04-Managing a project team, feedback, team dynamics, team roles

9 Traits of Successful Startup CEOs

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This is an interesting and short article from INC magazine on the traits of successful startup CEOs.  After running a business for about 3 years, a lot of these make good sense.

1. Good at hiring and firing – hiring people is easy and makes you feel good about yourself. But knowing when to cut loses is hard, and delaying can result in bigger problems. It’s not easy to do, I struggled with this for a long time.

2. Builds a culture, not a company – a company cannot grow if it has the wrong culture. Spend time finding employees with the right skill set AND the right culture. The first hires at a startup are crucial to building the right culture.

3. Listens to feedback

4. Resilient – someone said to me early on “sometimes the road is straight and easy, other days you can’t see 10 feet ahead of you.” Keep chugging along.

5. Has a vision – People need to believe that you have a plan and direction.

6. Stay focused – I interpret this as not getting distracted by other things that may pop up. Keep your head clear and focused to the important matter.

7. Speak clearly – When I first started I talked a lot to be friendly, thinking that I could get people to be more willing to do stuff for me.   But all that did was confuse people. Now I know to keep my instructions simple and concise. Explanations may or may not be necessary.

8. Customer advocate – I have to say “the customer is not always right.” Sometimes you have to fire customers. There’s certain customers that I don’t deal with, either because they are cheap, or because I know they will never be happy.

9. Good at convincing people – also related to being concise and clear. Don’t talk yourself into a trap, learn to stop

07c-Telling stories

Need a Story to Tell?

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By now, most of us realize what a powerful tool storytelling can be when conveying a message to an audience.  An idea can go from barely being understood to fully conceptualized given the right context a story can provide. Just knowing what stories can do is not enough though. One has to pick the right story at the right time to give ideas life. Couple this hard truth with the sometimes uncreative atmosphere of a business meeting and many are hard-pressed to come up with a relevant story to match up both with the idea and the environment. I found a great resource to help find a story to match the message: http://www.businessballs.com/stories.htm.

I was surprised to find one story listed that a previous manager of mine used to help defuse some tension in a cross-functional meeting with members of our IT department present:

A man in a hot air balloon is lost. He sees a man on the ground and reduces height to speak to him.

“Excuse me, can you tell me where I am?”

“You’re in a hot air balloon hovering thirty feet above this field,” comes the reply.

“You must work in Information Technology,” says the balloonist.

“I do,” says the man, “How did you know?”

“Well,” says the balloonist, “Everything you told me is technically correct, but it’s no use to anyone.”

“You must be in business,” says the man.

“I am,” says the balloonist, “How did you know?”

“Well,” says the man, “You don’t know where you are, you don’t know where you’re going, but you expect me to be able to help. You’re in the same position you were before we met, but now it’s my fault.”

Although some of the best stories can be gleaned from personal experience,  sometimes it can be hard to recall  one for every situation.  Having a few anecdotal stories in your repertoire can be extremely useful, and may just be enough to win your audience over.

blamegame

01-Structuring a problem, problem statement, Uncategorized

Einstein’s Secret to Amazing Problem Solving

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“Einstein is quoted as having said that if he had one hour to save the world he would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution.”

In the beginning of our MP journey we discussed the importance of fully understanding the problem at hand. With that we were tasked with evaluating the problem for our projects by using the idea of a problem statement summary. This tool helped guide us to clearly define the problem. I have found this tool a great resource, but always look to find even more resources to help in this department, as it is so important.

There are many times I still find it challenging to spend a lot of time on the problem at hand. It is so tempting to just dive right into a solution. Although I may know how important it is to analyze, develop, and clearly understand the problem, it is easy to jump ahead without even realizing it.

This article explains that being able to clearly define a problem is something that can be learned and developed over time.  It also explains that you may need to use a multitude of strategies or tools to help you get there.

Below are 10 strategies that you can use to help define a problem (see full article for an in depth description)

1) Rephrase the problem

2) Expose and Challenge assumptions

3) Chunk Up

4) Chunk Down

5) Find Multiple Perspectives

6) Use Effective Language Constructs

7) Make it Engaging

8) Reverse the Problem

9) Gather Facts

10) Problem-Solve your Problem Statement

Please be sure to take a look at the full article to give you a deeper understanding of the strategies listed.
https://litemind.com/problem-definition/

99-Spreadsheet modeling, charts & graphs, Excel resources, team dynamics

My Challenges with Excel

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C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Oxford University, and Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge, was an intellectual giant of the 20th century. In later life, reflecting on challenges he faced in his younger days, Lewis remarked:

“I could never have gone very far in any science, because in the path of every science the lion mathematics lies in wait for you. Even in mathematics whatever could be done by mere reasoning as in simple geometry I did with delight. But the moment calculation came in I was helpless. I grasped the principles but my answers were always wrong. Yet though I never could have been a scientist, I had scientific as well as imaginative impulses and I loved ratiocination*.”

To be candid, I have some apprehension when it comes to Excel . . . made all the more pressing because of how central excel skills are to the practice of finance. So when I consider my excel challenges I draw much encouragement from these thoughts of C.S. Lewis.

Although I have a deep passion for finance, and have worked in investment management for 10 years, my position at work has been more about interpreting and leveraging excel generated data, rather than performing the actual work of creating spreadsheet models myself.

The result is that up till now, my excel skills have languished.  Thus I’m grateful that our MBA program has forced me to improve. In this spirit, (and acting on the advice of professor Noonan) I’ve set out to build my own personal top 10 excel skillset, that will be useful to my financial career.  Some of these may seem rather obvious, but excel is my self-selected focus area and I figured that I could subject my list to public opinion and scrutiny, in the hope that collaborative discussion might occur. I also thought that some of this material might be useful for those considering a financial career.

Rough draft of “Top 10” excel skills for investment management and financial planning for high net worth individuals, families, trusts, and charitable foundations:

  1. Precision tree
  2. Sensitivity analysis, useful for evaluating insurance policies
  3. Goal Seek
  4. Historical market and financial instrument analysis
  5. Excel integration with Word and PowerPoint
  6. Configuring excel for pleasant appearance and functionality
  7. Mortgage / Bond / Annuity amortization schedules
  8. Learning to manipulate and efficiently sort data – this is hugely important for many areas within our business such as ranking client positions, asset allocation decisions, analysis of individual positions, and assessing performance in order to prioritize investment decisions
  9. Graphing portfolio performance vs. relevant market benchmarks
  10. Leveraging excel with proprietary finance software used by major financial enterprises. (our firm uses Advent)

When I reflect on the challenges of the first year of MBA school, I am glad that I have improved in several of theses areas and incorporated them into different assignments and projects. Our cohort has aided much of my improvement.

For example, during first semester, I was fortunate to be on a team with Shehzad Shabuddin, who was quite generous with his time and patient with helping me make progress on excel. Shehzad’s blog post, The Excel trap, reminds us of the dangers of reducing life to data and mathematics. Excel-ing in Real Estate by Bob Caperton and the article by Barry Slaymaker on MBA level excel skills were both particularly helpful. I’m also hopeful that I can persuade Joe Song to give me some Excel lessons between now and graduation.

One of the most powerful lessons I have learned in life (and a “key content” area of MP) is the importance of surrounding yourself with others whose complementary strengths have the capacity to offset your personal areas of weakness.  My next blog post will examine a leader who intimately understood just how powerful this principal is, and became a great, and most unexpected, actor in history.

*Ratiocination, noun. – the process of logical reasoning. [1520-30]

07c-Telling stories

Importance of storytelling in business and effect of interactive media in this process

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This article discusses the importance of storytelling in communications and its effect on creating strong bonds between people, consumers, and businesses. The article also talks about the effect of technology and interactive media on business and consumer interactions. http://adage.com/article/guest-columnists/storytelling-apple-google-chevy-led-success/229814/

Throughout ages storytelling has been used as a tool to convey our thoughts, educate ourselves and help others to shape their opinion about us. The article uses “journalists”, “teachers”, “athletic coaches” and even “moms and dads” and “little kids playing with dolls and fire engines” as examples of storytellers that each have their own tale to talk to others about.

Storytelling is also essential to the success of many businesses: how effective they interact with consumers and how well they build value with them. The article points out a creative method used by successful companies to build upon their stories; “creation myths: Jobs and Wozniak toiling away in a garage; Page and Brin penning plans for Google at Stanford; Coca-Cola’s secret formula locked in a vault”; these tales convey company cultures to consumers and help businesses to shape consumers view about the company and build value with them.

The importance of storytelling can specially be appreciated in the advertising industry as it plays a key role in creating bonds between consumers and the brands. The article uses Chevrolet and Pepsi as examples: “Chevrolet has been associated with “baseball,” “hot dogs,” “apple pie” and the American ethic for almost 100 years. Pepsi has been “the choice of a new generation” in one way, shape or form for more than half a century.”; I think diligent communication and well-crafted storytelling techniques helped these to companies to build special bonds with their consumers.

Thanks to today’s advanced technology, consumers and business are able to communicate more effectively via interactive media. Just like this very blog that we are using, consumers can leave their comments about a particular product and the feedback can then be expanded by other people’s comments. I think this type of storytelling benefits both sides as producers can improve their products based on the collective feedback ‘story’ received from consumers.

While interactive media provides a communication channel between businesses and consumers, it may have some shortcomings as well. Focusing only on boosting their efficiency, some advertising and distribution companies have missed on building ‘deep relationships’ with their consumers and instead focused on how many ‘likes’ or ‘clicks’ they are receiving; I believe that by using such techniques, not only the companies do not receive in-depth product feedbacks, but also they weaken their relationship with the users! This is a limiting factor for interactive media and needs to get improved over time.

01-Structuring a problem, 03-Planning the work of a team, 04-Managing a project team, work plans

Tips for Leading or Attending Your Next Staff Meeting

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Staff meetings. We know the drill. I think we’ve all had experience with good ones, and ones that are just plain awful.

In my experience, staff meetings have served a number of different purposes: updating others on the progress of projects, decision-making, feedback on work, getting insight from team members, problem-solving etc. The success of those meetings depended on the number of people who attended, how prepared individuals were when they went to the meeting, knowing the purpose of the meeting, and knowing the end goal of the meeting—not be confused with “what” the end goal is going to look like. For example, before you go into the meeting, you know that you want to come out with a solution to your most recent sales issues with a customer—you don’t know what that solution may be until the end of the meeting.

The following tips are from an HBR blog post about the most common mistakes that are made when trying to run a staff meeting. I’ve summarized them below:

  1. There’s no clear objective. To avoid this, make sure the objective of the meeting is clear so that “participants […] know what to expect and how to prepare.”
  2. There’s no focused agenda (despite having a clear meeting objective). This means that the agenda items are unclear (and not detailed enough). Speak to attendees beforehand to determine what exactly they want to discuss and how much time to allot to them.
  3. Not everyone in the room has a chance to speak. Ask directs questions, give “the mic” to them to speak, let the interrupters know they’ll have their time to speak = more engagement from everyone.
  4. Endless debates without a conclusion. This goes back to Mistake #2. If folks have an idea of what the agenda is beforehand, then they can come prepared with data to back potential arguments or provide useful feedback.
  5. Not reaching a consensus on an action item. Before you leave the meeting (or soon after), identify what’s supposed to be done, who is supposed to do it, and when it’s supposed to be done by.
  6. No remembering to give “kudos” to individuals. Towards the end of the meeting, make sure that you still recognize certain individuals or teams for their efforts. Help bring everyone’s efforts and hard work full circle—remind them of the overall goal.

Now I wanted to ask you…

  1. What “mistakes” have you made in a meeting?
  2. Based on your experience, what tips do you have on leading a successful meeting?
  3. What do you do just before a meeting? Right after a meeting?
Uncategorized

Data And Information Management

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My clients contact me with a variety of questions – information on our products and services, technologies provided, their project status, charges, quality metrics, data access, turnaround times, etc. There are questions I can answer right away and there are questions I can quickly look up in our information system to find the answers to. Two years ago, I was spending a significant amount of time everyday searching in individual records, logs, and online resources, calling other divisions, harassing innocent interns, and/or just simply guessing to get the answers.
Effective data and information management is an essential component for many organizations. It is especially a concern these days as the amount of digital information is exploding at an exponential rate. The consequences of poorly managed data can be significant. The following are the examples  discussed in this article:
  • Financial losses: Your organization’s headquarters are flooded unexpectedly. Your backup system is outdated, and, as a result, you lose months of data, worth millions of dollars to your organization.
  • Litigation risk: Hackers access your customer database, which includes addresses and credit card numbers. These customers are now at risk of identity theft, and they decide to sue you for violation of their privacy.
  • Excess data storage costs: Your organization has no process for data cleansing – replacing or deleting inaccurate, incomplete, or outdated information. Consequently, your data storage costs and IT resource needs double each year.
  • Inefficient workflow processes: Your team members can’t find the information that they need to do their work, because each department has its own database, and none of these systems communicate with one another.
  • Missed opportunities: Your sales reps struggle to access the inventory database, which informs them of product availability and delivery dates. Competitors win sales from you, because they have immediate access to this information.
  • Brand/reputation loss: Customers are frustrated, because departments can’t communicate effectively with one another. As a result, your organization’s reputation and sales suffer.
  • Negative press/publicity: One of your team members loses their laptop, which contains information about a well-known client. As a result, your organization receives negative media coverage and you lose a number of clients.

For me, developing an effective information system was a life saver; I did not have to spend most of my time answering emails and calls, but could actually do some productive work.

01-Structuring a problem, issue trees

Issue Trees: More Useful Than Initially Thought

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In my free time (can any of us say “free time” with a straight face anymore?), I volunteer as chair of a committee for the leading professional organization of my field. A couple of weeks ago I was approached by the Board of Directors to lead a project to analyze one of the websites our organization offers as a service to members. Currently, we host and provide overall guidance for the direction of the website and pay a third-party provider to make it a reality, but many members of the board have started to wonder whether there is a better hybrid sourcing arrangement that would decrease our costs and provide a better value to our members. They believe that there are a number of problems with the website that the organization is not equipped to address or they do not want to spend the time and resources to address them. In fact their exact words were, “We could pay a consulting firm to do the analysis for us, but we were wondering if you think your committee could take it on instead.”

Because I just don’t know how to say no (and I have all that free time mentioned above), I agreed to lead the project. In a way, this assignment to focus on different aspects of MP couldn’t have come at a better time. During our last committee meeting, we began brainstorming the key problems with the website, the positive and negative outcomes, and possible solutions. I found myself relying on problem trees far more than I ever expected.

In a Project Management article at Bright Hub PM, the author describes a helpful method to brainstorm and pinpoint causes and consequences of a problem using a problem tree in a way that I haven’t tried before. He suggests dividing a board into three vertical sections in which the team lists the problems in the center column, the causes of these problems in the left column, and the consequences in the right column. The author also recommends clearly delineating between the direct causes and consequences of these problems compared to those causes and consequences that are indirectly related. Then, finally he suggests pictorially connecting the causes, problems, and consequences into a tree.

During the discussion, I often had to put forth questions in order to get the conversation moving. An article by Overseas Development Institute provides some helpful starting points, including:

–          “Which causes and consequences are getting better and which are getting worse and which are staying the same?”

–          “What are the most serious consequences? Which are of most concern?”

–          “Which causes are easiest/most difficult to address? What possible solutions or options might there be?”

–          “What decisions have we made, and what actions have we agreed?”

This method is a little different than the method my team used to create a tree in our previous semesters, but the advantages are clear. It provides a method to break the problem into manageable pieces that can be assigned to different members of the team while clearly establishing links between the various cause and effects of each problem. It will help our team prioritize both the big picture and more detailed actions that need to take place to ensure a successful project. In particular, I think creating a problem tree with a team that is international really helps all of us visualize the project. It becomes a tool that each one of us can reference at different times during the project to make sure we’re on track. Problem or issue trees are proving to be pretty useful.

03-Planning the work of a team, work plans

Three Pitfalls of Strategic Planning

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This article describes three areas that managers generally go wrong when trying to plan and execute strategies and deliverables: http://www.forbes.com/sites/billconerly/2013/08/15/3-strategic-planning-pitfalls/

The one take-away I derive is a quote given by the author (Bill Conerly) in an associated link to the article that states, “The value of a goal is not the goal itself but the determination of the action steps most likely to lead to achieving the goal”.

In my line of work, where a lot of project management is involved, I find that a lot of goals are set by my department as well as other departments that oversee the work of my particular unit. However, there is usually a recurrence of problems particularly with managing vendors, deadlines and budgets. Most of these issues we face as a department can be avoided if the “Value of a Goal” defined above is properly adhered to. The three pitfalls in strategy go a long way into substantiating the “Value of a goal”.

The first pitfall, “Avoiding ‘No’ ” describes how a company’s strategy may start off with a well defined focus but would then allow a lot of scope creep to blur the overall vision. The article suggests that this is usually due to the unwillingness of corporate leaders to say ‘No’.

The second pitfall, “Not connecting to actions” is an embodiment of the old cliche, “talk is cheap”. Usually, employees get caught in the moment during a meeting and are excited about certain deliverables. However, the follow through and understanding of certain actionable items tend to lack.

Finally, the third pitfall, “Vague action steps”, which I found to be pretty similar to the second pitfall, also illustrates how lacking a sequential actionable plan could lead to the collapse of a well thought out strategy.

I subscribe to the fact that for a corporate goal to be successful, it should answer the SMART framework. In essence, a goal should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound (SMART). I strongly believe that a goal that meets the SMART framework essentially avoids the three pitfalls described in the article and completely captures the true definition of the ‘Value of a Goal’.

MEMBA learning community, Fall 2016- Spring 2017