Nothing in life travels in a neat formation accompanied by bugles and cavalry. A lot of it shows up filthy and unkempt, prominent in the mess we’ve made around our foxhole. These lessons are typically the offspring of hubris, naivete and ignorance … or from overlooking the land mines hidden beneath our feet.
Every Tuesday, we’ll share valuable and practical leadership tips and tools to help you BE a better leader so you can BECOME a better leader. Remember … you won’t BECOME a better leader until you start BEING a better leader … implementing NOW the changes necessary to adopt the proven strategies of successful leaders. You might start by building on the communication matrix and making sure you’re defending the castle to get done what only you can do. Make some time so you’re thinking past today.
The week just ended is my favorite sports week of the year. Some of you will say, “Nah, you got your calendar mixed up. Baseball season opened the previous week.” Of course, I could say, “but the home opener for the Giants was that week” and then you’d say, “OK, so you’re a big Giants fan. I get it.”
A few of you may suspect that’s not the reason. Not that I don’t love the World Champion San Francisco Giants and all … but honestly? That didn’t even occur to me as I braced for the greatest sports week of the year.
There are a lot of reasons why I love this past week.
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Every Thursday, I’m sharing a new Personal Productivity Tip to help you get more done. Each Productivity Tip is a remarkably simple tool or concept that can be quickly implemented to make a real difference in your personal productivity. When you apply many of them together, they’ll make a big difference in improving productivity, achieving accountability and staying focused on the things that matter the most in your life.
You may want to check out some of the posts in this Productivity series, including the the value of checklists; the importance of getting rid of the crappy stuff; the nightmare of the cluttered mind; and that feeling of being buried all the time. You can also leverage your resources and apply the lessons of the ARCI chart and the S.M.A.R.T. goals to boost the accountability of your entire organization. One more thing. When in doubt, write it down.
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What the hell is the Zeigarnik Effect?Have you ever heard of the Zeigarnik Effect? It’s named after a Russian psychologist, Bluma Zeigarnik, who stumbled across the notion in the 1920s that waiters remembered orders that were still unpaid better than those that were already completed. She returned to her lab, ran several experiments and further discovered that people remembered tasks better if they’d been interrupted doing them than if they’d completed them.
What she concluded has a lot to do with our short-term memory’s propensity to forget completely. The more we try to hold things in our short-term memory, the harder we have to work to remember them. It takes a lot of cognitive energy but with few results. Anyone have a different experience?
No surprise … we also seem to have a better memory for those things we have not yet finished. The “psychic tension” it creates remains a stimulus for us to keep moving forward, wrestling with that idea and continually straining to bring it to closure.
So, what does this mean for personal productivity?
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“Financial Adrenaline” is a term we love around here because it reflects our commitment to help you turbocharge your business with practical tips and techniques to improve free cash flow, the lifeblood of business. As a further extension of our Financial Adrenaline program, we’re going to share a new Business Finance Tidbit every Wednesday specifically for those business executives who don’t have a finance background. Last week we began our 12 part Big River series so you can pick up the story there.
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“Creditors have better memories than debtors.”
Benjamin Franklin
John, are you ready for our meeting? We said yesterday that we were going to meet to go over our financial projections and review a possible bank proposal.”
“I’ll be right there, Tom,” John Wilson, company CEO said to his controller. He reflected on their conversation last week about the Company’s expected negative cash flow and the need to borrow from their bank, most of which resulted from giving extended terms to their customers. John learned his lesson and wanted to avoid borrowing, but Tom had been pretty explicit about the need.
“John, I’ve gone over our short term cash needs again,” Tom said after they gathered in the conference room and were looking at some numbers on the overhead projector. “I’ve created a simple example on the screen with all the numbers shown in thousands.
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As we’ve all learned, most of life’s lessons don’t travel in a neat formation accompanied by bugles and cavalry. They arrive filthy and unkempt, prominent in the mess we’ve made around our foxhole. These lessons are typically the offspring of hubris, naivete and ignorance … or from overlooking the land mines hidden beneath our feet.
Every Tuesday, we’ll share valuable and practical leadership tips and tools to help you BE a better leader so you can BECOME a better leader. Remember … you won’t BECOME a better leader until you start BEING a better leader … implementing NOW the changes necessary to adopt the proven strategies of successful leaders. Start by taking a look at our communication matrix to make sure you’re working at improving your communication success.
How many times have we asked Are Distractions Destroying Your Brain? Whatever happened to that blank sheet of paper you were going to use to THINK, you know, that old-fashioned approach to problem solving and the creative process? Do we agree that Google is making us stupid?
These are but variations on a theme … our increasingly short term focus. We’re trying to do too much, keep track of a lot of stuff, fend off the intruders that keep pouring over the horizon … fighting today’s fires but missing the extraordinary value of a long term perspective.
We’ve talked about Warren Buffet’s most recent shareholder’s letter. He’s well known for his long-term perspective, which infuses such homilies as “At Berkshire, our time horizon is forever” and “that to finish first you must first finish”.
The key is to balance the need for short-term performance with the long term perspective that creates a lasting business. In our discussions about leadership, we have often referred to what only the CEO can do to focus on those special things that ONLY YOU can do.
Peter Drucker in The American CEO (full article requires WSJ login), supplemented by A.G. Lafley, former CEO of P&G, have written about what only the CEO can do … and one of their key findings is the importance of the balance between short and long term objectives. (Full article must be purchased from HBR.)
It’s correctly identified as one of the most important roles that a CEO must fulfill … because no one else has the knowledge, both inside and outside of the organization, to provide that balanced perspective.
What would you do differently as a leader (and in other aspects of your life) if your time horizon was truly long term? How would you make business decisions if you were thinking about what your business would look like in 5-10 years rather than next week?
My bet is that your decisions would be quite different. Try it this week. When a salesman asks you about how to get a higher price on a particular deal, stop and reflect on how it might affect your long term relationship with that customer.
Are you trying to squeeze every last nickel out every time?
Is your salesman focused only on maximizing his commission?
Is this really the best deal for the customer in every way?
Many of you are thinking … easy for you to say.
“If we don’t get these next few sales this month, we may not be able to make payroll” … or some variation on that theme.
“We’ve got bills to pay, investments we need to make right now. We can’t ignore that for what we might be able to achieve in 2015.“
There’s no question that current performance is life-sustaining. We can’t ignore it … but we can be mindful of our long term goals and make sure that a quick buck in the short term isn’t destroying our ability to build a lasting business. The salesman example is but one poignant reminder of the conflict between doing the right thing and thinking only of today’s success.
What are you doing to think long term? Are you encouraging your team to think long term or is this month’s performance the only thing on every one’s mind? Does it make any difference?
Maybe it’s time to lace that triple espresso with a long walk?
Every Thursday, I’m sharing a new Personal Productivity Tip to help you get more done. Each Productivity Tip is a remarkably simple tool or concept that can be quickly implemented to make a real difference in your personal productivity. When you apply many of them together, they’ll make a big difference in improving productivity, achieving accountability and staying focused on the things that matter the most in your life.
You may want to check out some of the posts in this Productivity series, including the the value of checklists; the importance of getting rid of the crappy stuff; the nightmare of the cluttered mind; and that feeling of being buried all the time. You can also leverage your resources and apply the lessons of the ARCI chart and the S.M.A.R.T. goals to boost the accountability of your entire organization.
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Most of us follow an informal rule about doing something now if it takes just a few minutes. Most GTD aficionados are familiar with a more specific 2 Minute Rule. The short version? If you can get it done in 2 minutes, don’t add it to your task list. Do it now and be done with it.
That’s about as direct and in-your-face as GTD gets. For me, though, the real power of this rule is to make sure you do the opposite of the rule.
So, what’s the opposite of the 2 Minute Rule? Don’t do it if it takes more than 2 Minutes? Wouldn’t that be nice … but unfortunately, far more things take 2 minutes than not.
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“Financial Adrenaline” is a term we love around here because it reflects our commitment to help you turbocharge your business with practical tips and techniques to improve free cash flow, the lifeblood of business. Every Wednesday, we’re sharing a new Business Finance Tidbit specifically for those business executives who don’t have a finance background. You’ll get a head start by reading Warren Buffett’s letter to shareholders this year, and his comments about depreciation.
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“The importance of knowing accounting can not be underestimated, it’s the language of business. If you don’t know it, it’s like being in a foreign country without knowing the language.”
Warren E. Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, Inc.
“We’re broke,” Tom mumbled to himself. Tom Sampson is the controller of Ace Business Stuff and was reviewing his latest calculations about their cash flow.
“What do you mean, we’re broke?” Tom looked up sheepishly to see John Wilson standing in his doorway. He fingered his collar and turned to address the company’s CEO. “We can’t be broke because business has never been better,” John said.
Read the full post »
As we’ve all learned, most of life’s lessons don’t travel in a neat formation accompanied by bugles and cavalry. They arrive filthy and unkempt, prominent in the mess we’ve made around our foxhole. These lessons are typically the offspring of hubris, naivete and ignorance … or from overlooking the land mines hidden beneath our feet.
Every Tuesday, we’ll share valuable and practical leadership tips and tools to help you BE a better leader so you can BECOME a better leader. Remember … you won’t BECOME a better leader until you start BEING a better leader … implementing NOW the changes necessary to adopt the proven strategies of successful leaders.
Some of you probably expected this article to appear in our Productivity Tips series, and it certainly fits there as well. I included it here because I think that as good leader, you absolutely must spend more time devoted to what only you can do, as well as thinking” about what needs to be done.
Some of the techniques that can provide that untethered head space require more than productivity tools. If you can protect yourself from the casual interlopers that eat up your day,
Read the full post »
Every Thursday, I’m sharing a new Personal Productivity Tip to make a real difference in your personal productivity success. When you apply these techniques, they’ll make a big difference in improving productivity, achieving accountability and staying focused on the things that matter the most in your life.
You may want to check out some of the posts in this Productivity series, including the the value of checklists; the importance of getting rid of the crappy stuff; the nightmare of the cluttered mind; and that feeling of being buried all the time. You can also leverage your resources and apply the lessons of the ARCI chart and the S.M.A.R.T. goals to boost the accountability of your entire organization. Start by Turbocharging the Sunrise! Last week, we talked about the distractions that are destroying our brains, and next week I’ll outline one approach to getting more control over these relentless intruders.
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If you’re like me, you realize that there are a lot of “little things” that we need to do every day that often escape us in the maelstrom that surrounds our normal routine. It’s usually those things we’ve promised someone we would do that day FOR SURE … a small thing, easily done … but then, in the firestorm at the office, we completely forget about until we hit home and are gently reminded about our oversight … again.
This may sound absurd … maybe it is a sign of the times … but I’ve recently created a “Routines List”, an innovation that serves as a handy checklist of routines that I may or may not need on any given day but I want a quick reminder of what they are. As you know, I’ve written before about the power of such checklists. (You can also check out David Allen of Getting Things Done (GTD) fame, who has also written extensively on the value of checklists.)
We all have routines, don’t we?
Read the full post »
“Financial Adrenaline” is a term we love around here because it reflects our commitment to help you turbocharge your business with practical tips and techniques to improve free cash flow, the lifeblood of business. As a further extension of our Financial Adrenaline program, we’re going to share a new Business Finance Tidbit every Wednesday specifically for those business executives who don’t have a finance background.
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We’ve kinda been on a Warren Buffett tear lately, and last week I encouraged you to read his recent 2010 Annual Report to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders.
I want to plant another seed this week about an often misunderstood concept: DEPRECIATIONIn accounting, an expense recorded to allocate a tangible asset's cost over its useful life. Because depreciation is a non-cash expense, it increases free cash flow while decreasing reported earning. It is used in accounting to try to match the expense of an asset to the income that the asset helps the company earn. For example, if a company buys a piece of equipment for $1 million and expects it to have a useful life of 10 years, it will be depreciated over 10 years. Every accounting year, the company will expense $100,000 (assuming straight-line depreciation), which will be matched with the money that the equipment helps to make each year.. (You can see the definition by placing your cursor over the term.)
Today, let’s just think about it in terms of EBITDA. In Does EBITDA Bury Its Own Dead?, I wrote about the perils of treating EBITDA as a placeholder for cash flow, and Buffett couldn’t agree more.
In his Annual Letter to Shareholders, 2002, Buffet describes
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Welcome to Exkalibur. I’m Lary Kirchenbauer, President of Exkalibur Advisors, Inc. Please take advantage of our resources to help you build your business ... and let me know what more we can do to serve you.
Read my latest column from the NY Times affiliate, the North Bay Business Journal.
I've known and worked with Lary for more than seven years as a business partner, consulting colleague and adviser and have found that Lary's financial skills and creativity result in high quality results for his clients. I am certain that Lary's strong work ethic, client focus and successful track record bode well for future clients just as they have formed the foundation of a long-term and highly valued relationship for me.
Kevin J. Sharps, Director, Financial Services Consulting practice
