Video of the Week: Five Must-Have Tech Tools for Entrepreneurs

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If you’re an business owner, chances are you’re constantly on the move and trying to keep tabs on the competition. These tech tools help you run your business more efficiently and fit it all into a 24-hour day. Also, read the article on The Wall Street Journal.

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Can You Loan Me Your Crystal Ball, Please?

By Jeff Pett, The Fleetwood Group

We are living in interesting times. Anyone who is bored at work these days is obviously not dealing with the “new normal.”  Is the economy getting stronger or weaker?  Is the latest reverse of employment figures merely a bump in the road or the beginning of a course reversal, the dreaded “double-dip” recession?

Are you hiring people or “right-sizing” your organization?

Are you trimming your sales force, staying the course, or adding to it?

Are you following through on strategic initiatives or pulling back to focus on operational “staying alive” issues?

What does your crystal ball say about the next year or two? Or five?

In the world of business that supplies stuff to the schools of this country, these certainly are interesting times.  I don’t know about you but our crystal ball is looking a little fuzzy this year.  If yours is giving you a clear look forward, we would like to borrow yours for a month or so.  Normally this time of year we see very clearly looking out three to six months, and we have a pretty good sense of what the next year looks like.  This year, however, we are having trouble seeing out even into next month.

State funding for schools is a big question mark in most states. So we are seeing a lot of schools delaying their plans to spend this summer until they see the dollars in their hands. While this may work for consumables (like paper, pencils and crayons) it is tough to make furniture to order without the orders.  The times may be interesting but they are also unprecedented. Trying to predict forward by analyzing backward is not working.

The next 30 days will tell us a lot. The financial results this year for a lot of companies will be determined, for good or ill, by what schools decide to buy… or not… over the next few weeks.  Stay tuned!

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Education Reform Out of Sync With High-Performing Nations, According to Report

The performance of students in other nations are constantly surpassing American students. In response, one reform tactic after another is implement, yet U.S. student performance still remains stagnant. A new white paper, released last month, explains why.

It turns out that the countries that are outperforming the United States have been pursuing strategies that the U.S. has not been pursuing, while the U.S. has embraced strategies that none of the best-performing countries have embraced. Reduced class size and more money for schools have long been advocated by American educators as solutions to poor student performance, but neither is correlated with high student performance in the best-performing countries.

But it is also true that some of the reforms dearest to the critics of the educators—school charters, support of entrepreneurs pursuing disruptive innovations, and firing teaches whose students perform poorly on standardized tests—are nowhere to be found in the arsenal of strategies used by the top-performing nations. Among the strategies now on the front burner in the United States, only the effort to develop internationally benchmarked student achievement standards and high-quality examinations appears to have a parallel in the program of the nations with the best student performance.

“I think we have been for a long time caught in a vicious cycle. We’ve been unwilling to do the things that have been needed to have a high-quality teaching force,” including raising the entry standard for teacher preparation and requiring prospective teachers to major in a content area, Marc S. Tucker, the president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, told Education Week “We’ve been unwilling to pay teachers at the level of engineers. We’ve been solving our problems of teacher shortages by waiving the very low standards that we have. We have been frustrated by low student performance, and now, we’re blaming our teachers for that, which makes it even harder to get good people.”

Sources: National Center on Education and the Economy and Education Week

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‘Green Schools’ and the Bottom Line

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After obtaining LEED certification last summer, Stoddert Elementary School in Washington, D.C., is finishing its first year as a newly renovated “green school.” The school is also saving “some green” with the new eco-friendly features. (Source: Education Week)

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Innovation on the Road to Recovery

By Michael Hawksworth

Companies that listen to their customers, think strategically, are innovative, and make prudent investments are usually at the top of their class. Unfortunately, with the economic downturn most organizations put business initiatives on hold, reduced staff, eliminated products or services, and closed facilities to keep their businesses viable. These were extremely difficult and necessary actions, but as the economy begins its recovery, a slow reaction or in-action will be fatal to many. For the prepared and ready, the new environment will present new opportunity for growth and profit.

As companies consider the recovery, they can be hindered by staff shortages, internal and external fears, conflicting priorities and the difficulty of justifying business cases in a still tentative financial environment. These influences negatively impact strategic thinking, innovation and business alignment to goals.

Creating New Opportunities

Strategic and savvy competitors have traditionally done very well coming out of economic downturns, and slow to adjust companies have been the victims of indecision, tired thinking and market misalignment. Following an era of pull back, opportunities open up for those who can take advantage of the disruption created by the downturn by seeing the new needs of their customers and the change in the competitive landscape.

Business leaders need to be addressing the following questions:

• What should our strategic direction and priorities be?
• How can we stimulate creative thinking and spawn innovation within the organization?
• How can we accelerate and improve business strategy alignment and organizational decision making?
• How can we profoundly understand our customers changing needs?

Creativity and Innovation

A recent IBM study of global CEOs found “creativity as the single most important leadership competency for enterprises.” Creativity leads to innovation in products, services and the way business is transacted and the way a business model is transformed. In today’s complex global business environment, creativity and innovation are a must for long term survival. Not only that, but innovation creates both revenue growth and increased profits. This was confirmed by a Harvard Business Review study of the business launches of about 100 companies where “14% of the launches, the true value innovations, generated 38% of total revenues and 61 percent of total profits.”

Dr. George Land recognized this need in his book, Grow or Die,decades ago, long before the complexity of today’s global business environment. Dr. Land’s research and concepts have been incorporated into a process that unleashes the creativity in a company’s management team to bring innovative results to strategic planning. The process can also transform customers into creative partners that lead to product and process innovation. Through collaboration with Dr. Land, leading consulting firms have incorporated this process into their management consulting services from strategic planning through project implementation efforts.

Backwards from Perfect

Most management consulting approaches focus on the current business processes and identify gaps between the current state and the desired state. This approach creates a culture where patching or adjusting the existing processes and systems are done to achieve our goals. If our vision was to own a Mercedes SL55, could we get there by making improvements to our Chevrolet Camaro? We may be able to make a Camaro perform more like a Mercedes and even change its exterior characteristics, but it will still be a Camaro. Taking advantage of breakthroughs in science-based creative thinking methods and changing our perspective to put ourselves in the future with a vision that we have achieved our goals, better prepares us to understand what we must do to get there. This approach opens the door for advancing creative thinking to develop innovative ideas and strategies to achieve the vision.

Accelerated Strategy, Alignment and Planning Methodology

To put these concepts to work for a company, a multi-element planning process is required that involves people, process and proven technology. It starts with the key people from an organization who have the vision, experience and involvement in decision making. The next step is to release and capture the creativity of those key people. Research has proven that a person who has reached the age of 30, has lost 98 percent of his creativity since childhood due to the rules and constrains placed on them as they grow and enter the work force. Dr. Land’s exercises and techniques unleash the pent up creativity of the key people leading to maximum involvement in generating a flood of useful ideas by intersecting creativity with experience.

The volume of ideas, solutions, constraints and enablers that are generated with the new found creativity must now be analyzed and evaluated to find the high impact strategic solutions that will propel the company to its vision. This is accomplished with skilled facilitation and the use of powerful analytical technology. We are now on the way to elicit solutions to complex issues including:

• Creating new business possibilities for products and services
• Formulating strategic directions
• Innovating for maximum customer value and ROI
• Achieving buy-in and ownership of decisions
• Redefining business processes
• Defining information needs
• Designing and selecting information systems
• Assessing business risks

The incorporation of electronic idea collection and analytic systems has existed for several decades to support these types of strategic planning efforts. The author was an early adopter and has incorporated several of these systems into our management consulting practice over the years. FarSightPro, developed by Dr. Land, has emerged as the most sophisticated of these tools and is the foundation for our current management consulting practice. These tools accelerate the decision making process by stimulating thoughtful comparison of ideas and strategies simultaneously to all participants. It creates results that transform chaos to order and bring clarity to needed focus and direction. By gathering every participant’s thoughts without the suppression of expression that can occur in group discussions where dominant players are participating, new cards are on the table for consideration. In fact, the results provide the ability to focus the discussion to the high payoff, important topics, strategies and new possibilities. Most importantly, the entire strategy definition and decision making process will be accelerated and the team will feel more aligned and empowered to execute on the ideas and strategies from their participation.

Following this methodology allows an organization to be exceptionally nimble in the current business climate of constant change. Usually change processes are very difficult, but when the people involved create those changes themselves, innovation and transformation can flow swiftly and effectively.

Conclusion

The current economic conditions are improving and large enterprises are already preparing for the recovery by moving forward with opportunistic strategic projects and initiatives. Mid-enterprise companies must act with the same urgency. The use of accelerated methods to re-evaluate business strategy and initiatives, identify customer’s emerging needs in rapidly changing environments, re-prioritize projects and implement changes will separate the winners from the losers in today’s complex business environment. Mid-enterprise companies need to begin this process now before they are overwhelmed with operational challenges created by the current state of their business as a result of downsizing and adjustments during the recession.

 

About the Author: As founder and President of MSS (http://msstech.com), Michael Hawksworth brings over 30 years of experience providing management and information systems consulting services. Michael started his consulting career with Arthur Andersen & Co’s Management Information Consulting Division, now Accenture, after receiving a Bachelor of Science degree from Arizona State University in 1979. In 1986, he co-founded the utility industry management and information consulting firm, Micon, Inc., recognized as an Inc. 500 company in 1991. In 1992 he spun off MSS to expand management consulting services to a broader range of industries. Today he focuses on innovative methods, trademarked as ASAP, to drive business value for his clients through MSS management consulting services.

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Video of the Week: Social Media for Entrepreneurs

 

Bloomberg TV shows how professionals and small businesses can use social media to build a customer base, advertise and promote to consumers. (Bloomberg)

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