As leaders, we all know that good enough doesn’t cut it. But in today’s lean and remote organizations, teams tend to accept “Good Enough”, which checks the box so that they can move on to the next critical issue in the business. It is a potential trap that can lead to mediocrity and subpar performance.  It can create: (more…)

• Productivity is down over the last two years and continuing to decline.

• 66% of employees do not feel engaged.

• 80% of strategies don’t realize their intended value.

• 60% of CEO’s don’t believe their team does a good job of implementing strategy.

These are compelling numbers that all business leaders should take note of. These numbers are worse today with the significant shift to remote work in the post pandemic workforce. Are these numbers a result of poor strategic plans? In some cases, yes, but in the majority of cases, it is the result of a poor implementation and engagement processes. During my 45-year career, I have seen that poor implementation is because of a lack of focus on people and organization – the bridge between strategy and results. (more…)

• Development of one Most Important Goal
• Creation of business strategies to support it
• Full engagement of stakeholders
• Application of Value Stream Mapping to close operating and strategic gaps
• Identification of an increase of $105M in Enterprise Value

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These statistic from Boardview.io should cause pause to all senior leaders:

“80% of leaders feel their company is good at crafting strategy but only 44% at its implementation”

To make matters worse, they also report:

10% of organizations achieve at least two-thirds of their strategy objectives, with 36% achieving between 50%-67% and 54% achieving less than 50%

I have no reason to doubt these statistics based on what we see in our consulting work. The primary reasons for this are: (more…)

We recently worked on a project that required the integration of two $30M companies. Both had grown to this size in a short period of time and had systems that supported their individual sizes relatively well. When the two were combined, they pushed across an inflection point. An inflections point is when a company’s systems, business processes and organization structure are struggling to support the size of the company and are incapable of supporting future growth to the next inflection point. (more…)

Over the last few months, none of us have been operating as usual. Swift action has taken place in all parts of every business.  Actions that typically would take months of reviews and decision making have been done in weeks, days and hours.  In trying times, we bypass the strict regimen of decision making and discard many of the minor concerns that get in the way of quick decision making. That is possible because business teams have (more…)

Every business owner is challenged with Re-Opening their business as the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions are slowly lifted. There are myriad things to consider and inputs on how to do it from the federal government, states and localities.  Each have a different approach and set of recommendations. Trying to find relevant guidance can be a daunting (more…)

In the next few weeks, companies with under 500 employees will start receiving payments from the Paycheck Protection Act and all companies will continue to make important decisions on how to structure themselves to deal with the current downturn and prepare themselves for the future (Here is one view of the future (more…)

We are in a global recession according to global experts in a recent Forbes article. Don’t let this be your Kobayashi Maru – No Win Scenario. Every dollar not spent by consumers reduces downstream spending by 43% according to the current velocity of money statistics. No matter what business you are in, you are being impacted by this atypical recession, one that will likely rival the tech bubble of 2001 and the financial collapse of 2008. If you don’t agree, no need to read further, but can you really take that risk? (more…)

The most successful way to look at unneeded business processes and their costs to the business is through a Value Stream Mapping (VSM) project. VSM provides a clear view of how various business processes are related to each other and assesses the need for those processes and how efficient they really are.

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