It's Lonely at the Top Preston: CEOs often feel very lonely. Although that may surprise many who have never been a CEO or business owner, it won’t surprise those who have. Many people clamor for time with the CEO. In addition to employees seeking the CEO’s time, there are customers, prospects and suppliers to meet [...]
Speed Preston: Brian, in our last exchange you talked about how the internet has enabled us to do things faster, cheaper and more efficiently. We discussed this in the specific application of developing a minimally viable product. I want to focus on the “faster” element whether enabled by the internet or not. Speed, in [...]
The Power of Why "If you always tell people why, they'll understand it better, they'll consider it more important, and they'll be more likely to comply" -Charlie Munger Asking why repeatedly until you get to the root cause of a problem is a powerful tool from the Toyota Management System. Explaining why is a powerful [...]
MVP (It's not what you think) Preston: Brian, “Ready, Fire, Aim” is great advice in those situations where we feel paralyzed by a lack of information. This is the state in which many entrepreneurial companies find themselves. It is also the state any business may find itself in when developing a new product or [...]
The Secrets of Creating a Sustainable Competitive Advantage By Preston Sumner and Brian Rouff Preston: The Holy Grail of business is creating a sustainable competitive advantage. You can point to numerous companies that have established a clear competitive advantage. The challenge is sustaining that competitive advantage. The chart below illustrates this difficulty. Note the turnover [...]
"Two is one and one is none." When designing processes, risk management must be taken into account. What is the impact of a failed component? Can the throughput of the process be protected by the use of several lower capacity machines rather than a single high capacity machine? Can a job be shared by two [...]
"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all." -Peter Drucker EFFECTIVENESS must come before efficiency. Effective means creating value for a customer. Processes must be designed to eliminate activities that do not add value. This is an important source of competitive advantage.
What Do Tim Tebow, Le’Veon Bell And John Boyd Have In Common? Tim Tebow took the Denver Broncos to the playoffs in 2011. He took over the quarterback job after a 1-3 start under another quarterback and took the team to a win in the first round of the playoffs. Tebow never got another start [...]
Are You Experienced? Jimi Hendrix unknowingly posed an important business process question in 1967 as the title to a song and his debut album. An earlier article, “If It’s Not a Process, It’s a Problem,” discussed the importance of processes. This article will discuss how we go about developing good processes. Any good process begins [...]
If It's Not a Process, It's a Problem All the activity in our businesses can be classified as either a process or a problem. If you have an activity that is not a process and you don’t think it is a problem, just wait. I promise it will eventually become a problem. For purposes of [...]
