Business Book Summaries

There is a saying famous in American business: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Famous and true, as it turns out.

Attributed to John Wanamaker, an American retail businessman, it has been paraphrased by any number in the decades since he first defined the primary problem every CEO faces in marketing. We all know our company must market. You only have to watch what happens when a company stops, to get the message.

Failure to market means becoming invisible, first in the eyes of your customers, then in reality. Yet, from the traditional print campaigns of the last century to contemporary Internet Pay-Per-Click, and Web 2.0 social media applications, CEOs of every size company still have no idea which part of their advertising/marketing budget works, and which part doesn’t.

What continues to remain elusive is knowing exactly which of their expenditures is getting the job done. And because of that, they spend more than necessary, squandering resources they could use elsewhere.

This is an issue that has never been more important. Significant changes have taken place in American companies in recent years, and these are certain to continue at a pace never previously experienced.

We are in an age of global markets with a digital presence that is increasingly becoming overarching. No one really knows the path ahead; it remains as murky as ever.

What worked just a year or two ago can already be obsolete, and what is successful today could be on the way out without our knowing it. Something new is always on the horizon, but which something new will make a positive difference is no clearer now than it has ever been.

This presents new challenges for marketing in ways that have never previously existed. But along with challenges are also opportunities — new Web 2.0 marketing communications tools such as corporate blogs, Wikis, and the increased specificity of marketing discussions through vertical channels as opposed to “talking to an invisible community.” All these are challenging every CEO to reexamine conventional practices.

For all the innovations of this brave new century, old issues remain. There exists, and has always existed, a fundamental disconnect between the CEO, sales, and marketing. Their personalities and objectives are quite different, and they profoundly affect the CEO’s functions.

This disconnect, about which I have much to say, is a result of our current economic corporate structure and culture, which were inadvertently fashioned to encompass it. The consequence is that it has an appearance of normalcy and a sense of permanence that are illusionary, but make it difficult to properly perceive, effectively manage and alter for the better.

In my experience, the CEO who follows the conventional and takes the commonly accepted management approach to the significant issues created by this disconnect, will never come to terms with the real issues. In most cases, in fact, the CEO will never even understand that the divide in these areas has been the fundamental cause of many, if not most, of his or her problems.

BusinessSummaries.com is a business book summaries service.Every week, it sends out to subscribers a 9- to 12-page summary of a best-selling business book chosen from among the hundreds of books printed out in the United States.For more information, please go to http://www.bizsum.com

In today’s pop business culture of motivational phrases and self-improvement books on successful management, there is no shortage of slogans about the value of teamwork: “There’s no ‘I’ in teamwork.” “TEAM: Together Everyone Achieves More.” “None of us is as smart as all of us.”

The fact is, they all convey what we know instinctively: Teams are powerful. Through our own experience and supporting research, we are convinced that complex problems benefit greatly from the creativity that comes from diverse thought, backgrounds, and styles. But I have yet to see a slogan that reveals the underlying secret of the very highest performing teams.

A major consulting firm figured it out. The researchers studied “successful” teams and the truly “breakthrough” teams to try to determine the differentiators between the two. They looked at the size of the team, the combination of management levels, the gender and culture mix, among many other variables.

In the end, they concluded that the greatest determinant of a breakthrough team is that they members of the team care as much about each other’ success as they do about their own success.

It’s well worth the investment to institutionalize a method for hiring people that’s based not only on the capacity to do the job but also on the capacity to care. That is, if you care about more than just getting the job done.

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“5 Steps to Successful Business Leadership” is an important management guide which explores the principles and practice of leadership in business. It provides readers with five creative and groundbreaking tools which, if used properly, can help them to succeed at the task of managing a team.

How to motivate the management team
Establishing and achieving targets
Coaching skills
Monitoring performance
Creating the environment for success
Thinking outside the square

STEP 1: Gain agreement that people want to be successful in their jobs
A common issue is the line where management influences stop and personal influence starts. All individuals have the right to select the thoughts they hold in mind and the thoughts influencing action.

Attitude leads to Behavior that leads to Consequences.

Do not train to change attitude. Training is the act of improving the performance of the actions and tasks to achieve the goals. It can and must be a focused activity with clear payback, and if there is no clear payback, then the training expense must be questioned. Attitudes can and should arise in training, but only good attitudes can help the employee focus behavior and enhance his or her performance at work.

Business has no right counseling employees. A person’s head is his castle. People will have life difficulties, such as divorce. But the business has no place involving itself these situations. It can only offer the employee the chance to file a leave, or offer advice on whom to approach for counseling advice.

Surveying attitudes is a waste of time and money. First, any effective manager can walk into a work place and have a very good idea in a few minutes of the attitudes of the employees there. The best and most effective thing management can do to build the best possible attitudes within the business is to focus on management’s proper job – of course, “to manage” – to do it very, very well and then ask everyone to come along for the ride, grow with the challenge and enjoy the success.

STEP 2: Define success in terms of the numbers the team must achieve
For a management team accountable for profit and loss, coordination of effort is effectively achieved by the profit profile. Each team member is responsible for some number on the profile and for some project whereby that number will be improved this year and next year. This defines success for the team, and momentum and commitment to being successful in this team and this job. The result of these clear and focused efforts is to arrive at a strong ‘team spirit’.

SUMMARY OF TEAM WORK
Coordination. All team members are expected to cooperate in such a way that the total level of operating profit is always enhanced.

Ethics. This is the responsibility of all team members, but a crucial focus of the team leader. It is not necessary that the team members actually like one other, but everyone must afford his or her fellow team members professional respect, ensuring that no personal biases undermine any aspect of team performance.

Personal performance. Bounded by the preceding points, each team member is expected to be thoroughly focused on his or her own job to the extent that when they say ‘such and such will happen’, other team members are confident that it will.

STEP 3: Identify the actions that, if acted out, will facilitate a satisfactory result
What management must do is create the climate to motivate, and provide the understanding and coaching and training in the behaviors of success to build the skills.

STEP 4: Keep the team focused on their level of effectiveness at implementing behaviors of success
The principles of job descriptions as we know them seem sound. Yet, there is something missing – a tie-up between the job descriptions and the behaviors of success. The form is kept very simple, with teams and team leaders completing it themselves. This process seeks to encourage regular discussions on ‘how we do a particular thing’, a.k.a. behaviors of success.

It must be clearly derived from and related to the strategic business plan and team members can see immediately why they in fact exist as a team.

The thrust is team based, and this emphasis on team effort and teamwork, when backed by the simple ethics as outlined in an earlier section, leads to improved team cohesiveness.

The system immediately places current performance expectations against business benchmarks, and the business benchmarks are always higher. The system focuses on the key behaviors of success with a strong positive effect on the person concerned. He or she is constantly reminded of the actions needed to attain success.

The system has proven very successful and has become a tool used by many managers to enhance the performance of their teams.

STEP 5: Celebrate large and small successes
A relationship can be established between the satisfaction and emotional state of a person’s life and the time he spends working. Daily emotional state is graphed as an irregular line, which indicates fluctuations in the level of satisfaction on a daily basis.

The progressive build-up of life satisfaction is something that should occur despite this daily flux, and ideally should increase over time. It can seen as being related significantly to a person’s goals.

Note that work is only one component of a person’s life and, for some people, not even a major component at that. Celebrating both small and large successes is a sure-fire way to get staff to realize their significance in the eyes of management and the team itself, itself a stepping-stone towards a realization of the importance of work in their lives.

FINAL NOTES
A leader has the ultimate responsibility for the productivity of his team, and some people will actively or passively resist the challenge to improve themselves and will show no energy or interest in doing so. These obstacles must be overcome by the leader if he or she is to bring the team to realize the power and potential of each person in that team.

As already stated, personal growth and an increase in satisfaction through success is only comfortable in retrospect.

BusinessSummaries.com is a business book summaries service. Every week, it sends out to subscribers a 9- to 12-page summary of a best-selling business book chosen from among the hundreds of books printed out in the United States. For more information, please go to http://www.bizsum.com

Workplace conflict need not be a problem. There are steps that can be taken by management to ensure that conflicts can be resolved as soon as possible and without harm. Moreover, if and when properly managed, conflicts have the potential to generate positive outcomes for all concerned.

If conflict is to be handled in a gainful manner, it is vitally important that individuals and organizations develop robust strategies for coping with conflict in the workplace. Not surprisingly, managers will often intuitively seek to resolve these disagreements by means that are primarily unilateral in nature.

Without a culprit, ideally one that can be proven to be at fault beyond reasonable doubt, the unilateral approach to conflict resolution simply does not work. In acknowledgment of these facts, when confronting conflicts within the workplace, alternative methods should always take precedence.

When taking a consultative approach to conflict resolution, disputants attempt to take responsibility for, and ownership of, their own disputes. Of course, unless a manager is actually one of the disputing parties, they will typically not be involved in the consultative resolution of conflict, nor perhaps even aware that there is a problem, or that an attempt at resolution is taking place at all. If one is to capitalize on the potential gains of consultative conflict resolution it is crucial that managers can take a step back and allow employees to attempt to work out their differences. It is an unfortunate reality of the workplace that some matters simply cannot be resolved by the parties involved, and that these conflicts, if left unresolved, can tend to fester.

Often known as the ‘softly-softly’ approach, facilitation is a relatively informal approach in which a third party, preferably one respected by and familiar with the disputing parties, brings the complainants together for discussions in the hope of establishing mutually satisfactory resolutions. Facilitation is a strategy for conflict resolution that is most potent in the early-stages of conflicts. Employed typically for fairly minor or mild conflicts, facilitation can be an extremely useful approach for a manager, whom sometimes might have to do as little as get the parties together and lend his/her presence to proceedings. Certainly, early informal interventions into conflicts, such as facilitation, should always be the first response to the identification of a potentially serious workplace conflict.

On the other hand, as with all approaches, there are issues revolving around facilitation that should concern a manager. Having established that third party conflict interventions are an unfortunate reality of the modern workplace, there are times when the subtlety of facilitation simply isn’t enough. Mediation is defined as a formal process of negotiation conducted in a controlled environment through which an impartial third party, ideally someone with no inherent decision-making power in regards to the matter, takes an active role in guiding disputing parties towards voluntarily settlement of a dispute. Needless to say, properly conducted mediation, executed from a position of neutrality by suitably skilled and experienced mediators, exists as a powerful tool for resolving conflict in the workplace.

Evidence suggests that, when mediation does work, it tends to produce enduring resolutions that involve minimal damage to the ego or interests of those involved and minimum potential for negative ‘spill-over’ in the workplace. Mediation is therefore widely regarded as an excellent means for resolving serious and pressing workplace conflicts. Arbitration is a formal process in which a third party, or occasionally parties, mutually agreed upon by the disputants or appointed by a suitable authority, renders a rational, legally-binding decision based upon the interpretation of the available evidence. While relatively few workplace conflicts find their way into a court, or board of arbitration, in the most serious of disputes, lawyers or similar agents of representation will often be solicited by the disputing parties.

In the final analysis, the implication for managers is that conflict is not necessarily counterproductive, but the inability to resolve conflict definitely is.

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