Posts in Books

Breakthrough Silos

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Breaking ⛏ Through Siloed  Organizations  First Requires Leadership Awareness! 類

Silos exist in practically every company, business, and organization. For profit or non profit … doesn’t matter. I’ve even identified silos in solo proprietorships.

The natural tendency of leaders is to “tear down the silos.”

Oh, I’m sure you’ve heard it all before … maybe you’ve even said it.

Everyone knows silos are bad!!!

Right?

Unfortunately, very few know why silos exist in the first place.

Unfortunately, very few understand why and who created the silos.

And, unfortunately, very few understand why playing “whack a silo” in your company doesn’t work!

The first step in dealing with silos in your organization is to learn why they formed in the first place and why you’ll NEVER get rid of them.

I challenge you to read Overcoming Organizational Myopia and learn not only why they form, but how to deal with them.

Increase your awareness!!!

#success #incubator #business #coaching #consultants
#overcomingorganizationalmyopia

That’s your marketing plan?

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🤔 Are you considering writing a book? 📖 Start with marketing it! 📢

On Facebook, this morning, I saw someone post, “I just published my book, can someone tell me how to market it.”

Too late! ⏰

If you are considering writing a book — I mean it’s a twinkle in your eye — start marketing your book first!

If you wait…your too late!

The first step is to define and hyper-focus on your audience — write the book for them.

Build your social media connections around that audience and develop qualified leads as you write.

Close to final draft, start building excitement with updates, videos, and snippets. Pull pre-release readers to test your book. Send it to someone influential for the Foreword.

Have a pre-release party and make the book available for pre-sale and become a bestseller prior to release.

Have big social fanfare, public service announcements, presentations, and book signings at final publication.

How do I know all this? I did the same as that person in 2012 when I published One Dead Marine, my first book.

#success #incubator #business #coaching #consultants
Crosscutter Enterprises
www.crossctr.com

Winner Takes It All!

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Does winning matter … sure. I can’t dispute that. But how? 🙉🙈🙊

‼ This update is going to piss a few people off that I know. 🤬 Oh well…

People, who don’t want you to win, care how you did it.

People, who want you to win, don’t care how you did it.

Those, who don’t want you to win, see how you’re winning, how you’re getting away with it, and also how you’re being recognized for it.

So, they start doing it as well.

Case in point: “Amazon Best Seller” 🔖

This garbage started before 2010. Forever, I thought it meant that your book simply out sold every other book in its category and was number one on Amazon … for a day or so.

That category could be very obscure. But, it doesn’t have to be. Because, I learned the many ways authors were convincing a lot of people to buy their book (often a $0.99 ebook) in one day — they game the system.

I have been told many times, by both authors and friends, I should do it too.

Recently I learned that some authors are calling #2 on Amazon a Best Seller … as is #14. Basically, if someone says it’s a Best Seller, then it is. Mainly, because there is no way to disprove it.

This is what people consider “Winning.”

Not me…

Crosscutter Enterprises
www.crossctr.com

Steps to Writing & Publishing a Book

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Interested in writing & publishing a book? Don’t know where or how to get started?

Successfully writing & publishing is much like starting a new business. The steps are essentially the same and having a plan & a coach really helps.

Many people think that publishing is expensive and difficult, but you can publish for very little money. It does require a lot if work to do it right. Here are my suggested 13 high-level steps to get you there:

1. Define your Purpose for writing.
2. Assess if you are ready to write & what you can write about.
3. Define the Audience.
4. Determine how you plan on writing your book (ways to get it written).
5. Ideation, research, brainstorming, and testing.
6. Outline.
7. Draft – edit – draft – edit – draft – edit – final draft.
8. Publishing determinations.
9. Cover design (and illustrations if required).
10. Draft reviewers and Foreword.
11. Pre-release marketing.
12. Format, Publish, and Release.
13. Post-release marketing.

If you are interested in writing & would like help, let me know.
Crosscutter Enterprises

Silo Poster Child!

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What does moving a manufactured home have to do with silos? In our case everything!

This story has become the poster child for my book, Overcoming Organizational Myopia!

My wife and I purchased a manufactured home for our horse property. There are actually quite a few moving parts to buying a double wide. One would expect these people to be experts at this.

The problem — silos creating organizational myopia.

It’s so bad, I, as a customer, can see every issue with these companies as plain as day.

First, let’s examine the major silos at work here:

1. Dealership. They are made up of three silos: 1) Sales – the people who sell the product; 2) Finance – the person who completes the formal paperwork; and 3) Project Manager – the person who is supposed to manage the delivery and setup of the home.

2. Factory. The Dealership and Factory are the same company. I see three silos: 1) Constuction – builds the home; 2) Maintenance – responsible for setup and warranty work; and 3) Trim Out – contracted company that finishes out the inside of the home onsite.

3. Delivery and Setup. Although used as a local contractor by all the dealers, they are a subcontractor that does site prep, delivery, setup, hook-up, and special stuff, like decks and skirting. As far as I can see, as a customer, they have at least seven silos, but they actually have silos within silos. The first silo is the Project Manager – this one guy is terrible, so bad in fact, I didn’t even know he was out PM for this effort. The first person we dealt with, forms a second silo. I’m not sure what to call him, but he’s kind of like Sales, but he was the first person who surveyed the site, determined requirements, and put together the bid. Of course, they have a Finance silo – one single person to take your money (everyone has one of these). Then, you have the Site Prep silo, Delivery silo, Setup silo, and Utilities silo. The Setup silo uses subcontractors and each of them (we dealt with three, that do the same job) are their own silo. I suspect there is at least one moresolo, made up of subcontractors, that handle the siding and decks, but haven’t dealt with them yet.

If you have read my book, I’m sure you can already see where the myopia might form. Let me tell you, it’s been pretty obvious working with this effort.

Myopia Issue #1. Dealership makes promises, yet financial paperwork is different. Here’s how you know you’re dealing with myopia. We signed an agreement with the salesperson. When we go to signing the 1,000 pages of documents, what we agreed to is not reflected in the paperwork. Comment, “Oh, I didn’t know that. I’ll have to check with the salesperson.” Impact: wasting company’s and customer’s valuable time at signing, getting with salesperson, validating what was written down and agreed to, and redoing paperwork to sign.

Myopia Issue #2. Dealership Project Manager only cares about getting the house built and delivered. While it’s being built and delivered, its costing them money. After it’s delivered, it’s someone else’s problem. Even though, they should ensure the customer’s end-to-end experience is flawless. Impact: Customer has to deal with several people across the three major silos to actually move into their new home.

Myopia Issue #3 — Everything After the Sale. Since the Dealership PM only cares about getting the product off their books, they dump the effort at that point. Now, I, as the customer, am forced to deal with all the silos related to the Factory and the Delivery and Setup subcontractor. This is where it really gets UGLY!

With the Delivery and Setup silo, two major myopia issues impact this company and resulted in a big fat 0 for customer satisfaction! First was a PM that is totally clueless. This guy didn’t just drop the ball; he lost it under the bleachers. The PM was so bad, that we didn’t even know he was our PM. Impact: Customer (that’s me) acts as PM and spends hours working with every silo in the company! The second major myopia issue is Communication (or, the Lack There Of). Since, I’m the PM on this effort, I worked with every single silo. In every interation the silos complain about and/or demonstrate a complete lack of communication across the company. Impacts: Project delays, constant defects, and unhappy customer.

Since the Dealership PM drops the effort after delivery, the other major silo we are forced to work with is the Factory. So far, it’s been the finishing effort on property. Their major issue is a lack of end-to-end process ownership. How this manifested itself is as follows. The finishing crew comes out to basically Make Ready the home for move in. They have to close up the two halves of the house, fix all the damage from moving, and repair stuff the Construction silo screws up. This was a constant game of Passing the Blame. These guys passed so many bucks that they’re horribly in debt! They blamed everything on the Delivery and Setup and Factory silos, so essentially they could get out of doing tons of work. Impacts: Work left no lt completed, more delays, and tons of rework by “warranty.”

Now, just think…they haven’t even finished the setup of this home and we have yet to move in. Consider this timeline so far. Its May 14th. On April 1st, we closed on the sale of our other home. On April 4th, we agreed on the purchase of this home. On April 8th, we closed on the purchase (paid cash). On April 15th, the house was ready (it was already being built when purchased). It wasn’t delivered until April 29th! It’s now May 14th and yesterday they “finished” the finish work after passing off unfinished work. Also, no utilities have been hooked up and we don’t even know when that might happen.

Leaders…Take a look at your operation. Is this what you see? You have silos in your company…they are inevitable and you actually want them … no, you need them to operate! However, it’s the myopic behavior, as demonstrated here, that forms out of silos gone wrong.

Need help identifying the silos and the myopia? I’m an expert at it. Every business you deal with throughout the day has these issues.

I hope this helps you better “see” how silos exist, organizational myopia occurs, and what its impact is like.

Innovation

Why Stop Now?

Books Meandering Genius Publishing

J. K. Rowling, the famous author who wrote the Harry Potter series states that she won’t write about Harry anymore.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bustle.com/p/jk-rowling-explains-why-there-wont-be-any-more-stories-about-harry-potter-8900613/amp

Being an author (Not of get stature), I question this. Ok, maybe Harry’s story has been told and there’s really nothing to add. However, what of the rest of the world and characters surrounding Harry Potter and Hogwarts?

In an immersive realm like Harry Potter, the opportunities are endless to expand on facets that no one ever considered. What about the Flight of Vox — this self destructing Phoenix that was owned by the Headmaster of Hogwarts is bound to have a series of interesting tales as he went through life bursting into flames and rising from the ashes.

I’m sure that there are some pretty interesting stories around the world outside of Hogwarts that Nomag’s have never seen. In Fantastic Beasts and in the Harry Potter series, we learn of other schools, which obviously have other stories.

Ok, J. K. (love the initials by the way), let Harry rest and retire. But, don’t stop now. In your mind is a world many have only glimpsed at. Bring it more to life and who knows what will happen?

Kickstarter Project: Overcoming Organizational Myopia

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Overcoming Organizational Myopia, stovepipes, sandboxes, short sightedness

At 2:30 pm, Central Time, on June 27, 2015, KS Project, Overcoming Organizational Myopia lifted off.  Overcoming Organizational Myopia will be a new nonfiction book about successfully breaking through stovepiped organizations to obtain organizational effectiveness.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1551087231/overcoming-organizational-mypoia

The Short Story: I discovered that it really does not matter what company or organization I work with, they all have stovepipes.  What I learned is that they are a product of human nature.  The problem is that everyone wants to “break down the silos” as the typical management response. Unfortunately, this NEVER works! All you do is cause confusion and drive unproductivity as the people in your business seek to rebuild the stovepipes that make them feel secure.  This book is about breaking through the stovepipes to become an effective and efficient organization.  It respects the stovepipes and teaches you how to navigate through them using a consistent and systematic application of full-spectrum strategic and organizational methods.  The book is designed to provide you with situational examples so you can self-diagnose your organization.  Across nine areas, the book helps you identify problem areas and, like a business doctor, treat the root causes with solid business solutions.

Breaking Down Silos

How do you break down silos?

Books Meandering Genius

Saturday I came across this question on LinkedIn…how do you break down silos?

Breaking Down SilosSilos exist in nearly every organization.  Organizations’ that suffer from silos are affected by what I refer to as Organizational Myopia.  My book on this is due out in a couple months that addresses this topic.

Silos are created by human nature.  Entrepreneurs start their small business with a great idea.  They are really good at delivering a service or building a product.  If the customers like the product or service, business tends to grow fast.  Specialty departments form because the founder’s skill is in developing the product.  Needs like HR, Finance, and IT crop up and specific people are hired to do this.  They often need to stand up a team or department.  Then the delivery side of the house gets too busy for everything to happen with one person and it fractures into things like Operations, Sales, Marketing, and Logistics.  These departments tend to start to segment around customer bases and then fracture further into teams.  These teams promote competition across the product for sales and delivery.

When the company started, it was small and manageable.  Everyone was focused on the same things.  The company grows and it starts to form these “groups of humans” in what we call “silos.”  So, the silos ALWAYS exist in successful companies.  The bigger the company is, the more prevalent the silos.  Mergers and acquisitions tend to create more silos then remove them.

Then here comes human nature.  Everyone wants to “belong.”  It’s a Maslow basic need.  They identify with their group at work as part of that effort; belonging means that you are part of one team and not part of others.  Thus, you get a strong feeling of team affinity.  This builds walls and starts to create an “us and them” mentality.  People start to think “we’re better than they are,” “they get better stuff,” “we have more work,” and “we need more money or people than they do.”  The walls solidify with brick and mortar and now your silos are firm and resolute.

Problems with this are a lack of communication across silos, people tend to throw “stuff” over the wall to the next step in processes without regard, constant empire building and resource wars, and everyone develops their own view of what customer is important.  This is Organizational Myopia.

The thing is, just disrupting the silos (breaking them down) WILL NOT solve your problem.  Tear them down with leadership and personnel changes, mergers, and acquisitions–the normal management response to the problem–doesn’t work.  You spend months, if not years, dealing with the change management issues associated, or worse, the ramifications because you didn’t deal with the change management in the first place.  Needless, employees flail around being unproductive for a while and then guess what?  Human nature takes hold again and they form right back into their belonging groups and they rebuild their silo walls and make them even more solid to prevent the same breakdown again.

The trick is to learn to work in a silo environment, not break down the silos.  Knowing how to Overcome Organizational Myopia is the purpose of my book.  It’s about breakthrough, not break down.

Working on One Dead Marine II

Books Meandering Genius Publishing

One Dead Marine

One Dead Marine

In May of 2012, I published my first fictional novel, One Dead Marine.

This book takes you into the world of The Savage SoulTM and Scorched EarthTM, which was created by a close friend of mine, Kevin Bogucki (Bogo).  Bogo worked on the world of The Savage SoulTM since we were kids in school.  Today, Scorched EarthTM is the planet Earth born out of an advanced society in the twenty-first century that died a painful death–and the killer’s name was Yellow Mike.

One Dead Marine follows Anthony Moon, a Native American U.S. Marine, who finds himself 150 years in the future, where old-world technology, magic-wielding demons, flesh-eating zombies, and monsters of every imagination populate the environment like the air he breathes.

Moon guides us through his journeys and experiences as you follow along in his own personal journal of his arrival to this new post apocalyptic world.  His journal outlines where Lance Corporal Moon learns to survive–barely–in a fanatical environment built out of the madness of a twisted drug and an ensuing great disaster.

The time for One Dead Marine II is upon us.

I have slowly worked on this second story, which picks up where the last book ended.  Lately, with the help of blogging, I have been getting wore into writing and this book is taking shape.

One Dead Marine II (true name yet to be announced) takes our unlikely Native American Marine hero to Las Vegas, Nevada.  Expect to see more of his struggles, to learn more about Moon, that he doesn’t even know himself, and battle lots of zombies–ugh!

This installment of The Savage SoulTM and Scorched EarthTM series will push Anthony Moon’s psyche to its limits with the madness that makes up planet Earth.

My goal is to release this installment by the end of the year.

Additionally, I’m working to reformat One Dead Marine, which was only released in paperback, in e-book format available for Kindle and Nook.  I hope to have this version released by April of this year.  It was very exciting to publish my first paperback and taught me some things about self-publishing that will help me when I release my first non-fiction business book, Overcoming Organizational Myopia.  I expect to also release that book by the end of May, beginning of April.

This second book following Moon will not be a journal, like the last book.  This one takes us into the more traditional approach to book writing by putting it in the first person view.  Also, I expect this novel to be longer than the first, which was just under 29,000 words (130 pages).

Well, back to writing…

High Performing Organizations

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I’ve been working in some way or fashion in the field of quality consulting since about 1990 when I attended one of my first Total Quality Management courses at Carswell AFB in Ft Worth TX. Since then I have worked in the areas of strategic planning, strategic communication, performance management, process management, human capital planning, resource management, and education and training. I’ve been in the lowest tactical to the highest CEO positions of military, non-profits, and companies and seen many things both doing and consulting in these areas.

So what?

Over the last several years I’ve been really thinking about what makes companies successful. My upcoming book, Overcoming Organizational Myopia is based on a lot of that thought. What I see too much of is organizations looking for that silver bullet. I was in a recent meeting, where a leader said he was looking for that one single metric that when tugged upon it unravelled everything else going on in the organization. My answer would be really simple, that doesn’t exist. Being a top performing (you fill in the blank) takes a lot of work and it’s constant work.

The group I work for now has been extremely successful over the last two years. My boss is even going to be interviewed by Gallup because of their employee engagement success in their last UCount survey. One of the managers in the team commented that now we have to sustain it. My response was, no, now we have to make it better next year. In today’s day and age, sustaining is the death of a company. You have to get better. When I started with them in January of 2012, they had just won The Keepers of Quality award for their major organization. That was great, but there was a lot more they could do. This month, we share part of our two-year continuous improvement story with that sMe audience to discuss how we are building and encouraging an environment of continuous improvement–quality.

What is all this mean?

High performing organizations don’t just “happen.” It takes. Lot of hard work and it’s a constant journey. If you read business books like I do, you probably heard many ways to become that high performing organization. They tell you what it is, they tell you what you should do, and they tell you why. They fill your head with fantastic stores of Apple and Dell, turn arounds like IBM and Harley Davidson, etc. trust me, I have read them all–well a lot of them. The thing they don’t tell you is HOW.

Funny, there are so many How To and Self Help books on the shelf, but none give away the secrets to becoming a great organization. How To books sell too–my speech writing instructor and mentor, Joan Detz taught me that in 2005.

So, how does an organization really improve? That’s the thoughts that have been on my mind of late. My soon to be released book focuses on part of the story, overcoming the “silo effect” that plagues every business in the world. You know what I’m talking about…sand boxes, camps, teams…the way we organize and the way we group as human beings lead us to form silos–we become myopic in business. They problem is that it will ALWAYS happen–you can’t avoid it. Leaders and managers alike might recognize it and try to break it down, but it happens to all of us. Overcoming Organizational Myopia is a true how to book focused on the nine things that suffer in siloed organizations and how to overcome it–not solve it, but to overcome it.

But the key, I think is the “Golden Egg,” as James Farhat would say. That is how does any organization that wants to be high performing make it happen? If they were a car, how do they get their engine firing on all cylinders? That is my journey this year. My effort in 2014 is to not only define it, but to lay out the roadmap and provide holistic training to all, at whatever level they are at, to help them become better and grow.

A guy I worked with in Booz Allen used to comment about how the different teams in our office would fight over the pieces of the “pie.” He was talking about this perceived limited amount of money that was available to all of Booz Allen that we would fight to get a piece of. He believed that believing that the pie was a certain size was limiting our ability to go for more and this we had to take more of someone else’s pie to grow our own silo–back to the myopia view again.

In America today, I think many business look at the perceived pie and think they have to take from others to get a bigger share. That leads us to disruptive innovation, aggressive marketing, and like tactics to win over the market share pie. What if I told you that the pie doesn’t exist. The better you are as a high performing organization, the more people will buy your whatever? I believe that doing good work gets more work–it’s not about pies, but about becoming the best at what you do. This is true both of an organization and as an individual.

So, I leave you with these thoughts on this Tuesday morning. Myopia, pies, and high performing organizations. Let me know what you think. Tell me it can’t be done…that I don’t know what I’m talking about. I look forward to the debate.

For those interested, what does a high performing organization mean to you?