Seeking Coastal Utopia

Measure twice cut once. How much money do you have in your bank account? How much gas is in your car? How fast are you going? How many miles before the next stop? “assorted tape measures” by patricia serna on  Unsplash Measures. Metrics. Score. These are needed to succeed. This is the biggest failure of many businesses. Start-ups and mature businesses alike. It affects teams, groups, and individuals. It is a path to failure if you choose to not measure anything that will change behavior. Successful businesses have Key Performance Indicators — KPI’s that are used to identify important metrics or measurements that are necessary for their business success — or survival if they only just started actively measuring. You need to measure your efforts. “baseball field” by Chris Chow on  Unsplash I played a lot of baseball while growing up. That is a statistician’s sport. Everything is measured. Runs, hits, errors, balls, strikes, on-base percentages, assists, puto...

“people working inside white and black room” by Venveo on  Unsplash You can’t lead or manage from behind a desk . Yes, you are right, I am not allowed to say the word can’t — neither are you! Let us introduce another way…as a leader or as a manager, you are extremely ineffective when you stay behind your desk. Stop arguing, it’s true . Unless you are managing a group of automation equipment or robots, then yes, your argument is true. However, the last time I checked, we need humans to do most of the work that we do in business today, and in the effort to keep them involved, they require face-to-face interaction, coaching, and guidance. Humans are messy, therefore we require, no, we demand interaction, and if you are or wish to be a leader or a manager, you limit your ability to actively participate or interact when you are camped out behind your desk. “turned on monitoring screen” by Stephen Dawson on  Unsplash The ability to “see” how the business is ...

Parkinson’s Law simply states that work will expand to fill the time available to it.  In a recent personal effort with the altMBA, the opposite is also true — work will compress to fill the time available. If you have less time to get the work done, you will figure out a way to get it completed. This is all about productivity and it is amazing how we all follow this “law.” The same truism can be applied to money. The more money you make, the more money you spend. Having been in and around manufacturing environments for more than 25 years, it is easy to see how Parkinson’s Law comes into play. I have fallen into the trap of allowing work to expand significantly because there was nothing needing done next, but I also used this to my advantage through artificial constraints to get work completed within a period of time that was more compressed. Learning to say “good enough” and not allowing the hunt for perfect cause any more delay is imperative in the business world. However ...