My Top 5 Tips For Larger Organizations

My Top 5 Tips For Larger Organizations

Here are my personal top 5 recommendations for larger organizations wishing to regain Predictable Success® in 2007.

1. FIND YOUR CHANGE AGENT

Large organizations slide past Predictable Success® into the 'Treadmill' stage of development for one simple reason - the [V]isionary (risk-taking, long-term, entrepreneurial, status-quo-challenging) mindset is quashed.

To get back to Predictable Success®, your biggest challenge is to revitalize that 'V' function in your organization.

Start by finding someone you can trust as a change agent - someone who will effectively challenge the precepts you're currently running the business by, in a creative, constructive, way.

As an interesting example, see this short article about John Udell's new job at Microsoft (an organization that badly needs to do all of this).

2. REWARD 'QUALITY QUESTIONING', NOT 'LAZY LISTENING'

This means encouraging people to question as much as they listen (you've probably done a great job getting people to listen - so much so, you rarely hear a discouraging word...)

In fact, you want your folks to start the path back to Predictable Success® by questioning more than they listen - for a while anyway.

3. STOP SERVING KOOL-AID

The biggest single reason that you're not hearing quality questions from your folks, is because you're feeding them so much corporate kool-aid -

Start finding shades of grey...

• That 'company mantra' that everyone has to 'get', or they don't 'fit';
  
  
• The 'unchallengeable' metrics that must be unquestionably delivered;
  
  
• The underlying assumptions about your operating environment that are 'not up for discussion'.

Of course, these were (and still are) important factors in getting that alignment and focus you needed to get into Predictable Success®, but if your organization, division, department or team on the slide through Treadmill, or even worse, verging on Bureaucracy, then the blunt fact is, you've overcooked it.

Ease off on the binary, 'black and white' stuff. You need to start finding shades of grey, allowing you (and your key people) to get comfortable with more ambiguity.

4. BLOW UP YOUR UNPRODUCTIVE PROCESSES.

What's your most unproductive process / meeting?

Kill it. Today.

Kill it quickly, and simply: "From today, we will no longer be holding the weekly Murfle Review Meeting." You don't need to explain. Everyone will know why.

5. MAKE VACUUMS

That process or meeting you just killed? Leave it killed.

You don't need to fill the vacuum with some equally turgid, artificial activity. Let the space breathe.

Find other ways to put empty spaces into your people's activities. They're all working too hard to think, let alone think creatively.

Stop scheduling, metric-ing and meeting-ing people to death. If you want Predictable Success®, you need organic vibrancy and flexibility - the rigidity and brittleness you've currently got won't cut it.

Good luck!
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