2.2.9 Working on your Business: Business Excellence – What it Means, What it Looks Like, How it is Achieved

2.2.9 Spend time working on your business, not in it

For many years, I raced skiffs every weekend in summer. It was on the magnificent Sydney Harbour, and towards the end of my racing career, mostly on the northern part of the Harbour opposite the famous Sydney Heads, on what is known as The Sound – a cross between harbour and ocean sailing – quite the joy or the demise of skiff racers – depending on your perspective. Skiffs are designed for more flatter-water bays and lakes, so the addition of rolling ocean swells could give the boats and rigs a real bashing, not to mention testing the limits of the crews' endurance.

From the first skiff I bought decades ago, my mind was locked into business mode, and with my background in a manufacturing pharmaceutical company, the application of TQM, 5S, TPM, and Lean thinking, was almost automatic. 

Jay, was my sheet-hand for many seasons, and while his father was the local sail maker and coach, he had decided to become a professional golfer, and man could he hit a golf ball!! He didn’t however get too much time for sailing when he was younger, but when he retired from the circuit, I suggested he and his younger brother crew for me. Jay jumped at the chance, and while his younger brother only sailed a season, before travelling the world doing the yacht-racing circuit, Jay stayed, and is still racing skiffs some 10-20 years later. 

The term Situational Leadership is often heard in business and this was a real example of being unconsciously competent. I remember one Saturday -- the sky was crystal clear, the day was warm, and there was a perfect north-easterly breeze blowing. We couldn't wait to get out there. As we were dropping the boat in the water at Manly Beach, Jay commented, “You know I really enjoy sailing with you ...", and went on to elaborate, "... every week we go out, we work hard at doing our best every week, and if we don’t do well, or have to come in early for any reason, I know it was because of us, not because of our gear breaking or some system not working properly.” I hadn’t really given it much conscious thought, but I know that if you want to perform at your best, you need to have tight reliable processes, a formal continuous-improvement programme, and a solid asset-maintenance programme.

He continued, “Take Harry as an example. He rigs up next to us every week; he’s always working on his boat the morning of the race, he’s just about worn out with stress by the time he hits the water; he can’t keep a consistent crew, he rarely finishes a race, and he never seems to be improving. We just turn up every week and everything goes like clockwork and I hadn’t appreciated just how much that matters to me until now. It is really enjoyable to just do our thing without thinking about what’s going to break or go wrong.”

My secret of consistent and routine performance is not only in the application of TQM, 5S, TPM, and Lean thinking, but is also based on two other critical influences on my life. In my early years in business, I read – I mean I devoured, absorbed, and deployed, the concepts in what has been described at the time as “An underground best seller …”, The E-Myth[1], and while the author, Michael Gerber, was named the “World’s Number One Small Business Guru”[2], the lessons are not only applicable to larger businesses and corporations, they are scaleable, and as I can testify, also applicable to just about any area of life. This is this secret I used in my skiff racing but also in business. If you set your business up to depend on you working in it, there is no way you are going to get the thinking and deployment time to change anything for the better; you’re going to be too physically and emotionally exhausted.

Gerber, said that the key is not to try and hire the best and brightest; he argues that you have to set up processes, procedures, and ways of working that the average person can grasp and work to routinely, to free up your time for thinking, improving, evolving, and continuing to be a viable business. This is also true in larger businesses; senior managers need to be setting up their areas of the business to do the routine things routinely so they can spend time on strategy.

The second reason is stress. From my Sport Psychology days, we knew that once a human being is stressed beyond a certain skill level, they become distressed, and performance declines. This has been validated with modern-day brain research that has shown that the overload causes a retreat to the “threat” part of the brain, where creativity is reduced, the thought-action repertoire narrows, and essentially the body automatically goes into Fight-Flight-Freeze preparation. In other words, goes into short-term survival mode. If people are continually in this mode, it can be disastrous for the long-term viability of a business, as well as their health[3]. 

So, what can be done about this? There are a few tips above, but to summarise:

-         Ways of working need to be tightly defined, such that anyone can follow them;

-         Adopt a formal framework to maintain processes and assets;

-         Adopt a formal continuous-improvement framework across the whole business to systematically improve ways of working;

-         Get out of the way and let people do their jobs, and spend your time on building a business for the longer term.

If you like what you read here, please share with your network, and also, if you see areas for improving the quality and relevance of the content, please feel free to share your comments and questions.

Thanks for reading, and I look forward to next week, where I’ll conclude this section on strategy, with taking an alternative view on what communication really means in an organisation.

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#excellence #paradigms #competitive #integration #IBP #positioning #decisionmaking #coach #gameplan #training #strategy #innovation #lean #planning #vision #mission #values #discipline #mindset #positive organisation

[1] Gerber, M. E., (2004 revised 1986, 1995), “The E-Myth Revisted”, Picnic Time

[2] Named World's Number One Small Business Guru, Inc. Magazine; and Lifetime Achievement Award, National Academy of Bestselling Authors, 2010

[3] Fredrickson, B.L., (2000), "Cultivating Positive Emotions to Optimize Health and Well-Being", Prevention & Treatment