The sales guys uniformly wanted to drape their presentation around their process. The better presentations focused on providing cool nuggets of immediate value.
The boring presentations all featured The One Right Way. The better presentations let me pick and choose.
And after looking at all those clouds and circles, I realized that a process is just like a blog. Shorter is better.
When you get over 50 variables or gates, rethink your model. Your process has died. Tommy Smothers called his imaginary golf book, 352 Things To Remember At The Point Of Impact.
The other thing I realized was that after fifteen points in a model, the purpose is more failure analysis. “Not doing this thingie right here must have been the reason we failed.”
Dr. Deming said, “People who focus on failure become experts on failure.”
The best thing I learned was the novel concept that best practices should be so blatantly obvious that your people rush to adopt them. If you have to apply force, they are not best practices.
What do you think?
Please come to
How To Get More Value From Your Existing Resources Tuesday, October 19th, 7:15am to 8:30, Intelligent Office, Rockville, or Championship Leadership in Resource Constrained Markets
Dick:
ReplyDeleteYour best point should be a screen saver or placard on the desk!
Best practices should be so blatantly obvious that your people rush to adopt them. If you have to apply force, they are not best practices.
A brief analysis of why it didn't work is an aid to success; detailed analysis of failure is building a case for blame and has no productive elements.
Jack, one of my best insights was restructuring evaluation to get out of failure. The two questions to ask in evaluation are, "What did we do right?" and "What do we do next?" See http://throughthebrowser.blogspot.com/2009/08/sales-labs-planned-work-cycle.html
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