ChangeThis RSS
"If you read the pages of the Wall Street Journal you would come to believe that business is about big deals—about multi-billion dollar acquisitions, massive pay packages for executives, macroeconomic forces, stuff like that.
In fact, the secret of success is in the little things. Billions of small decisions. [...]
Spend a few moments with this essay, and we'll show you three things. First, customer experience is central. ... Second, customer experience is hard, because it's not just about your front-line customer-facing employees. ... Third, delivering a great customer experience requires discipline—or more accurately, six disciplines that cut across every element of how your company operates."
Continue reading
"Companies are not really machines, so much as complex, dynamic, growing systems. After all, companies are really just groups of people who have banded together to achieve some kind of purpose. [...]
For many years the machine view has prevailed, and many companies are designed as information-processing and production machines. But information processing is not learning. Production is not learning. Learning is a creative process, not a mechanical one. Many critical factors in business cannot be easily counted, measured or controlled."
Continue reading
"Our businesses are more complicated and difficult to manage than ever. Our economy is more uncertain than ever. Our resources are scarcer than ever. There is endless choice and feature overkill in all but the best experiences. Everybody knows everything about us. The simple life is a thing of the past. Everywhere, there's too much of the wrong stuff, and not enough of the right. The noise is deafening, the signal weak. Everything is too complicated and time-sucking.
Welcome to the age of excess everything. Success in this new age looks different, and demands a new and singular skill: Subtraction.
Subtraction is defined simply as the art of removing anything excessive, confusing, wasteful, unnatural, hazardous, hard to use, or ugly—and the discipline to refrain from adding it in the first place."
Continue reading
"The moon has risen. You and your family and friends are gathered around the fire, deciding who will be your next chieftain. Your former leader has died in battle, and this is a solemn and important occasion. The adults speak quietly, the firelight flickering over their faces, while the children and adolescents listen to every word. [...]
This is the most important decision the tribe can make: choose badly, and they could all starve to death, or be overrun by an invading enemy. Choose well, and they can hope for safety, freedom, a measure of prosperity. The discussion continues far into the night.
[...] Our deeply-wired-in sense of what makes a good leader is still there. You can see it every day in how we respond to the leaders in our organizations. Some leaders are merely "appointed": they may have the title and the corner office, but people simply don't commit to them. They have employees, but they don't have followers.
Then there are what I call "accepted" leaders. Sometimes they don't even have the external signs of leadership—they may not have the top job or the big paycheck, but people gravitate toward them. People want to work for and with them; teams coalesce around them and achieve great things.
What's the difference?"
Continue reading
"We all know bosses who adopt a rigid, rule-bound, Command-and-Control approach to management. But do we love them? Will we move heaven and earth to achieve superior performance for them and the company? Will we put our heart into our work even when these bosses don't happen to be standing over us?
My two Nick's Pizza and Pub restaurants in suburban Chicago are among the top ten busiest independent pizza chains in the United States, as measured in per-unit sales. Our margins are often twice those of the average pizza joint, while employee turnover is less than 20% per year in an industry that averages 150%. My employees do love to come to work—and it shows, each and every day.
I didn't get numbers like that or the love of my employees by dictating their every behavior, insisting things be done my way, and punishing them when they go astray. You won't find any surveillance cameras in my restaurants—although many people tried to sell me them when I first opened, and friends and associates told me I needed them. You sometimes won't even find a manager supervising our team members during a shift. (Yes, you read that right, no managers!). What you will find is a culture of trust in which everyone—from the most junior team-member on up—strives every day to do their very best, and has fun doing it.
[...] If I can stop policing my workforce of sixteen and seventeen year-olds—not normally considered the most motivated and trustworthy of employees—and achieve world-class results, just think what you can accomplish in your business."
Continue reading