘Built to Last'

Explore what goes into a company's transformation from mediocre to excellent. Based on hard evidence and volumes of data, the book author (Jim Collins) and his team uncover timeless principles on how the good-to-great companies like Abbott, Circuit City, Fannie Mae, Gillette, Kimberly-Clark, Kroger, Nucor, Philip Morris, Pitney Bowes, Walgreens, and Wells Fargo produced sustained great results and achieved enduring greatness, evolving into companies that were indeed ‘Built to Last'. The Collins team selected 2 sets of comparison companies:

a. Direct comparisons – Companies in the same industry with the same resources and opportunities as the good-to-great group but showed no leap in performance, which were: Upjohn, Silo, Great Western, Warner-Lambert, Scott Paper, A&P, Bethlehem Steel, RJ Reynolds, Addressograph, Eckerd, and Bank of America.

b. Unsustained comparisons – Companies that made a short-term shift from good to great but failed to maintain the trajectory, namely: Burroughs, Chrysler, Harris, Hasbro, Rubbermaid, and Teledyne

Wisdom In A Nutshell:
a. Ten out of eleven good-to-great company leaders or CEOs came from the inside. They were not outsiders hired in to ‘save' the company. They were either people who worked many years at the company or were members of the family that owned the company.

b. Strategy per se did not separate the good to great companies from the comparison groups.

c. Good-to-great companies focus on what Not to do and what they should stop doing.

d. Technology has nothing to do with the transformation from good to great. It may help accelerate it but is not the cause of it.

e. Mergers and acquisitions do not cause a transformation from good to great.

f. Good-to-great companies paid little attention to managing change or motivating people. Under the right conditions, these problems naturally go away.

g. Good-to-great transformations did not need any new name, tagline, or launch program. The leap was in the performance results, not a revolutionary process.

h. Greatness is not a function of circumstance; it is clearly a matter of conscious choice.

i. Every good-to-great company had “Level 5” leadership during pivotal transition years, where Level 1 is a Highly Capable Individual, Level 2 is a Contributing Team Member, Level 3 is the Competent Manager, Level 4 is an Effective Leader, and Level 5 is the Executive who builds enduring greatness through a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will.
j. Level 5 leaders display a compelling modesty, are self-effacing and understated. In contrast, two thirds of the comparison companies had leaders with gargantuan personal egos that contributed to the demise or continued mediocrity of the company.

k. Level 5 leaders are fanatically driven, infected with an incurable need to produce sustained results. They are resolved to do whatever it takes to make the company great, no matter how big or hard the decisions.

l. One of the most damaging trends in recent history is the tendency (especially of boards of directors) to select dazzling, celebrity leaders and to de-select potential Level 5 leaders.

m. Potential Level 5 leaders exist all around us, we just have to know what to look for.

n. The research team was not looking for Level 5 leadership, but the data was overwhelming and convincing. The Level 5 discovery is an empirical, not ideological, finding.

o. Before answering the “what” questions of vision and strategy, ask first “who” are the right people for the team.

p. Comparison companies used layoffs much more than the good-to-great companies. Although rigorous, the good-to-great companies were never ruthless and did not rely on layoffs or restructuring to improve performance.

q. Good-to-great management teams consist of people who debate vigorously in search of the best answers, yet who unify behind decisions, regardless of parochial interests.

r. There is no link between executive compensation and the shift from good to great. The purpose of compensation is not to ‘motivate' the right behaviors from the wrong people, but to get and keep the right people in the first place.

s. The old adage “People are your most important asset” is wrong. People are not your most important asset. The right people are.

t. Whether someone is the right person has more to do with character and innate capabilities than specific knowledge, skills or experience.

u. The Hedgehog Concept is a concept that flows from the deep understanding about the intersection of the following three circles:

1. What you can be best in the world at, realistically, and what you cannot be best in the world at

2. What drives your economic engine

3. What you are deeply passionate about

v. Discover your core values and purpose beyond simply making money and combine this with the dynamic of preserve the core values - stimulate progress, as shown for example by Disney. They have evolved from making short animated films, to feature length films, to theme parks, to cruises, but their core values of providing happiness to young and old, and not succumbing to cynicism remains strong.

w. Enduring great companies don't exist merely to deliver returns to shareholders. In a truly great company, profits and cash flow are absolutely essential for life, but they are not the very point of life.

"IF YOU'RE DOING SOMETHING YOU CARE DEEPLY ABOUT AND IF YOU BELIVE IN IT , IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO IMAGINE NOT TRYING TO MAKE IT GREAT"