rute force. We’ve all used it. Nothing like a bit of ‘mechanical agitation’ to get things moving again - except when it doesn’t. I have yet to see a frozen computer screen get un-stuck by smacking the monitor. But perhaps someday it will work, so we do it anyway. If nothing else, it makes us feel better when we don’t know what else to do.
However, there’s always that guy who gets things going with just the right amount of finesse – and we hate him for it. So rather than asking for him to show us how to do it, we go on picking up the sledgehammer or smacking the monitor.
When starting up a business, the brute force method works well: 20 hour days schmoozing potential customers, planning the job, fixing the problems, and delivering on the commitments no matter what. That is known as Dedication and Determination. When things get really busy, it’s also known as Desperation!
It happens all the time – as human beings, we are comfortable doing things the same way every time until something forces us to change. But the successful leader anticipates the need to change. Is it time for you to change the tools you use to manage and lead your business?
Same Old Management B.S.
Most small and mid-sized businesses who have taken the step to implement a business management system, and even some large companies, suffer from the same old Management B.S.: Management By Spreadsheet. It used to be that business owners did all the number crunching in their head or on a scratchpad. But since the 1990s, it has been a MUST to use a computer with spreadsheet software such as Microsoft Excel. The problem is that a lot of managers who learned the trade many years ago use spreadsheets like they would a piece of paper: they enter numbers in cells, and have the spreadsheet multiply quantity times unit price, total up the columns, add in sales tax, and display a total. Eventually, they hire someone to enter the numbers for them, pretty-up the printout, and “Oh by the way, copy the information from each job into a spreadsheet so I can see how much we did last month to plan for next month.” Most businesses pay people to copy and paste numbers from workbook to workbook because they don’t know how to do it otherwise. That’s the start of Management BS.
“Every business I have been in communicates by spreadsheets,” says Dan Harrier, a consultant with Aquila Analytics. “Yet few people are proficient in fully utilizing spreadsheets. Employees can spend their entire day refreshing the data, processing it, and formatting it. Forget analysis, there is no time left for that. However, I am able to code many repetitive Excel importing and processing steps into macros, and reduce that daily ordeal to about 1-5 minutes. The benefit is a reproducible, error-free report, done quickly so that there is time to focus on the meaning of the information. Recently, I was able to save a company 400 hours a year doing just that.” Why wouldn’t every business want to do this? Most companies can’t justify hiring a full time employee to automate their processes, and those that can have difficulty in finding the right people. Look for talent on a temporary basis, as needed.
Assuming you have the time, how do you get meaning out of spreadsheet reports? Looking over tables of numbers is a waste of time because people aren’t wired to easily compare lists of numbers to each other, and especially not to the numbers they saw yesterday. Instead, I use charts. I’ve always said: “A picture is worth a thousand words, and a chart is worth a thousand numbers.” So putting the business results into charts is a step in the right direction.
The real value in using a spreadsheet is to produce single page Dashboard Reports to identify trends and outliers, drill down to causes by interconnecting data from different sources, and to perform other analysis of the information to learn something new about the business. Steve Schmidt, one of the driving forces for Six Sigma implementation in Motorola and GE, and a resident of the San Antonio area, in his book Knowledge Based Management, asks the question: “One year from now what evidence will you have to show that you made a difference? If we don’t have a plan to measure our impact on the company’s bottom line, our apathy projects a ‘will to lose’ which will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. …our job security is in our own hands.”
We’ll Need to Coax It a Little – Give Me That Sledgehammer!
B
Advertising Call 210.853.0213 www.TexasOilGasMagazinecom
34