Cleaning up Incompetence

For the past two weeks (and going for the next two or so) I am really in the overkill Ironman mode trying to clean things up both personally with respect to Own Web Now and professionally with respect to everything that I’m doing.

Have you ever seen a dumbass jock on ESPN scream “We must execute. Execution is the key. We are just not executing” – same stupidity applies in business where you go head first towards the results you’ve set and process you’ve implemented that when it works remarkably well you don’t take your head out of the picture for long enough to see the mounting pile of little problems.

I think that’s something we all struggle with. We’ve been remarkably, by all expectations and projections, successful over the past few years but we’re neither as efficient as we possibly can be nor as focused as we probably should be. That sort of a shotcoming is generally flows from the top down, as you’ve read on this blog before.

What I generally do not talk about is how we overcome and fix the issues that pop up.

Last week was big organizational view / review / rebalance. Since quite few of you run as large of an organization I won’t bore you with those details.

Today, I sat through the pipeline with an axe and went through all the quotes and promises and well wishes we were thinking about doing and I started swinging. When you are struggling you’ll take any deal, any project, sign up for everything that may lead to success. Once you’re successful, you have to rebalance a little and try to be more optimal with your practice instead of chasing any dime. Not that there is anything wrong with chasing per-se, but if your chasing of little stuff impedes your ability to be responsive with the big stuff and you start backing yourself up….. well, you owe your plan a big reality check because things have changed since the time you’ve put it together or since your last measurable accomplishment.

So today I got myself out of the expectations and promises and doubled down on the things we intend to fulfil. Already got the apologies/retractions out and have a goal to have all the outstanding quotes submitted and fulfilled by the end of the week.

This hasn’t been easy, and it has really impacted my ability to be as responsive as I’d like. I know I’ve missed a lot of email responses and IMs as I’ve just flagged the conversations I need to continue but haven’t had the time to give them the just attention and response they deserve.

The point of this whole thing, even condensed down to a single activity like email responses, is that regardless of how big you are you still have the issue of finite resources and finite opportunities you can turn into results. One suffers as a result of the other and the reason why it is done to begin with is to improve your company, services and deliverables as you grow – instead of precipitously declining quality to increase revenues until you’re pretty much the biggest thing out there but everyone thinks you suck (See: AT&T)

How have I done this so far? First, I bumped up my hours from 4-6 a day to about 10-12. I then organized my to-do list not in the order of urgent, important, high priority, standard, normal, low, inquiry but in the the order of resolution and delegation. That is, I tackled the issues that were largely not involving me but were waiting on me as a small part of the equation. This way I can attack things first and hand them back over so they can continue to progress without my direct involvement.

Then moving on to the optimization tasks – instead of doing a process equivalent of data entry and then fixing the issue I’ve moved to fix the issue first and then work through the backlog – this way my pile is static and every issue I handle directly decreases the workload and backlog by that amount. Remember, you don’t fix problems by making a pile of those problems or people complaining about those problems smaller. You fix it by stopping the problems from coming up in the future.

I’m not superhuman. Last night I had some of the Halloween candy and apparently wasn’t watching just how much of it I was eating while working. I decided to take a short nap around 10 PM and the next thing I remember is walking the dog around 7:30 am 🙂 I’ve had to cut out the blogging, marketing, partner calls, movies, lots of TV and sports (haven’t seen a full football game in 2 weeks now) and am back to driving to work with Katie. Each of those activities contributes a few hours a week back to my fixing efforts.

It’s not really easy and I am not complaining – it really is a blessing to have growth pains – but I think it’s important to keep in mind that everything comes at a cost.