Sometimes history has a resonance with events today. Historians say you can’t understand today without knowing about yesterday. I’ve always been more interested in tomorrow, perhaps I missed a trick. But I was struck by England’s amazing success in becoming the major economic power in the world, and the contrast now with decades, or a century, of our productivity nightmare. Poor productivity costs everyone, employee, employer and Government, a massive amount of money. We need to fix it to be able to afford the Welfare State to which we think we are entitled. Enjoy the video.
Continue readingCategory Archives: Perform
The Very Boring Subject Of Margins
Do you know your margins? The very important Gross Profit Margin = (Net Sales – Cost of Goods Sold)/ Net Sales Cash is the lifeblood of a business. It needs to be worried about. You should know your margins and a good set of management accounts will yield all the ratios you need to manage the business.
Continue readingTime for a new Manifesto!
The pen is mightier than the sword and Marx’s writings have proved to be a nuclear option. His ideas have shaped history and perhaps, in their vision, help freeze progress? But he was far-sighted and foresaw that one day, with the right conditions, the supply of labour would gain the upper hand over the suppliers of capital. Has that day arrived? Enjoy the video.
Continue readingTribal Loyalty
Do many of your employees worry about how they will get their next drink or square meal? In the developed world we take our physical sustenance for granted. “An army marches on its stomach” is usually attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte. The need to keep the troops fed and watered to maintain a fighting spirit is a long-known fact. Lord Nelson ate after his sailors. The US Marines feed their Officers after the men. It’s a symbol of servant leadership.
Continue readingA Consultant’s Dream
“Employee engagement” is a management consultant’s dream! It brings so many advantages, produces such amazing bottom line results, why hasn’t everyone bought into it? Why do very savvy senior businesspeople think a 10% improvement is what to expect? Scepticism. A perfectly healthy buyer scepticism. The lure of gold created a rising tide of Consultants eager to service the need. You just needed to read a book or two after all.
Continue readingCompetition, Co-operation and Co-ordination
Congratulations! Your organisation is growing and as it grows moves along the usual orgainsational development path. You have teams, then departments, then functions. The organisation constantly evolves to meet the environment. Have you noticed competition between the function heads, department heads and team leaders? Enjoy the video!
Continue readingWorld Class?
What if World Class performance was as simple as taking the brakes off, to release the pent-up competitive energy of your organisation? Imagine you are in a saloon car race, winner takes all. You are on the starting line with your competition, engines revving, watching the lights go from red to green and the flag comes down to signal the start of the race. Your heart thumps as the tyres screech and slide on the tarmac as you move forward in a pack. You slowly overhaul car after car with your 1% advantage.
Continue readingGreed is Good!
Money – pay, bonuses, rewards – is a complicated subject. For something that has been around for thousands of years, human beings have a very poor understanding of what it does. Human lives are so very different now from those far off times, at least for the wealthy who do not have to worry about their safety, starving or their future. You can see that the relationship with money – it provides security – changes as lives change. What does that mean for the leaders of organisations today? Enjoy the video.
Continue readingEmotional Unintelligence
There is a strange illogical perception among managers who consider themselves hardnosed, driving and forceful. They think being emotional and letting the bad temper show is somehow practical. In fact, it is a negative emotional outburst which has no place in the work environment. That is being emotionally unintelligent! As an example of positive management behaviour, here is how to address absence issues. Don’t focus on the number of days absent, focus on the number of days present. In the UK there are 223 workdays in a year. If this employee has only attended for 213 days, then you lost ten days of their help to achieve your and your organization’s goals.
Continue readingManaging remote employees
One of the things the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted, is how many managers need to see their people working to believe they are not being lazy. McGregor’s Theory X and Y, asks if you think people are inherently lazy or if people want to do a good job. Our straw polls at our Workshops average out at about 70% Y, people want to do a good job. How does the manager cope when he or she can’t watch their team working! Enjoy the video!
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