Strategic Discipline Blog

How are you feeling about your business today?  We invest a great deal of time and energy on the Strategic Disciplines of meeting rhythms, metrics, priorities, and work process flow charts.  These are all objective elements to running a successful business.  There is another perhaps more subtle yet just as critical aspect to running a successful business and that is the subjective - the raw emotions that it takes to provide the energy that drives your business.

Setting objectives and priorities is over stated focus of any new year.  Most of all of us do it personally and even more businesses certainly demand it.  Strategic Discipline extends to recognizing the need for balance in the priorities and metrics you establish.  You can place so much emphasis on attaining a priority or metric you may lose sight of the affect this effort puts on other aspects of your business.  Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.  In our Rockefeller Habits Workshops we tell the story of Delta Airlines emphasis to have their flights arrive on time.  They reached their objective, however the affect of their efforts turned a positive into a negative when customers complained that their bags weren’t arriving on time. 

Dan and Chip Heath, the authors of Switch, How to Change When Change is Hard, and Made to Stick recently sent out a newsletter FIVE TIPS FOR (FINALLY) GETTING YOUR NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTION RIGHT that suggest ideas gleaned from their research that I’d like to suggest you peruse as you consider making your New Year’s resolutions.

What’s the easiest way to initiate strategic discipline?  Start with a daily huddle.  Perhaps your people are accountable already.  Perhaps they have metrics that they measure each day so they know how productive they are.  Perhaps they never get stuck.  And finally quite possibly you never have miscommunication.  Even if you can answer yes to each of these you’ll find the daily huddle brings a marked improvement in communication, accountability, and performance. 

It’s half-time in a girl’s freshman basketball game.  The score 31-9.  My officiating partner and I discuss how difficult our job can become in a lopsided game.  We need to keep our heads in the game despite the score.  The team that’s leading is the first to score in the second half.  They score again, and again, still again.  By the time the third quarter is over they are the only team that’s scored and it’s now 48-9. 

It would hardly be Christmas and the holiday season if most of us weren’t feeling some stress.  It’s a little known fact what the real source of stress is.  What you are stressing about right now?  Most of us are hurrying to get our Christmas gifts purchased, and hoping we don’t forget anyone.  Some males even make it a habit to shop the very last day, Christmas Eve for their significant other.  Add this to your current to do list and it’s no wonder some of us border on insanity this time of year. 

Your business relies on new customers for growth.  It's experiencing an increasing number of no shows for new customer appointments.  You’ve tried a number of changes, and techniques to get your new patients to honor the first visit they’ve scheduled however nothing seems to be working.  The loss of 1 or more appointments per day is a major reduction in efficiency for you and your staff to say nothing of the revenue loss.

Do your meetings lack conflict?  If so, isn’t that good?

A question that frequently comes up is what should I have Key Performance Indicators for in my business? Certainly there are lot of options.  Revenue and profit margin are Key Performance Indicators that everyone should monitor, however these are lagging indicators.   What Key Performance Indicators do you have in place that predict your revenue and profit margin?  Do you monitor your sales effort and have indicators that report on your sales pipeline?  How reliable are these?  Do you monitor your variable costs and fixed expenses?  Contribution margin is a good forecaster of profit margin as well as gross profit margin.  Yet do these give you enough information far ahead of your performance to be true leading indicators?  With time and practice whatever number you choose to watch you can discover which key metrics help predict the crucial outcomes in your business.

As we approach 2011 and put 2010 in the review mirror it’s important to understand that there are two types of key performance indicators in your business: leading and lagging.