Archive for 'operations'
Harnessing Diva Power
May 22nd, 2006 by John Herman, under operations, small business. No Comments
From Entrepreneur’s Small Business Blog
You’re smart enough to know you can’t run your business by yourself. But what do you do if you can’t afford to hire the experienced help you need to grow? You find others in the same boat and join forces to give each other a leg up. In Dayton, Ohio, that’s just what these five hospital executives did, according to this recent article in the Dayton Business Journal. After working as nurses and then being promoted to administrative positions, Cris Huerta and her fellow execs, who jokingly call themselves the GDIVAS, teamed up to share resources and brainpower to develop better ways to run each of their medical facilities. In addition to sharing resources, they’ve also contracted with each other’s facilities whenever possible for needed services. Why not do the same in your community? Find other business owners with big plans for growth but a small monetary well to draw from, and put your collective brains together to help each other prosper. As they say, two heads–or five–are better than one.
Flexibility
May 17th, 2006 by John Herman, under marketing, operations, small business. No Comments
Seth Godin talks Flexibility:
The one thing that’s certain about your marketing plan, your products, hey, even your life is that it won’t turn out the way you planned.
Given this proven truth, doesn’t it make sense to spend most of your time building flexibility into whatever you’re building?
It’s a lot easier to change your mind in advance… doing it when you have to is painful–especially if you have to persuade a team. The most flexible plans have the need (and ability) to change built right in.
Don’t scar on the first cut
May 17th, 2006 by John Herman, under operations. No Comments
37Signals Signal vs. Noise Blog has an interesting post today by David
Policies are often the result of something that once went wrong. It’s organizational scar tissue developed from a This Can Never Happen Again mandate. And its almost always ill-considered.
The problem with policies are that they compound and eventually add up to the rigidity of bureaucracy that everyone says they despise. Policies are not free. They demean the intellect of the executer (“I know this is stupid, but…”) and obsolve the ability to deal with a situation in context (“I sympathize, but…”).
Here’s a curve ball: When something goes wrong, have a chat about it, embed the learning in the organizational memory as a story instead of a policy. Stories have context and engage the listeners, so next time a similar situation arise, you’ll be informed by the story and act wiser.
Policies are codified overreactions to unlikely-to-happen-again situations. A collective punishment for the wrong-doings of a one-off. And unless you want to treat the people in your environment as five year-olds, “Because The Policy Said So” is not a valid answer.