|
CEO Tools
The Nuts-n-Bolts of
Business
for Every Manager's Success
Kraig
Kramer |
Introduction
– Business Tools for More Profit$ Right Now
Have
you ever watched an air-powered impact wrench remove the lug nuts
from your car’s wheels? Or used an electric screwdriver in your
home? Or prepared food with a Cuisine-Art® in your kitchen? In most
situations these specialized tools are so much more efficient for
the job at hand than the manual variety.
This
book equips the reader with similar tools for business to grow
faster, to make more money and to get ahead quicker. It draws tools
from the author’s hands-on experience as CEO of eight companies in
as many industries. The book suggests a management process to group
tools into appropriate toolboxes for effective application in any
business, for profit or not-for-profit. The following management
process steps, or toolboxes, correspond to the seven book chapters
where the tools are located, ready for the reader’s use:
This
introductory chapter puts a few exemplary business tools in the
reader’s hands from each of the seven toolboxes – tools to make
money with right now. The chapter encourages use of the tools
individually at first, just to get good at using them. It then goes
on to introduce the concept of taking the company or team to a state
of “we” – a sort of magical place where anything that can be
dreamed can be accomplished. Using certain tools over time leads to
“we,” much like the auto assembly worker in Johnny Cash’s song
One Piece at a Time builds his dream car by smuggling parts out of
the plant one at a time.
Chapter
1 Summary – Make Goals Meaningful Motivators
A
goal is like a dartboard: you still get points for missing the
bulls-eye. But by shooting for the bulls-eye, you’ll always score
more. Getting people in a business to grasp the concept of reaching
higher is every manager’s job: it’s all about making goals
meaningful in their context. At Graphic Arts Center printing in
Portland, we got everyone to understand that doubling printing
volume in two years would allow us to buy all new printing presses,
a meaningful goal indeed. Why? Well, new presses meant the best
state-of-the-art printing for customers, the newest toys for
employees, more volume for suppliers, more profit for shareholders,
and more jobs for the community. Meaningful!
This
chapter contains many tools for setting meaningful goals, getting
buy-in by team members and accomplishing the goals. Here are a few
of the tools: an overall company or team goal, big audacious goals,
getting commitment through I Will, the 1-page business plan, fun and
celebration as tools, the repetitive communication tool and the
Harley® hot button.
Read
how a $46,000 Steinway® piano was earned by one sales manager who
grabbed the brass ring by achieving unheard-of profits in his
region. Get commitment from your team the same way well-known
football coach Dick Vermeil has so many times. And experience the
exhilaration of using a big audacious goal to turn Snapper lawnmower
manufacturing company’s pretax loss of $54 million to $13 million
profit in a single year. Because the reader will want to keep this
chapter’s tools in a permanent, handy place nearby, the chapter
wraps up with a tool kit summarizing the top ten tools for
meaningful goals.
Chapter
2 Summary – Communicate to Get Meaningful Results
No
communication at all is far worse than receiving bad news. The
country group Lonestar captures this precept of communication in
their hit tune No News in which the protagonist waits fruitlessly to
hear from his beloved. And so it is in business. We routinely fail
to provide the communication necessary for facilitating meaningful
results. This chapter lays out a simple but complete set of
communication tools for every manager to accomplish meaningful goals
every time.
It
also tosses trust into the equation, because talk without trust
falls on deaf ears. Since trust is largely a function of values
alignment in an enterprise, this chapter charts a course for
building a cohesive culture through values and communication. Some
of the tools include walking your four corners, the symbolism tool,
repetitive communication tools, the manager’s monthly letter,
personal notes of praise, and a renewed focus on the power of
“we.” Read how a symbolic Q1 = $1.00 slogan permanently stopped
pretax losses in my printing firm while the whole industry continued
to lose money in that season each year. Again, the reader can
capture the top ten communication and top ten values-aligning tools
in chapter-concluding tool kits.
Chapter
3 Summary – Now Track What’s Meaningful
Just
before becoming CEO at GAC printing in Oregon, a surprise loss in
the midst of their Initial Public Offering necessitated cancellation
of the IPO. Responsive tracking to anticipate the future could have
prevented this embarrassing incident.
“What
gets measured gets done.” You’ve heard that said, but no one
ever told you there were three steps involved, namely 1) setting
goals, 2) communicating and building trust, and then 3) tracking
against the goals to feed back results to the team. It’s obvious
once you see it, but how many managers actually do these three
steps, much less apply accurate, responsive tracking? And which
tools are right for accurate tracking? It’s this last question
that is the focus of this chapter – it makes a decided difference
which tracking tools are used. Many management-measuring tools are
inaccurate, inconsistent and misleading.
An
example of a misleading management tool is the ordinary monthly
sales chart. People think up is good and down is bad, but what if
the chart goes up less than the same month last year? What if that
continues for 12 months? When will you finally notice that your
growth has slowed to a crawl? Too late is the answer. A simple tool
called the trailing 12 months chart (T12M) will forever solve this
problem. Where ordinary charts regularly lie to you, the T12M always
tells you the truth.
Other
eye-opening tracking tools in chapter three include monthly
re-forecasting, the quarterly priorities manager, managerial success
traits, the time audit tool, two related communication tools, a
backlog tracker, and the best financial reporting tool, among
others. A tool kit containing the top ten tracking tools closes out
this chapter nicely.
Chapter
4 Summary – Anticipate the Future, Then Realize It
Country-western
star Vince Gill says it best in his all-time top platinum recording:
There Ain’t No Future in the Past. We use lessons from the past to
improve our future plans, but more than that, we need to see the
future and change it before it happens. Que sera, sera isn’t good
enough: what will be is what we decide will be. Or try it this way:
they say there’ll be a recession and we decided we just aren’t
going to participate!
Chapter
four answers the questions: how can I improve my future results? How
do I grow faster? How will I increase future profitability? How do I
control my destiny? The answers lie in tools that anticipate the
future better and in an attitude of not giving in, not ever. George
Steiner, the grand-daddy of modern planning put it succinctly:
“Planning is looking into the future and changing what we do now
to create improved results.” It’s the manager’s job
description: read the trail signs and take action to make things
better. Here, the trail signs are genuine crystal balls – tools
that really allow us to see into the future.
The
tools for future realization include the “right growth rate,”
the 1-page action plan, using “what if?” as a strategy tool, the
unique business proposition, 1-page tactics and the dreamtime tool.
This chapter revisits tools from other chapters, showing how they
work for gazing into the future to get genuine, highly probable
pictures of what will be and how to re-paint those pictures before
they materialize. A bonus-pack of tool kits synopsizes the chapter
with the top ten planning tools plus the top ten strategy tools.
Chapter
5 Summary – Get, Coach and Keep Winners
People
are almost always the deciding factor in true business success. What
if your shipping or mailroom clerk stays an extra five minutes each
day to get a package out to a customer? It would get there a whole
day sooner. If your receptionist were the very best wouldn’t that
attract and keep more customers? Management’s job is to point our
people at what’s important, which is usually the customer. This
particular tool is called key customer-impacting jobs, and it’s
just one of many spelled out in this chapter. The idea is to turn
every one of our people into winners, getting them to see how they
can best contribute to the success of customers and the company.
Chapter
five focuses on tools that have to do with people performance. The
tools involve finding winners, putting people in their best jobs,
weeding our employee garden, coaching winners rather than laggards
or losers, and getting our winners to concentrate on important
things while permanently fixing urgent things. This chapter winds up
with tool kits containing the top ten customer tools and the top ten
tools to get, keep and motivate winners.
Chapter
6 Summary – Get Organized to Get Results
One
of my very best chief financial officers was an organized manager
but was also one of the worst when it came to organizing his own
paperwork. Often our greatest strength shows up as our greatest
weakness in other areas. This CFO just couldn’t file or find stuff
quickly! He would eventually find what we needed, but it took hours
– no exaggeration. He finally adopted the C-drawer tool from this
chapter, and amazingly it bought back a half-day per day for him.
His lack of a filing system was literally doubling his workweek.
Being
organized imparts efficiency and productivity to a business, which
in turn promotes bottom-line profits. The well-known, now retired
chairman of Bank of America during its growth decades, Lou Lundborg,
cited this as one of only two traits he sought in executives. If
nothing else, we managers need to be organized just to set an
example for those around us.
Chapter
six serves up a truckload of tools for organizing self and others.
The systematizing tools in this chapter include a time audit,
lead-manage-do guidelines, keys to successful delegation, a
management roles tool, the monthly operations report tool, the
powerful company calendar and more. The top ten tools for getting
organized are summarized in a tool kit at the end of this chapter.
Chapter
7 Summary – Celebrate Every Success!
A
management team that fails to celebrate will devastate motivation
and future successes that meaningful goals might have created.
Similarly, celebration after a big effort certifies the true meaning
of the endeavor. My first time as CEO of a really small company
taught me this lesson lastingly: we had just achieved gargantuan
growth for that industry, up from $1.2 million in sales to $2.5
million in just two years. We didn’t celebrate, and you could feel
employee morale palpably plummet going into the next year.
Celebration
tools make and keep goals meaningful. One such tool is monetary
reward (compensation) and another is recognition of people for
getting results. Recognition as a tool pays off at least 1000-to-1
over compensation of any kind. A headline lauding Jack Welch’s
success at GE hits it hard: Raises and Praise(s) or Out the Door!
Compensation and recognition (praise), plus a fair-but-tough
attitude about performance, are Welch’s secrets to success.
Now
add some more of chapter seven’s success tools: fun, challenge,
personal growth, convenience, communication and security. Together
with compensation and recognition, these are what people want in
their jobs. When we managers fail to provide these, our best people
leave. Other tools in this celebration chapter include an employee
satisfaction index, recognition buck$, personal notes of recognition
mailed to a person’s home, and awards of all kinds. These tools
and more are captured in this chapter’s two tool kits, the top ten
tools to be a better recognizer followed by the top ten celebration
tools.
Summary
– Get Started, One Tool at a Time
How
can the reader assimilate and adopt so many tools? Chapter eight
suggests a number of solutions, such as implementing only one tool
per week, delegating the implementation of certain tools to others,
and beginning with tools that will have the biggest payoff for you.
The top ten tools as picked by the author’s audiences,
representing over 30,000 CEOs and managers, are also offered as a
starting point, along with several other short lists for using the
tools. Some notes on using certain tools together are provided, and
a brief discussion on becoming CEO and personal growth is offered.
Finally, this chapter’s tool kit covers the top ten tools from the
computer compact disk designed to accompany the book. This summary
offers readers an easy route to implement two dozen of the book’s
more popular business tools.
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