Tag Archives: life

August 22, 2012 · 8:36 am

Good Results

There’s an expression one hears in sports sometimes that a final score is a good result.  It doesn’t pertain to your team winning (which I guess is always a good result).  Instead, it means that the outcome of the match is in line with the way the game was played. The team that dominated the game won even if it was a sloppy match or something unusual like an own goal kept it closer than it should have been.  Ugly play didn’t get in the way of the outcome.  You hear the expression in boxing too.  It means that there was no lucky one-punch knockout or the fight was stopped by a cut on the person who was winning.  The “right” guy won.

I had the same thought when the whole controversy about Jordyn Wieber happened during the Olympics.  Even though she finished fourth during the qualifying round she couldn’t compete for the all-around gymnastics gold because international rules only allow two competitors per country in the finals.  This was seen as a bad result – she played well and yet she wasn’t allowed to continue (one could ask why no one complained about the rules in advance of the Games when the US had such a deep squad but hindsight is always perfect…).

Maybe it’s the notion of fairness that’s inherent in thinking something is a good result.  That’s certainly part of it but I think it’s a bit of a misplaced focus too.  There’s a golf expression – “it’s not how, it’s how many.”  That means it doesn’t matter if you hit a soaring perfect shot to 3 feet or if you skull it along the ground to the same place.  All that matters is the final score.  As Bobby Orr said, forget about style; worry about results.  Here’s the thing: business outcomes often aren’t fair.  Idiot self-promoters get great jobs and smart, quiet people languish.   There’s a lot of focus in business on style, on “how” instead of “how many.”  Are those a “good result?”

We might ask ourselves how many good people or excellent opportunities are we overlooking because they don’t fit into our idea of perfect.  Winning ugly is still winning, right?

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August 14, 2012 · 8:43 am

Do Less, Be More Productive

Every manager I know – heck, every business I know – is having to do more with less.

English: Productivity comparison for the membe...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Fewer resources.  Fewer people.  Hopefully not fewer consultants!  That means that every person on staff needs to be more productive.  Productivity is one of those tricky numbers – it’s a ratio of output to input – that seems more attuned to an industrial age than to a time when the world is moving to an information-based economy.  Still, one thing I speak with clients about all the time are results – key performance indicators, things we can measure to gauge our progress.  Sometimes I even get paid based on those productivity measures so I’m very focused on improving them.

One thing I’ve found is that we sometimes confuse putting out more with making more value.  I think many of the technological innovations which we enjoy these days were originally designed to help improve our ability to be productive.  In fact in many ways I think they had the opposite effect.  We’ve become tools of our tools.  For example many years ago when I began in business I was very careful about how I wrote each and every document because someone would have to type that document and if we needed to make changes we had to retype the entire thing.  Once word processing became the norm it was very easy to make revisions. In theory we could put out the document more rapidly since changing a word didn’t mean retyping everything.  The reality is that we spent a lot more time focusing on formatting – how the document appeared – and making little changes – a word here and there – because we could.  We didn’t think through what we were saying before we started to write.  I’m not sure we became all that more productive.

Email is another tool that should make us productive but has the opposite effect in many cases.  It’s easy to add recipients to a chain and everyone seems to want to weigh in.  What could be a 5 minute hallway conversation turns into an 8 hour chain of notes.  We’re less productive.

I advocate doing less to be more productive.  Send less email (but have more face to face conversations).  Don’t respond to every note unless it’s directed to you.  Don’t multitask – finish one thing before starting another.  Trust your staff and delegate.  Spend more time on the 20% that produces real value and less time on the other 80%. Maybe even pretend that a lot of the “productivity tools” don’t exist. What are your productivity secrets?

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August 6, 2012 · 8:48 am

What I Learned By Getting Whupped

Yesterday was the final round of my golf club’s championship. I made it all the way to the final match during which I was beaten like a rented mule. I did announce that it was my birthday before we teed off but my opponent’s good wishes ended as soon as we hit the first shots.  I suppose it would be pretty understandable if I was upset, but I’m not. I’ve never made it this far in the competition and the loss wasn’t so much about my playing badly as it was about his playing well. Which is, of course, a business point.

These are a few of the things I learned both prior to and during the butt-kicking:

  • You can have butterflies as long as you can get them to fly in formation.  It’s amazing how much raw energy one can get from being nervous.  You might get it speaking publicly; I got it on the first tee.  My thing was to focus on it  and then to dismiss it.  Noting what’s going on isn’t the same as getting caught up in it.
  • Breaking large tasks down into small pieces really does work.  Thinking about having to win a lot of holes of golf to get to the final was kind of daunting.  Making one good swing to get to the next shot was relatively easy.  Getting revenues to double by the end of the fiscal year is hard; closing one more deal this week seems do-able.
  • Getting beaten isn’t the same as losing.  Avis made a pretty good business being number 2.  Very few categories only can support a single player.
  • Finally, I learned not to compound my mistakes.  It’s hard to hit out of deep rough 200 yards to the green and it’s a much better idea to take one’s medicine, pitch out, and try to knock it close from back in the fairway.  We often make mistakes in business but if we don’t compound them we might just make a surprise par and win the hole.

I realize playing for a club championship isn’t the PGA Tour but it was fun to get a taste of high-level competition.  Like business, it’s far more taxing mentally than it is physically, an ultimately the ability to focus mentally helps overcome the physical challenges.  Fore!

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