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The Predictable Success® Blog
by Les McKeown
Read Les McKeown's personal blog on all things Predictable Success® Les's blog is freely available to everyone - you do not have to be a GPS member to read or listen. Know someone else who would enjoy reading Les's Predictable Success® Blog? Use the Tell A Colleague link at the left or bottom of this page.
Note: Unless otherwise mentioned, neither Les nor Predictable Success® has any interest in any of the resources mentioned in this blog - we just like 'em!
Click here to subscribe to The Predictable Success® Blog RSS feed

| Thursday, Apr 24, 2008 |
| CNN / The Glenn Beck Show: Protecting your Job in a Recession |
| The other day, while having lunch in Boston with an old friend from the UK, I got a call from the producers of the CNN 'Glenn Beck Show' asking me to come on the show and talk about how to protect your job in a recession.
Here's the result. You'll need to turn your speakers up (the sound's a little low, and the video is a teeny bit choppy in one section).
Enjoy!
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| Monday, Apr 14, 2008 |
| JetBlue Slides off the end of the Runway |
| So JetBlue Chairman (and founder and ex-CEO) has resigned, formally bringing to an end any chance for his once high-flying company to stay for long in Predictable Success® (see earlier blog entry below for the backstory).
As it slides inexorably into Treadmill, watch for increasingly bureaucratic hoops in dealing with JetBlue, a gradual erosion of comfort and inflight options (probably accompanied by an attention-diverting rebranding exercise), and possibly a 'merger' with one or more of the other, more traditional low-cost airlines.
My money is on an acquisition by Southwest, and a return by Neeleman to some role in the combined organization. Watch this space. |
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| Wednesday, Jan 09, 2008 |
| Starbucks Hits Treadmill |
The decision by Howard Schultz to reinstate himself as Starbuck's chief executive highlights the difficulties faced by many once high-flying organizations when growth stalls.
In Predictable Success® terms, Starbucks has hit Treadmill.
To succeed in pulling Starbucks back to Predictable Success®, Schultz' return must accomplish six goals that most returning leaders overlook.
Click here to read the full text of our press release on this topic. |
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| Friday, Dec 14, 2007 |
| Generation CrY? |
| This year sees the first substantial arrival of so-called 'Gen Y' into the workplace (they're the kids that were serving you burgers and looking for summer internships during the last three year).
Are they different from their predecessors (GenX and the Baby Boomers), or are people just...well, ...people?
I contributed to an online debate on the subject. Here's the link to the resulting article. |
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| Wednesday, Nov 14, 2007 |
| What's Your Decision-Making Energy Conversion Ratio? |
In Michael Pollan's fascinating book 'The Omnivore's Dilemma ' (not directly a Predictable Success-related book, but a worthwhile read nonetheless), he points out that in the US, it takes between seven and ten calories of energy (in growing, processing, preparing and distributing the food) to put one calorie of food on your plate.
That led me to think about the decision-making 'energy conversion ratio' in the organizations I work with: Do you have a manager, a peer, a team member who's decision-making 'energy conversion ratio' is higher than 1:1?
Someone, in other words, in whom you have to invest five, seven, ten times more energy in managing them, than the organization gets back in return?
If so, what are you going to do about it? |
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| Tuesday, Nov 06, 2007 |
| Orientation Up in the Air |
This month's Hemispheres magazine (United's in-flight mag) has a great article about employee orientation - particularly the role of senior executives in making it a worthwhile exercise.
A recent study by staffing firm Robert Half International found that a third of employers fail to provide a formal orientation program for new hires. For those who do, more than 50 percent of employees rated the orientation as anywhere from "not effective" to "only somewhat effective."
I contributed substantially to the article - but the other contributions are right on the mark as well :)
CLICK HERE TO READ THE HEMISPHERES ARTICLE |
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| Monday, Oct 22, 2007 |
| Which One Is Yours...? |
| Mission Statements can be useful, or useless. There's rarely an in-between.
I love the example at the start of Guy Kawasaki's enjoyable 'Art of the Start' presentation:
Useful or useless. Which one is yours...?
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| Tuesday, Oct 16, 2007 |
| Which customer are you tee-ing off? |
| An interesting set of occurrences yesterday:
1. An email arrived from Microsoft, with this clickable link right at the top:
"Read this issue online if you can't see the images or are using Outlook 2007"
Huh? Microsoft are sending emails that can't be read by their own software?
2. Coming out of the Post Office, I found someone's credit card lying on the ground. I called the 800 number on the back to report the lost card. The operator asks for my name, address and telephone number. I tell her that that information is irrelevant, I'm merely reporting the lost card, and all she needs to know is the card number and the cardholder's name.
The operator proceeds to tell me that it is 'mandatory' for me to supply her with my contact details (remember, I'm not even a customer of these people - merely an innocent bystander trying to help), and that unless I do supply those details, she cannot report the card as lost. [I hung up and cut the card in pieces.]
Lesson? You know you're in Bureaucracy when not only are you providing terrible customer service, you're in fact actively trying to tee your customers off. |
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| Monday, Oct 01, 2007 |
| Pecha Kucha - How to make a Predictable Success(r) Presentation |
| Two Tokyo-based architects (!) have developed a presentation format that they call 'Pecha Kucha' (Japanese for 'the sound of conversation'). When Seth Godin, Dan Pink, Wikipedia and Business 2.0 all glom on to something in the same month, it's at least worth taking a look at
The format is pretty simple - and pretty much right on track with the Predictable Success(r) methodology on group communication: 20 slides, 20 seconds each - 6 minutes 40 seconds to complete your presentation and sit back down. Cool.
Check out the Wikipedia article here.
Other Pecha Kucha links from Google.
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| Thursday, Sep 27, 2007 |
| Watching Microsoft Battle Treadmill |
| For organizations in Treadmill, a vital step in recovering Predictable Success® is to institutionalize an entrepreneurial, creative, risk-taking culture - diluting the dependence on individual charismatic 'E's.
This is a particularly difficult step for founder/owners to take, as it often feels like their very identity is being threatened. As it is also usually achieved by external appointments - recruiting new (often younger) executives to head up divisions, departments teams and groups - the process, if successful, is also accompanied by large, if slow, shifts in the corporate culture (if the culture doesn't change, the new appointees are usually 'rejected by the organism' over time, and the organization remains in Treadmill, or worse, slides down into Bureaucracy).
It's fascinating to watch Microsoft - locked in one of the classic Treadmill / Bureaucracy struggles of all time - play this out in real time.
The recent (last 24 months at time of writing) appointment of new managers from organizations such as aQuantive Brian McAndrews, Senior VP, Advertiser and Publisher Solutions), Electronic Arts (Don Mattrick, Senior VP, Interactive Entertainment Business), Ask.com (Steve Berkowitz (Senior VP, Online Services) Groove Networks (Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect) shows that they're certainly trying to make this happen. Time will tell whether or not they will be successful.
My own view? I think it might be too late for them to succeed - but I sure as heck would never bet against them. |
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Starbucks Hits Treadmill
The decision by Howard Schultz to reinstate himself as Starbuck's chief executive highlights the difficulties faced by many once high-flying organizations when growth stalls. To succeed, Schultz' return must accomplish six goals that most returning leaders overlook. . . . Read more
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Don Imus, MSNBC, CBS and Predictable Success®
Yesterday's decision by MSNBC to stop syndication of the 'Imus In The Morning' radio show, and CBS's continued concern over their relationship with Mr Imus highlights a difficult issue faced by every business leader, and provides three key lessons for everyone who manages 'star performers'. . . . Read more
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Draining The Swamp
A prerequisite of Predictable Success(tm) is to be clearly focused on what gets done, by whom, and when. Yet most of us are quite the opposite - drowning in a sea of commitments, to-do lists, black holes and open loops. Here's how to fix that . . . Read more
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The 3-Word Sentence That Gets Stuff Done
Does your project list look like an airline departure board during a snowstorm...'Delayed', 'Delayed', Delayed..'? Are your managers constantly committing to stuff that just doesn't get finished? Here's the single sentence - with just three words - that will clear that departure board and Get Stuff Done. Learn it. Use it. Accelerate your Predictable Success(tm) . . . Read more
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The Two People You Need To Fire Today
In completing the transition to Predictable Success® there a couple of Rites of Passage - tough decisions that will threaten to derail your progress - even to the extent of sending you back to Whitewater. Here's the first, and most difficult - firing the 2 people who stand in your way . . . Read more
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Use Your P-E Ratio for Crisis Management
Les McKeown
No - not your "Price-Earnings Ratio"... When faced with a 'must-be-fixed-today' emergency - particularly an external one (with customers, other stakeholders, press etc.), it's vital to ensure the issue is dealt with by the right team members. Here's your Predictable Success(tm) guide to getting it right first time... . . . Read more
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Sticking With The Strategy: Tiger Woods -v- Phil Mickelson
There's been a lot of talk in recent months about the relative brilliance of Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson. After his Masters victory a couple of months ago, it was suggested by a number of sports pundits that Phil was about to eclipse Tiger as the best player in the world.
Two lessons in Predictable Success(tm) changed all that
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What's the Next Step?
In Dana Point, CA for a 2-day client workshop on The 9 Key Transitions.
During the second morning, we had a great discussion on why so many great decisions never get implemented. Here's what we concluded... . . . Read more
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Hitting The Bulls-Eye
I played darts quite a bit, as a kid (which may explain a lot). As I can best recall, in the hundreds of games I played, I hit the bulls-eye somewhere between 6 and 8 times. But I only hit it on purpose once
. . . Read more
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Alignment >> Be Like Water
Today I'm in beautiful Annapolis, Maryland for a client company off-site. As I watch the boats bob in the bay by the Naval Academy, I'm reminded of the lesson I learned recently about unnecessarily hard work we often do to ensure alignment in our organizations. . . . Read more
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