Enjoy the Turkey! HMD???

The Digital Leader Newsletter — Strategies and Techniques for Change Agents, Strategists, and Innovators

Feedback is the breakfast of champions — attributed to Ken Blanchard

Thank you for reading The Digital Leader Newsletter. I’m lucky to be here. I’m lucky to do the work I get to do. I’m lucky to have you invest time in reading this newsletter. So I’m asking for feedback.

Have you ever seen the Amazon “How’s My Driving” email? It’s how Amazon customer service would ask for feedback to customer service. “Did I solve your issue today” is an example of a “how’s my driving” request.

When I was at Amazon, the way we asked for peer feedback was by asking “how’s my driving?” So I’m asking you…

HMD??? How’s my driving?

If you have suggestions, feedback and ideas, I welcome them all.

The Effective Executive

There’s only a handful of business books that I recommend to almost anyone. Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive is on that shortlist. It’s one of the few books I try to re-read every couple of years.

The book's premise is that being an effective executive is not in managing others but in managing yourself. This is an empowering philosophy as we have complete control over our own behavior.

With that setup, here are a few of my key insights from The Effective Executive.

A Stunning Introduction

The introduction to The Effective Executive is a concise, insightful, and actionable outline of personal businesses practices if I could only always do live these practices! A performance management system or leadership class from this first chapter.

What made them all effective is that they followed the same eight practices:

• They asked, “What needs to be done?”

• They asked, “What is right for the enterprise?”

• They developed action plans.

• They took responsibility for decisions.

• They took responsibility for communicating.

• They were focused on opportunities rather than problems.

• They ran productive meetings.

• They thought and said “we” rather than “I.”

The first two practices gave them the knowledge they needed. The next four helped them convert this knowledge into effective action. The last two ensured that the whole organization felt responsible and accountable.

For any team — business or otherwise, a leader who incorporates these eight practices into their approach will be a great leader.

Focusing on just one of these, I learned something from “focus on opportunities rather than problems.” Is this just semantics in calling our problems “opportunities for improvement"? No! Drucker outlines that executives need to be “scanning” for various market opportunities and that management meeting should focus first on opportunities and then, only when all opportunities are dealt with, are problems dealt with. This positive, leaning-forward posture toward the market does at least two things. First, it creates a customer and market orientation instead of an inward-facing orientation. Second, it creates an empowered organization to solve problems at the point of operation, versus one needing to be told how to fix a problem.

Running Productive Meetings?? What percentage of your work time do you spend in meetings? 25%? 50%? More? What percentage of these meetings are needed and productive?

Decision Making

Drucker dedicates two chapters to decision-making. Two critical concepts are understanding if the situation is a generalized one in which we should seek a principle to make the decision or an exception with no underlying principle. He dives deep into understanding that most situations have options containing compromises. These options are more opinion-based than fact-based and thus are based on hypothesis. Peter gives the practical advice that opinions come with a plan to test the decision (since it is based on a hypothesis). This technique of seeing how a decision can be tested helps speed up decisions and minimize risk. Finally, Drucker outlines that a major part of decision-making, and typically overlooked, is figuring out how to put them into effect. Repeated communication is the key to putting decisions into effect.

They took responsibility for communicating

Chief Repeating Officer

Ever heard of a “CRO” or “Chief Repeating Officer”? Of course, you’re not going to have that title, but you should have the mindset. If you are a change maker, strategist, program leader or CEO, you need to figure out THE message which needs to persist. And keep repeating. And keep repeating.

When you hold a key meeting, how often are “key points” distributed? And if they are distributed, is the headline buried with other meeting notes? Don’t bury the headline —>what was THE decision made, on what principle, and how are you going to test that decision?

If you have a meeting without a decision, there is perhaps work to do on meeting hygiene. Meeting hygiene? That is for another week in The Digital Leader Newsletter.

Onward.

John

About The Digital Leader Newsletter

This is a newsletter for change agents, strategists, and innovators.  The Digital Leader Newsletter is a weekly coaching session focusing on customer-centricity, innovation, and strategy. We deliver practical theory, examples, tools, and techniques to help you build better strategies, better plans, better solutions — but most of all, to think and communicate better.

John Rossman is a keynote speaker and advisor on leadership and innovation.

Learn more at https://johnrossman.com