Buddha CEO, Howard M. Cox [best e book reader for android txt] 📗

your entire organization back on track.

Stakeholder Value Propositions:

The final section of the Two Page Business Plan is reserved to committing to writing the intended value propositions for your stakeholder groups as we discussed earlier.

Meetings, Meetings & More Meetings

There is no communication tool more misused and maligned than the corporate meeting. The interesting thing is that they also have the potential to be the most effective communication and indoctrination tool in your tool-box.

There are two basic categories of meetings, individual and group. I will address group meetings first.

Group meetings present an incredibly leveraged (one to many) communication tool. There are 4 levels of group meetings and I suggest the following frequencies for each.

Group Meetings

Strategic Meetings

This is the annual senior executive strategy session to set the goals for the coming year as well as the revisiting the vision for the mid-term and long-term. There needs to be a product or deliverable that comes out of such sessions.

The quality of those outcomes has more to do with the preparation for the annual retreat than the productivity during the retreat. I have successfully used a Two-Page Strategic Plan template to document the preparation for and outcomes from the annual retreat. An example template is provided for download at our website.

Organizational Meetings

I recommend a quarterly event to include everyone in the company. This should take no more than an hour, and be an opportunity for the management team to report to the entire organization the results to date so far vs. goals and update the group on any other significant events that have occurred or are on the horizon.

Operational Meetings

This is the traditional monthly departmental meeting. This is an opportunity for each functional unit to report to senior management on their individual progress towards their objectives and their bottom line results.

This meeting poses the greatest threat to be a complete waste of time. The meeting should generally last no more than 90 minutes and be governed by a strict agenda and structure based on the functional units’ critical processes and key performance indicators. An example operational meeting agenda template is available for download at our website.

Tactical Meetings

These meetings will involve smaller teams of front line activities and can be held generally weekly or bi-weekly but in some cases even on a daily basis. The purpose of these meetings is to address concerns at the detailed activity level at a 5,000 foot view.

Individual Meetings

Individual meetings serve a completely different role. Rather than being a leveraged communication and indoctrination opportunity like group meetings, they provide a one on one coaching and mentoring opportunity.

These meetings can range from formal documented annual performance evaluation sessions to the preferably more frequent informal ad hoc meetings for breakfast, lunch or social time after work. They also include any contact in person in the hallways or around the water coolers or via the phone or computer. Just like a great athletic coach, you should seize every interaction as an opportunity to up-skill your team.

Formal performance Evaluation Meetings

The annual formal meeting is a required element of a well run organization. You provide written feedback to the individual as to their performance in the critical processes within their job duties, their performance in upholding the values of the organization, their performance against goals that were established for them personally in their prior annual review, to set individual goals for the coming year and to document their overall performance and merit based pay increase or promotions etc. An example of an annual performance evaluation template is available for download at our website.

Informal Ad-Hoc Individual Meetings

The frequency and format for the informal ad hoc meetings will depend on the strategic nature of the role of your direct reports. I would suggest than you have such encounters with everyone who reports to you on at least an annual basis. These informal meetings could be bi-weekly or even weekly with mission critical direct reports. The purpose of these more informal sessions are to make sure the direct report in on track and on target, to address any questions, comments or concerns they may have accumulated since your last such session and to encourage and inspire.

A Final Note on Communication Tools:

As noted in the introductory section, there are a great many new or relatively new corporate communication tools available today. The proper use of an intranet, emails, pod-cast messages CEO blogs can also provide highly leveraged channels to aid the communication and indoctrination phase.

Perfect Deed Tools – Execution

The last step in the system is the doing phase. The bar here is flawless execution of your mission critical processes, the ones that are most responsible for delivering on your value proposition to all of your stakeholders. This is the essence of true management.

Perfect thought is the first creation, perfect word communicates and indoctrinates the vision and perfect deed delivers on the vision through the execution of the mission.

Focus Management

There are a multitude of inputs you will receive as a management team in any organization. You have to provide some focusing tool to guide your decision making in the heat of the moment. The following formula is such a tool.


Recipe of success:

ProductsServices + Customers + Team Members + Value Chain partners + Capital = Results

Whether we like to admit it or not; all of our organizations are uniquely organized to get exactly the results that we are getting. The definition of insanity is doing the same things and expecting to get different results. Therefore, if we desire different results, you have to manipulate one or more of the variables in the recipe for success.

The Role of Management

The ultimate challenge is to accumulate the correct mix of productsservices, customers, team members and value chain partners and shareholders to produce optimal results. The fundamental role of management is to allocate finite resources to produce the right balance of near-term cash flow, long-term profitability and ROI for the invested capital.

What You Measure Gets Done

In order to achieve this, you logically need to have data to substantiate what are your most profitable productsservices, who are your most profitable customers, who are your most productive team members, which value chain partners add the most value in the eyes of the ultimate consumer of your productsservices and what is the bottom line cumulative return you are providing your shareholders.

Only after careful analysis of the above metrics can you properly rebalance these key variables to continually provide better results for all stakeholders in the process. It is a common flaw of the small to middle-market business segment that they do not have access to the data described above.

First Things First

When someone would engage me as a consultant, the typical focus was because they wanted to grow their business. My first comment usual was “are your sure about that”?

My experience has been that most organizations do not currently have an optimal business model. I define a business model as the conglomeration of the variables listed above, productsservices, team members, customers, value chain partners & capital.

Therefore, my first action step in a consulting engagement was to challenge the management team to first fix their business model or prove that it was already optimal. Only then does growth make sense. Any other action step to grow a business with core underlying chronic problems will only serve to make those problems worse. This inevitably leads to a tremendous amount of frustration and unhappiness for all concerned and possibly total implosion and the ultimate failure of the organization.


Time Management

Time management is essentially the discipline of moment management. Creating intentions and next steps and then prioritizing action plans from moment to moment to stay on track and use each moment to its fullest.

It is hard to know what to put first if you don’t know what the first things are in the first place. This is why I believe that the best way to start this section on time management is with an excerpt from the Dali Lama’s book “The Art of Happiness”.

When faced with a feeling of stagnation and confusion, it may be helpful to take an hour, an afternoon, or even several days to simply reflect on what it is that will truly bring us happiness, and the then reset our priorities on the basis of that. This can put our life back in proper context, allow a fresh perspective, and enable us to see which direction to take.

The firm resolve to become happy – to learn about the factors that lead to happiness and take positive steps to build a happier life – can be just such a decision. The tuning-toward happiness as a valid goal and the conscious decision to seek happiness in a systematic manner can profoundly change the rest of our lives.

Sometimes when I meet old friends, it reminds me how quickly time passes. And it makes me wonder if we’ve utilized our time properly or not. Proper utilization of time is so important. While I have this body, and especially this amazing human brain, I think every minute is something precious. Our day-to-day existence is very much alive with hope, although there is no guarantee of our future. There is no guarantee that tomorrow at this time we will be here. But still we are working for that purely on the basis of hope. So, we need to make the best use of our time.

I believe that the proper utilization of our time is this; if you can serve other people, other sentient beings. If not, at least refrain from harming them. I think this is the whole basis of my philosophy.

So, let us reflect on what is truly of value in life, what gives meaning to our lives, and set our priorities on the basis of that. The purpose of our life needs to be positive. We weren’t born with the purpose of causing trouble, harming others. For our life to be of value, I think we need to develop basic good human qualities – warmth, kindness, compassion. Then our life becomes meaningful and more peaceful – happier.

Getting Things Done

In my view, the ultimate guru on time management is David Allen. I strongly advise adopting the principles and practices in his book “Getting Things Done” on an organization wide basis.

David Allen is a Black belt in Karate. The big thought of his book is that through implementing his system you can create a “mind like water”.

The metaphor is based on the way water reacts when you throw a rock into a pond. It creates ripples in the exact appropriate response to the size and mass of the rock and then returns to a state of calmness.

Allen explains that this is exactly how we should behave. We should respond to the stimulus we receive all day long from our family, friends or at work with the exactly appropriate measure for the input and then return to a state of calm and await the next input.

The problem is that we have a tendency to either overreact or