“Instead of asking…Which choice will maximize my ROI? We ask instead, Given the core competencies of my organization and the assets under it’s control, how can I best direct the organization to serve? Which products or services could we produce that would best enable my community to flourish?”

At first take, I asked how you can ignore profit? Well, you cant. The argument here is that profit is what helps the business attract sufficient capital to continue growing and enabling greater and greater levels of community flourishing and service.

These two compelling questions are inspiring my actions on a daily basis. How would your world change if you focused on these two questions in lieu of maximizing ROI?

Post from: Joe Budde Jr. More about business operations and Joe can be found at his blog.

Profit and Maximizing Shareholder Return Fail to Inspire

Selected Thomas Merton quotes as an epilogue to Jerry Colonna’s guest post on A VC:

1.  “One of the chief obstacles to this perfection of selfless charity, is the selfish anxiety to get the most out of everything, to be a brilliant success in our own eyes and in the eyes of other men. We can only get rid of this anxiety by being content to miss something in almost everything we do. We cannot master everything, taste everything, understand everything, drain every experience to its last dregs. But if we have the courage to let almost everything else go, we will probably be able to retain the one thing necessary for us -whatever it may be. If we are too eager to have everything, we will almost certainly miss even the one thing we need.
   Happiness consists in finding out precisely what the ‘one thing necessary’ may be, in our lives, and in gladly relinquishing all the rest. For then, by a divine paradox, we find that everything else is given us together with the one thing we needed. “ – from No Man is an Island
2. “All men seek peace first of all with themselves. That is necessary, because we do not naturally find rest even in our own being. We have to learn to commune with ourselves before we can communicate with other men and with God. A man who is not at peace with himself necessarily projects his interior fighting into the society of those he lives with, and spreads a contagion of conflict all around him. Even when he tries to do good to others his efforts are hopeless, since he does not know how to do good to himself. In moments of wildest idealism he may take it into his head to make other people happy: and in doing so he will overwhelm them with his own unhappiness. He seeks to find himself somehow in the work of making others happy. Therefore he throws himself into the work. As a result he gets out of the work all that he put into it: his own confusion, his own disintegration, his own unhappiness. “ – from No Man is an Island
   

1. “The deep secrecy of my own being is often hidden from me by my own estimate of what I am. My idea of what I am is falsified by my admiration for what I do. And my illusions about myself are bred by contagion from the illusions of other men. We all seek to imitate one another’s imagined greatness.If I do not know who I am, it is because I think I am the sort of person everyone around me wants to be. Perhaps I have never asked myself whether I really wanted to become what everybody else seems to want to become. Perhaps if I only realized that I do not admire what everyone seems to admire, I would really begin to live after all. I would be liberated from the painful duty of saying what I really do not think and of acting in a way that betrays God’s truth and the integrity of my own soul.” - from “No Man is an Island”
   

How can we enable each other to become more fully ourselves?  How can we enable our wives/girlfriends be more fully themselves and for them to do likewise to us?

Post from: Joe Budde Jr. More about business operations and Joe can be found at his blog.

Thomas Merton Quotes: The Epilogue to Jerry Colonna’s guest post on A VC

“…Life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers…We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn’t it?”

Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts

I ventured out today. Booked a ticket to the Storyline conference. We were able to grab a group of 5 awesome guys to head out to Portland together.

Have you ventured out recently?

Post from: Joe Budde Jr. More about business operations and Joe can be found at his blog.

Let’s Venture Out: Storyline Conference

So after thinking about this all week, I wondered what questions will help me determine if my drive is healthy.  Thankfully,  Michael Hyatt posted two questions that leaders should ask to determine what is driving them:

1. Am I using my strengths for the good of the project or the organization, or am I mainly seeking affirmation from outside sources like my boss or peers?
2. What is my true motivation for working on this project? Is it for the sake of others and the bigger picture or just to elevate my own status?

Now, I’m off to act on them.  My goal is to spend the day for the sake of others and the bigger picture.  Tomorrow, I’ll wake up and try again.  It’ll take training, but the great thing is that we can choose to be teachable.

Today, I’m choosing to be taught.  What about you? How would you answer these questions?

Post from: Joe Budde Jr. More about business operations and Joe can be found at his blog.

Should we be Driven by Personal or Organizational Success?

So why do we continue to measure our success with static measures? It may be fun to know how many Starbucks stores there are (17,009 in 2010) or the average revenue per store, but I’d rather know the percentage of those stores that have revenues that are higher than their three year averages. This type of measure helps us understand the direction of the stores – growing or shrinking.

Another effective dynamic measurement is to apply a cohort analysis to examine groups trends. Analyze groups of customers, stores or members in any grouping to show how different groupings compare.

While it may be a bit NSFW, OkCupid, an online dating site, uses its massive profile database to chart and graph a wonderfully told story on its blog, OkTrends. However un-sexy our own data may be, there are some lessons to be learned from how they use dynamic measures and cohort anaylsis to tell stories.

The ability to build measureable triggers in our business processes is paramount to building businesses that can be measured directionally and further support our ability to achieve our objectives. Whether we choose an outcome measure or a process measure. The difference between these two types of measurement points are for another day.

Post from: Joe Budde Jr. More about business operations and Joe can be found at his blog.

Directional vs. Static Key Performance Indicators

You can’t look a big problem too directly in the eye. You have to approach it somewhat obliquely. But you have to adjust the angle just right: you have to be facing the big problem directly enough that you catch some of the excitement radiating from it, but not so much that it paralyzes you. You can tighten the angle once you get going, just as a sailboat can sail closer to the wind once it gets underway. [Emphasis mine]

Just a bit of a Thursday attitude change toward projects.

Post from: Joe Budde Jr. More about business operations and Joe can be found at his blog.

Catch it, but dont be Paralyzed

Picture via cliff1066 cc and flickr

“Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable”
- President Dwight D. Eisenhower

The more I experience in business and leadership, the more I realize that planning is both worthless and invaluable.  Dwight D. Eisenhower said it best:  ”In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”  While I don’t believe president Eisenhower is saying we shouldn’t bother planning, I do believe the statement does lend itself to viewing planning as a means of helping a team to learn the information necessary to execute and frequently adjust a project’s course.

President Eisenhower has created intentional gray space to allow his team to plan and adjust accordingly as seen fit as new information is gathered.  This shouldn’t mean that project managers outline every second and the minutia of a product.  I don’t think I am the only one that thinks my bathroom breaks should not be scheduled on a gantt chart!

As leaders we should build opportunities into projects that allow us to adjust course and allow our teams to innovate.  But that also does not mean we should allow operations to continue as if there is no plan.  Highlighting the large tasks and general outlines of tasks will help to reduce the ambiguity of a project and enable higher levels of innovation.  These opposing forces of rigidity and open space certainly creates a gray space  between planning activity that is seemingly useless and activity that matters.

Because of reasonable planning exercises, I have found myself more prepared to do battle and able to accomplish more in a shorter amount of time.

I’ve found three areas where I can embrace planning gray areas:
1. Vetting Financial plans:  Back of the napkin analysis is just as good as weeks worth of spreadsheet work, especially when we arrive at about the same result.
2. Long and medium term project plan development:  Embracing the gray areas while developing project plans allows for the insertion of relationship building and intention determination.
3. Assessing:  Allowing gray space in assessment of a new project, plan or measurable action allows for the creation of measures that creatively help to determine the next steps of the project.

The real trick is not to run to or from planning, but to utilize it in a way that advances the cause to a place where people agree on the vision, understand the large steps along the way and understand they have space to be creative.  Of course none of this can happen without mutual trust, both in the leader and from the leader. If the trust doesn’t exist, see Ben’s awesome post on how to handle office politics.

When leaders embrace the planning gray spaces, they can only continue to advance and innovate.

Post from: Joe Budde Jr. More about business operations and Joe can be found at his blog.

Planning: Value in the Gray Space

Over the past three months I have been non-stop learning!  From reading books and I’ve taken much of my readings from the past three months and compiled what I have found to be the four characteristics great leaders demonstrate daily:

1. Leaders have strong opinions but weak defenses

Bob Sutton author of No Assholes Rule, gives a great example of how leaders opinions can set organizational culture.  In a post he describes how Andy Grove’s approach to leadership pushes three points that can be summed up with the following phrase, “Leaders have strong opinions but weak defenses.”  He says leaders explore and doubt in private, espouse self-fulfilling confidence in public and always seek to understand and adapt.

2. Leaders seek understanding

Are we able to express our ideas clearly and most importantly can we actively listen? Leaders seek understanding through civil dialogue. In Donald Miller’s post on civil dialogue, he lists his five principles of civil dialogue that take leaders conversations to the next level:

1. Truth is not My Truth, it’s Just Truth
2. Methodology is Part of the Message
3. Without a Loving Heart, I am Like a Clanging Cymbal
4. The Other Person has Sovereignty
5. I Could be Wrong

3. Leaders consider business in their current state, not in its ideal state.

Seth Levine calls it “Your reality filter,” but it is just calling a spade a spade.  Ambitions, passion and excitement tend to cloud sound judgments on today’s decisions.  Put those feelings aside to make decisions based on data.  This practice of relying on data that describes the current state evidence based management.  Its the theory where we commit , “to finding and using the best theory and data available at the time to make decisions.”  Note it does not say feelings, or goal state.  When my feelings over run my logical ability to make a decision, I run into issues.  True leaders focus on the current reality and not the idealistic view of their business.

4. Leaders understand enough of each part of the whole so their ideas can have sex.

British author, Matt Ridley calls this “the mating of ideas.”  Ridley’s recent TED talk explained how ideas over the centuries have built upon traded with to enable an explosion over the past 100 years of standard of living.  He explains that people take their ideas or products and combine with or trade for other products creating new ideas or products.  His point is that not a single human knows how to make a mouse – drilling for oil to make the plastic, growing coffee for the rigger making the oil.  What is valuable here is that leaders can dive into details in a cross-functional way yet zoom out to make those details have sex and create value.

Leadership is an infinite resource, but finite in execution.  There are plenty of folks who know about these leadership characteristics, but very few who are able to implement them.  At the end of the day, we all ask ourselves the same question, am I implementing leadership characteristics in my life?

Post from: Joe Budde Jr. More about business operations and Joe can be found at his blog.

Four Characteristics of Great Leaders

How to Iron a Shirt

How to Shine Shoes

Via the always stylish and entertaining men’s fashion writer Kenyatte.

Post from: Joe Budde Jr. More about business operations and Joe can be found at his blog.

Business Dress 101: How to Shine Shoes and Iron Shirts

This Netflix slide deck explains how they maintain their culture.  After reading it several months ago, I have recommended it to several friends and colleagues. I didn’t want my faithful readers to miss the benefits, so I have embedded the slides below.

How different would the world be if all employers/managers were this focused on driving results from its teams?

Post from: Joe Budde Jr. More about business operations and Joe can be found at his blog.

Netflix Continues a Culture of Values Congruence