Todd Sattersten :: Astronaut Projects

Exit Interview Questions

I like the questions in Inc. this month around exit interviews. I think there is alot to learn when people leave a company and most miss the opportunity.

• If the CEO left unexpectedly today and you were put in charge, what are the first things you would change?
• What could have changed six months ago that would have prevented you from looking for a new job?
• If you weren't looking, what factors tipped the scale when an opportunity came up?
• Who do you think is next to resign? And why?
• Why didn't you leave us sooner than now?
• Describe any areas of conflict that have affected either your performance or morale, or that you believe affected other employees.

They have links at the end of the article to additional resources at Workforce Management and BusinessBalls.com.

One Quality of A Leader

Whitespace asks "What's the one quality in a person labeled as a leader that you look for?"

A Little Too Late

You need to click through to Johnnie Moore's blog and read the note that the employees of Blendz Coffee left their boss.

What's In a Name?

Chipotle Mexican Grill had their IPO last week and the WSJ ran a short piece on the titles that company leaders use.

The customer service manager goes by "Manager of Duct Tape and Plungers". The guy who runs creative-services is the head of "Special Weapons and Tactics". Finally, the company's spokeman goes by "Director of Hoopla, Hype, and Ballyhoo".

That probably gives some indication of the kind of place it is to work. :)

Perfect for Boss's Day

Over at 800-CEO-READ, we have put together an ebook for Boss's Day called Nine Lives of Leadership. We are really happy with how it turned out. If you are looking for something for that favorite manager in your life, check out our entry here for the details.

There seems to be an awful lot going on this week. Or is it just me?

Dee Hock on Hiring

Hire and promote first on the basis of integrity;
second, motivation;
third, capacity;
fourth, understanding;
fifth, knowledge;
and last and least, experience.

Without integrity, motivation is dangerous;
without motivation, capacity is impotent;
without capacity, understanding is limited;
without understanding, knowledge is meaningless;
without knowledge, experience is blind.
Experience is easy to provide and quickly put to good use by people with all the other qualities.

-Dee Hock on Management, M. Mitchell Waldrop, FC5, Oct:Nov 1996

9 Tips For Change Agents

1. Be open to data at the start. "Even if you think you know what you're doing, chances are you don't know what you could be doing. Open up your mind to as much new thinking as you can absorb. You may find different and better ideas than the ones your organization started with."
2. Network like crazy. "There is a network of people who are thinking about learning organizations. I've found you can get in touch with them easily. People say to me, `I can't believe you talked with so-and-so! How'd you do it?' The answer is, I called him."
3. Document your own learning. "People in the organization need to see documentation for their own comfort. The smartest thing I did was to create a matrix of ideas from leading thinkers. I documented two categories of thinking -- the elements of a learning organization, and the pitfalls to avoid."
4. Take senior management along. Turner's own education included benchmarking trips to Saturn, Texas Instruments, Motorola, General Electric, and other companies known for their innovative approaches to learning. "Some of the people in the senior group were very skeptical," Turner says. "It helped to take them on these benchmarking trips to show them other companies that were actually doing some of the same learning practices."
5. No fear! "You've got to be fearless and not worry about keeping your job."
6. Be a learning person yourself. "Change agents have to be in love with learning and constantly learning new things themselves. Then they find new ways to communicate those things to the organization as a whole."
7. Laugh when it hurts. "This can be very discouraging work. You need a good sense of humor. It also helps if you've got a mantra you can say to yourself when things aren't going too well."
8. Know the business before you try to change anything. "I don't think you can do this work if you're just a theorist. I've been a sales rep, I've been in a marketing job where I worked with the operations side. So when I go about the work of creating a change strategy, I already have an understanding of the people in our organization and what they do."
9. Finish what you start. "I made a list of change projects we'd started and never finished in the past. We called it 'the black hole.' I determined early on I didn't want to be part of a second-rate movie."

-9 Tips for Change Agents, Nicholas Morgan, FC5, Oct:Nov 1996

50 Reasons Why We Can't Change

1. We've never done it before.
2. Nobody else has ever done it.
3. It has never been tried before.
4. We tried it before.
5. Another company/person tried it before.
6. We've been doing it this way for 25 years.
7. It won't work in a small company.
8. It won't work in a large company.
9. It won't work in our company.
10. Why change--it's working OK.
11. The boss will never buy it.
12. It needs further investigation.
13. Our competitors are not doing it.
14. It's too much trouble to change.
15. Our company is different.
16. The ad department says it can't be done.
17. Sales department says it can't be done.
18. The service department won't like it.
19. The janitor says it can't be done.
20. It can't be done.
21. We don't have the money.
22. We don't have the personnel.
23. We don't have the equipment.
24. The union will scream.
25. It's too visionary.
26. You can't teach an old dog new tricks.
27. It's too radical a change.
28. It's beyond my responsibility.
29. It's not my job.
30. We don't have the time.
31. It will obsolete other procedures.
32. Customers won't buy it.
33. It's contrary to policy.
34. It will increase overhead.
35. The employees will never buy it.
36. It's not our problem.
37. I don't like it.
38. You're right, but...
39. We're not ready for it.
40. It needs more thought.
41. Management won't accept it.
42. We can't take the chance.
43. We'd lose money on it.
44. It takes too long to pay out.
45. We're doing all right as is.
46. It needs committee study.
47. Competition won't like it.
48. It needs sleeping on.
49. It won't work in this department.
50. It's impossible.

E.F. Borish,
Product Manager,
Milwaukee Gear Company,
Product Engineering Magazine
July 20, 1959
[This was published in the November 1993 prototype version of Fast Company].

Gaining Momentum...

I seem to be gaining some momentum again for blogging.

I just wanted to point you over to my FC Now BlogJam contribution. It is entitled The Time For Action Is Now.

Milwaukee looks good in the Fortune 500

OnMilwaukee.com looked through the recent Fortune 500 issue and found the Milwaukee and Wisconsin fared pretty well.

• Wisconsin has 25 Fortune 1000 companies
• The big names are Northwestern Mutual, Johnson Controls, Manpower, Kohl's, Harley-Davison, Rockwell, and Wisconsin Energy Corporation.
• Johnson Controls is the top ranked Wisconsin company at #71
• In looking at metro Milwaukee, the area ranked #5 when you consider population and number of ranked companies.

Milwaukee Companies Taking a Beating

It has been a rough couple of weeks for Milwaukee-based companies.

Things started with Harley-Davidson. On April 13th, the motorcycle maker announced earnings were up 11% but that sales were flat. They lower 2005 earnings expectations and said they would cut production. The stock has dropped 22% since the announcement.

Yesterday, the highly recognized Midwest Airlines announced losses of 91 cents per share for the first quarter. They said fuel prices are up 36% over last year. On a positive note, they saw revenues grow almost 11%. Midwest's stock is down almost 10% since the announcement.

Harley got hit because people didn't expect the flat sales. They'll be fine.

Midwest on the other hand I am worried about. They lost $15.9 million dollars this quarter. The company is only worth $31 million at this point. I am not sure how they can survive in this environment of high fuel costs and no ability to raise prices. I am flying with them in both June and July to do my little bit. There is improved quality of life here by having a local airline that flies direct to big cities. There is nothing that beats their Signature service. I wish them luck in the months ahead.

You Think You Know, But You Don't

Monday's WSJ had an interesting piece on Blockbuster [sub. needed]. The main story is Carl Icahn buying up a bunch of shares and his trying to get Blockbuster to pay out a bunch of cash to shareholders. CEO John Antioco thinks the cash would be helpful to build new parts to the business.

Inside the story is a more interesting story for me. From the article:

In his search for a new business for Blockbuster, Mr. Antioco has embraced some idea--like the mail-order DVD service--that he initially derided. When Netflix first started, Mr. Antioco argued its business was only a niche market because he didn't think consumers would want to think days ahead about what movies they want to order. But Netflix has signed up so many subscribers--three million as of last month, including many former Blockbuster customers--that he had no choice but to follow suit. Last summer he launched Blockbuster Online. So far it has grown quickly. Blockbuster initially expected it could sign up 250,000 customers by year-end. Instead within seven months, Blockbuster had signed up 750,000. Mr. Antioco's target is up to two million subscribers by early 2006.

This is a clear tale of the importance of listening to your customers. Mr. Antioco was thinking for them. "Why would they do that?" This sort of thinking gets companies into a lot of trouble. In this case, it allowed a new competitor to enter Blockbuster's market and steal lots of customers. As a matter of fact, Netflix stole us about a month ago.

Working on the Right Thing

I visited with a dietician on Friday. I was searching for advice on how I could reduce my cholesterol. I am just not keen on taking drugs for the next 50 years to solve this problem.

Cholesterol is a leading indicator for developing heart disease. It is cholesterol that attaches itself to the walls of the arteries, calcifies, and forms plaque. It is restrictions in the arteries that causes heart attacks and strokes. So the relationship has always been:

Treatment -> Reduce Cholesterol -> Reduce Heart Disease

Heart disease and cholesterol have become permanently bonded in the public conscious. The trouble is that some treatments for high cholesterol don't necessarily show reductions in the occurrence of heart disease. My dietician says drug therapies can be used to control cholesterol, but they have never been proven to reduce your chances of having a heart attack. That really struck me.

Statins -> Reduced Cholesterol ? Reduced Heart Disease ?

We talked alot about the Portfolio diet. This is range of foods based on the Mediterran diet. It has lots of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, and fish. What is significant about this diet is that it has been studied and proven to lower the chance of developing heart disease and heart related incidents.

Portfolio Diet -> Reduced Heart Disease

I think there is a corollary here for business. Companies often develop measurements to track success. These are often internal measurements meant to promote certain behaviors in the organization. I think often companies don't research and study what (if any) impact these measurements will have on their goals. They don't appreciate the systemic issues surrounding their overall goals.

I have always thought that on-time delivery was one of these types of measurements.

Eliminate Causes of Late Deliveries -> Improve On-Time Delivery -> Improve Customer Retention (Happier Customers)

You can definitely make a strong case for correlation between on-time delivery and customer retention. Customers won't put up with bad promises for very long and take their business elsewhere if they have to.

When people start to look at the causes of late deliveries, they see all sorts of things. Typos in the order taking. Freight company takes an extra day to get it there. Material shortage. Change from product development group. Failure in quality testing.

Fixing any one (or all) of these things will improve the delivery metric. I would make the argument that none of those fixes really improved your customer retention. You simply improved a measurement.

Eliminate Material Shortages -> Improve On-Time Delivery ?Improve Customer Retention (Happier Customers)?

You have to look at the company on a systemic level. If you want to improve on-time delivery, you need to get your lead time to as close to zero as possible. The whole company has to change the way they do business to enable that change. Product Design. Factory layout. Vendor Quality. The systemic improvement in performance will undoubtedly improve customer retention.

Reduce Leadtime -> Improve Customer Retention (Happier Customers)

To bring it back to the cholesterol story, in some ways, people are fooling by taking medication. The need to take a systemic approach to their problem. They to stop smoking. They need to exercise. They need to change what they eat.

So, measure the right thing and figure out the rights things to impact the measurement in business (and in life).

The Office

I can't recommend strong enough the BBC series The Office.

I rented the first season at Blockbuster last week and spent the week watching the six episodes. The characters of David, Tim, Dawn, and Gareth are wonderful caricatures of today's business office.

It is funny and serious.

Be sure to watch the documentary that comes with the series. It is an outstanding behind-the-scenes on how the series came to be.

Rent it or buy it. You'll love it.

Succession Planning

"Though both Mr. [VJ] Voshi and Ms. [Ann] Livermore are well-regarded, insiders in charge of a single operation at a huge company often fail to ascend to the highest post because directors don't think they run a big enough unit to qualify."

This from a WSJ article [sub. needed] yesterday on who will follow in Carly's footsteps.

The statement above describes a huge problem in Corporate America and a failure at most companies. CEOs and boards need to have processes in place to develop internal leaders. Voshi and Livermore are perfectly qualified to run HP and one of the two of them are exactly was HP needs right now. The company needs someone who understands the culture and raise the morale of the troops.

I have firsthand experience from General Electric. GE's focus on creating managers is well reported. Jack Welch's replacement process started seven years before his retirement. GE has a set of positions that future company leaders go through. You can look at who is on the way up by what people are taking jobs on some the "training ground" businesses. Next you see people taking over some of the smaller businesses. Then a stint in Europe or Asia. If successful, that leads to a leading bigger business when another star is hired away. That is the nature of things there.

If you don't have the people within the walls of your company that can run it, you are not hiring the right people.

All the talk of Carly

Can we all agree on a few of things:

1. There was alot of talk when Carly Fiorina took over HP. She was the first women to take over a company of that size and HP was the first tech company. It was a first and firsts are always big.

2. The board brought her in because they thought things had to change. The way HP was working was perceived not to be working. The Compaq deal was the change she thought needs to take place. Lots of people disagreed, but she got the deal done. I think you can judge her performance after being there four years.

3. Her firing is as big as her hiring. This was a matter of time. She didn't fit with The HP Way. She didn't seem to get it. Again there is going to be lots of talk. The stories were already written. She was helping write some of them. I mean look at Fortune last week.

Another way to contribute to the SE Asia Relief

For the next week, Lisa at Management Craft is offering her ebook New Year's Resolutions For Leaders for $5.00 and she is donating the entire amount to the Red Cross and Mercy Corps.

It contains great advice as we start the New Year. It is a true win-win. You can help yourself while helping others.

When I think open source business...

When I think of transparency and operating as an open source business, I think of what BzzAgent is doing with their blog.

The latest example is the post asking where they ask their stakeholders "Who Would You Hire?" They provided descriptions of the two finalists' backgrounds and looked to readers for their feedback. This week Bzzagent announced the person they hired and gave reasons for the decision.

Back in May, they shared an internal memo that included their cash burn rate and plans for obtaining additional capital.

I think what they are doing is bold.

Quote of the Week

"Work is a continuous series of annoyances" -My Wife

Beer.

When I am offered a "cocktail", beer is my drink of choice. I came of age during the microbrew renaissance. I was drawn into the newness and the variety craft brews offered. When I visit a city, I always find the microbrewery/restaurant. Almost without exception, you find great beer and really good food. When I was in San Francisco at BlogOn, I visited three such establishments.

I have taken my interest to the next level and started doing some homebrewing. For those who haven't, it is easy to do. You can be brewing with a $50 investment in equipment. The ingredients for a 5 gallon batch (~50 bottles) cost about $25. It takes six to eight weeks from start to drink. I just started drinking my second batch and it has turned out really good. My two recommendations are (1) buying a copy of Homebrewing for Dummies and (2) visiting the website of Midwest Homebrewing Supplies.

This whole entry was inspired by two beer business articles I ran across on Friday. The first was in the October 18th edition of Fortune. The New King of Beers is a profile of Europe's InBev. You may not have heard of the company, but you definitely know their brands - Bass, Beck's, Labatt's, Rolling Rock, Skol, and Stella Artois. The surprise for me was that they are the world's largest beer producer (161 million barrels to No. 2 Anheuser-Busch's 130 million). AB usually gets the nod as the world's biggest, because their revenues are larger ($13.8 billion to InBev's $11.3 billion).

The second article was a book excerpt that I found in the Wall Street Journal [sub. needed]. The book is called Travels with Barley: A Journey through Beer Culture in America by Ken Wells (Free Press, Oct. 2004). I liked his stories of visiting Memphis to find out what Elvis drank and visiting Woody's, "an extremely famous beer joint in the town of Caruthersville [Missouri]. The main reason it was famous...was that Woody's had a firm policy of not serving beer in bottles because bottles, well, are just too hard on the human head." I have added this one to my Christmas list.

OK, here is an interesting story

I like this story about Distant Replays of Atlanta.

[via I can't remember]

Trump Math

The WSJ reports today that reality show use to be the cheap way to program a network. That is changing quickly.

Before Donald Trump agreed to tape a second season of his hit reality show "The Apprentice," he says he told NBC he'd need a few things. More creative control would be nice, and perhaps flashier living quarters for the contestants. And how about a personal publicist?

Then Mr. Trump took out his calculator. NBC paid him about $50,000 an episode the first season. But with his show winning huge ratings, Mr. Trump wanted a fat raise. He heard the six actors on the hit comedy "Friends" each took home about $1.5 million an episode so, as the sole star of "The Apprentice," he figured he should get $9 million per show. Still, his program ran an hour and "Friends" just 30 minutes. Mr. Trump bumped the figure to $18 million. "That seemed fair," he says in an interview. "I'm not being totally facetious."

I think the lesson here is know what you are worth.

Ball Game

I got my Business 2.0 yesterday and the interview on pg. 34 is with Jeff Angus. He runs a blog called Management by Baseball.

First of all, I love new biz blogs. Second, it is great to see a blogger being used as the source for an article in a major business magazine.

Kindred Spirits

I haven't done a post lately on new blogs I am reading. If you read the biz blogs, you have probably already since these. I have linked to many of them over the past couple of months.

There is another reason I am listing them. RSS is going to make blogrolls less revalant . People reading your feed aren't going to see who else you like. I am trying one solution today - post an entry with your new links.

With further ado:

• Evelyn Rodriguez at Crossroads Dispatches (you must go now).
• David Paull at Perception Analyzer Dial.Log
• Robert Scoble and his LinkBlog
• Mark Cuban at BlogMaverick
• Kirsten Osolind at re:invention
• Thinking by Peter Davidson
• Matthew Homann at the non-billable hour
• Scott Miller at Game Matters
• John Zagula and Rich Tong at Marketing Playbook
• David Wolfe at Ageless Marketing
• Sam Decker at Decker Marketing
• Yvonne DiVita at Lip-Sticking
• Mark Ramsey at Radio Marketing Nexus
• Toby Bloomberg at Diva Marketing
• Jeff Kallay at Experience Economy Evangelist
• Shannon at shannonsays.com

There are more I want to share. I'll put another post up later in the week.

Bob Wright in Fortune

Bob Wright has taken NBC from a single public network to a media powerhouse. In the last issue of Fortune (5/31/04), they showed a graph showing how ad-based revenues will go from 95% to 50% with the Vivendi Universal merger.

In this issue (6/14/04), there is a Q&A with the GE vice-chairman. Most of the questions are about how hard life is going with [insert VU merger, endings of Friends/Fraiser, cost of Law & Order]. The only two questions that told you anything were:

Q:Is there one non-NBC show you wish you had?
A: 24

Q:Did you learn anything from the Donald by watching NBC's hit The Apprentice?
A:[Laughs]It reinforced my view that you should be confident and be bold.

Support Your People

There is a great story that Ageless Marketing shares from the "Start the Week" e-newsletter.

Karaoke Capitalism II

I have talked about Swedish authors Jonas Ridderstrle and Kjell Nordstrm a number of times, (here, here, and here). They wrote Funky Business and more recently Karaoke Capitalism.

I still get search hits for Karaoke Capitalism. I wanted to let you know that you can get the new book at 800-CEO-READ. I talked about it on their blog early this week.

Updating Your Values

I wrote about Jack Welch's editorial in the 1/23/04 edition of WSJ. The values Jack always pushed were the 4 E's - energy, energize, edge, and execute.

The annual report for General Electric came out last week. In the Letter to Stakeholders, Jeff Immelt announced a reshaping of the company's values around four actions - Imagine, Solve, Build, and Lead.

From the report:

Imagine at GE is the freedom to dream and the power to make it real. This requires the values of passion and curiosity. Solve reflects GE's unique ability to tackle the world's toughest problems and expresses our values of resourcefulness and accountability. Build requires a preformance culture that creates customer and shareowner value, and the word captures our values of teamwork and commitment. Lead reflects our spirit of optimism that embraces change, and our values of openness and energy; what it will take to win.

It mentioned in the letter that executive development classes suggested the change to "capture the spirit of GE as a growth company".

What do you think of GE's reformulated values?