We are all challenged by this nebulous thing called the future. The future is the indeterminate period of time that follows the present. Its beginning is predictable, owing to the reality of time and physics. We don’t question it, yet it confounds us, and when we don’t arrive at the future we anticipated, we often feel thwarted. It becomes an unfulfilled expectation or an anticipation that was not delivered on.
Consider this short passage from the poem “To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest, with the Plow” by Robert Burns:
The best laid schemes of mice and men
Go often askew,
And leaves us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!
Still you are blest, compared with me!
The present only touches you:
But oh! I backward cast my eye,
On prospects dreary!
And forward, though I cannot see,
I guess and fear!
Burns expresses a farmer’s regret and apologies to a lowly mouse for plowing his field and cutting through its nest in the cold days of December. He feels he failed the mouse, but he recognizes that perhaps the mouse probably doesn’t view it the way he does. The mouse does not condemn the farmer for what was an unintended mistake—something totally outside the control of the mouse that disrupted its future.
Your future is not predictable, yet while preparing for your future, you may forget to enjoy your experience of the present moment, something that Burns believes the mouse is fully capable of and that he, Burns, is not. I doubt the fear of the future impacts the lives of any other creature on earth besides us humans. It literally dominates us. Oh, to be a mouse!
The farmer reminisces on “prospects dreary,” or bad events that have happened in the past, which he opines prevent him from making progress because he is fearful of repeating mistakes. When you are concerned about the past repeating itself, you hold yourself back not only from entering your future but also from experiencing your present.
As I’ve said, it’s difficult to not be focused on the past. It’s more comfortable that way because it’s all you know. It’s all your employees know. By hanging on to the past a bit longer, you think you can avoid the discomfort of risking the present/past for the possibility of a much bigger future that you fear you may not be able to pull off anyway.
It’s easier to just settle for what you have and never venture out of the safe place that allows you to hang on to your false sense of security. All for what? So that you don’t have to face the fact that you are vulnerable to failure if you take risks? But your ability to produce breakthroughs in your business requires that you experience failure. You need to understand that on the other side of every failure, a breakthrough is waiting. If you accept that, you’ll eagerly await more failures so that you can experience more breakthroughs. To get there, however, you have to be willing to risk your past for a more powerful future.
Are you willing to do that? Right now, maybe not so much. But you’ll get there in Stage Two.
Mapping Your Present/Past
The fear of repeating the past runs the lives of almost all business leaders, and it explains why you don’t have the results you want. If you’re unwilling to let go of your past, then that’s what you’re going to have to settle for. But creating a future is a lot simpler than your past would mislead you to believe. The negative viral memes that make up the Execution Virus in your workplace are a reflection of your past. If only you were saying those memes out loud rather than being unconscious of them, they would have no control over you and the execution of your strategy.
The good news is that when it comes to getting your negative viral memes under control, the old adage “Sunlight is the best disinfectant” applies 100 percent! Exposure of your memes is the most essential part of the process of disconnecting from your past so it won’t dominate your future.
Right now, you might want to make this your mantra: “There is no past. There are only the conversations I have about the past that dominate my actions and thwart the future I say I want.”
Up until now, the past and the memes it has produced in your workplace have had all the power to determine your outcomes.
You can look at Stage Two on your downloaded Process Map.
Once you’ve completed Stage Two, you will have your power back.
Preparing to Lead Stage Three
Here’s what you will do in Stage Three:
Uncover what is missing that, if it were present today, would cause your invented future to be fulfilled.
Determine the missing strategies and processes that you must implement to close the gap.
Determine the human assets that are missing in your organizational structure.
Determine where trust and safety are missing.
Some of these steps involve being able to identify a reverse salient. Reverse salient is a military term. It refers to a backward bulge in the advancing line of a military front. Imagine an army advancing on its enemy in a bowed-forward formation. At any point in that formation, if the enemy establishes a stronghold and is able to push part of that advancing front backward into itself, it creates a reverse salient. A reverse salient causes the forward progress of the military front to slow or stop; it can even put the whole army at risk of collapsing. When this happens, the generals usually pull together resources to address this weakness and bring the reverse salient back in line with the rest of the front. Reverse salients have a way of getting the attention of leaders.
Now let’s apply this concept to your business. Reverse salients are the weaknesses in the systems we operate within, and more important, they are where opportunities are located. Without identifying the reverse salients, many innovators in business would not have been able to see where to focus their efforts to create the amazing world we live in. Identify these weaknesses in your business, and you have the foundation for making progress within your organization and for focusing on the innovations that will give you the greatest opportunity for success.
Thomas Edison was perhaps one of the most prolific observers of reverse salients. We often think of him as the inventor of the lightbulb, but in fact, at least a dozen other inventors did that before him. What Edison recognized was the opportunity to improve upon the incandescent lightbulbs that had already been invented, and he did it in response to a reverse salient: the problems of filament burnout, short life, expensive production, and the impracticality of the invention’s large-scale commercial use. In 1879 Edison solved the reverse salient that made it possible to use an incandescent bulb to light the world.
To bring the reverse salient concept into the present day, a new future for any organization is not possible without identifying a gap, a breach, or an opening that a new future will emerge from. Without this gap, which only you can generate, only the past is possible because nothing is needed or wanted; there are no reverse salients. If it’s not possible to perceive a gap, then there is nothing for you to cause into existence. Transformation begins and ends in the gap you create and stand inside of.
Mapping the gap is one of the most important elements for executing a future-based strategy. Now that you’ve identified the future you are committed to (Stage One) and you’ve cleared the past out of the equation by telling the brutal truth about it (Stage Two), you can begin to explore your gap. You want to lower yourself into the abyss—go through the funnel, step into the gap, and find out what’s missing that you couldn’t see while negative viral memes were running the show.
You can look at Stage Three on your downloaded Process Map.
“I have not failed.
I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
— Thomas A. Edison
“Sweating the Assets”
In Stage Four, you will analyze, understand, and negotiate new processes. To accomplish that, you will do these things:
Establish and reinforce ConnectionPoints™ values, processes, and practices—which place service over self-interest.
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Determine the priorities for staying on track.
Determine the promises for action.
Determine the criteria for satisfaction and who will manage satisfaction and hold people accountable.
Establish the ongoing use of the Accountability Scorecard (available online at www.ThirteenersBook.com).
The outcome of business operations is the harvesting of value from assets owned by a business. Assets can be either physical or intangible. An example of value derived from a physical asset, like a building, is rent. An example of value derived from an intangible asset, like an idea, is a royalty. The effort involved in “harvesting” this value is what constitutes business operations cycles.
Typical business operations encompass three fundamental management imperatives that collectively aim to maximize value harvested from business assets:
Generate recurring income.
Increase the value of the business assets.
Secure the income and value of the business.
This has often been referred to as “sweating the assets.”
One of the greatest unrecognized assets of your business is an act of speech called “A Promise to Take Action.” Have you ever considered a promise to take some kind of action as an asset, let alone valued it as such? Probably not.
Yet people in your company are making promises all day long. There are overt promises that people agree to make, and then there are the actions they take to fulfill their promises. Promises are intangible assets. How effective are you at wringing the value out of them?
The Accountability Struggle
Wherever there’s a struggle with the practices and principles of “accountability,” I’ve noticed the culture of the company becoming drained of its energy. A lack of mastery in accountability means everything is up for grabs. When accountability is weak, so is your ability to compete effectively.
When no one can tell the truth about what is and isn’t happening, when no one can hold others to their word, when people can’t be counted on, and when accountability isn’t implemented, then integrity is lost, and you can end up creating a negative viral meme that undermines performance.
Results of Poor Accountability Practices
Organizations with poor accountability practices have the highest failure rates in business, and they have the greatest difficulty achieving the results they want and need—let alone the ones they’ve created a strategic plan to achieve.
It’s not that people don’t want accountability; it’s just that it’s probably the most misunderstood practice in business. That explains why good accountability practices are missing to one extent or another in just about every single organization. And it’s why at least 87 percent of companies are not executing their strategy. If you want your company to become a THIRTEENER, you must master accountability.
What Is Accountability?
What does it mean to be accountable? Put differently, what does it mean to be count-on-able? Few people really know; and implementing accountability is a struggle when we don’t even know what it is.
It starts with leadership. How can any organization hope to accomplish its mission when the leader struggles to get people to commit to take action and then fails to hold them accountable when they don’t? What do you imagine that does to the future of your company?
Ninety-five percent of CEOs have some plan for achieving growth and profit this year. Every business leader has a vision for what’s possible in his or her business—or at least you do now. Otherwise, you may be wasting your time in business. Perhaps you’re struggling with how to achieve your vision—or with getting your employees to contribute to achieving it. If you’re ever going to achieve your vision and accomplish your mission, you’re going to have to rely on other people who commit to helping you get there. If people don’t keep their promises to do their work and there is no accountability for nonperformance, then low expectations, mediocrity, and failed goals take over.
It’s Time to Rock the Boat
CEOs and entrepreneurs like you are often the most creative breed of business leaders. You think differently than everyone else. Most of you are people oriented; you love the people who work with you. Some of your employees are your best friends; you may have even hired them because they are. You certainly don’t want to upset the most important people in your life. You want to get along with everyone. And you want them to like you.
Perhaps those relationships helped you establish your company, and some of your current employees sacrificed to help you achieve what you have. Unfortunately, all of this can lead to problems in establishing accountability.
What I often hear is, “How can I now ask them to stand up and make promises and then get on their case when they don’t do what they said they would? I know it’s a bad precedent to set, but I don’t want to lose my best and most loyal employees. If I ask them to be accountable when they don’t perform, they’ll leave. Then what will I do?”
How can you produce the kind of results you need when you don’t know whether you can count on people and you’re worrying about offending them when they let you down? How can you plan for the future if you don’t think your teams will be able to get you there? What kind of plans will you come up with for a team that may or may not take action? What happens to your integrity as a leader when you don’t handle the critical issue of accountability?
When you structure your relationships in business around individuals rather than around accountability, performance suffers. Your relationships not only end up costing you financially when the job doesn’t get done, but also those same relationships will suffer if you settle for mediocre performance. When promises to perform are excused, you become “reasonable.” Resentments build, and unresolved problems have the potential to make things much worse.
How can you turn this around and make accountability work for you and your employees—especially for you?
Sweating the Assets
“Sweating the assets”—which I defined earlier in this chapter—is not a new term. It seems to be a lost concept from long ago.
If you have developed a new way to solve an old problem, the model for that solution is recognized as intellectual property (IP). IP is inherent in the form of information used to transfer value to the user or client. You have likely invested extraordinary amounts of money—and emotional currency—in the development of your IP, and if someone were to copy it, you would do everything in your power to protect it, even if that meant taking the matter to court.
Therefore, an asset doesn’t necessarily need to be represented by a number on the balance sheet. For example, it’s hard to value your employees or your distribution channels or your IP on a balance sheet. In the same way, you can’t assign a monetary value to what people say they are going to do. Yet, in a real sense, a statement, such as a promise to do something, is one of those high-value assets that often is overlooked. If it is written in a contract, you have the solid evidence of a promise being fulfilled as a future asset. But contracts only rarely appear on the balance sheet as an asset—the outcome does, but not the promise itself. It probably has not been your practice to focus on “harvesting” a promise’s value because we tend to overlook that. As a result, we rarely manage that asset very well. But, as with any asset, a promise will either increase or decline in value depending on how well it is managed.
“Sweating the assets” means we take existing assets (and that includes promises) and find ways to add value to them so that they grow and produce a new return.
A good example of sweating tangible assets comes from Canadian Pacific Railway. Several years ago, this company was looking for ways to expand into a commodity transportation business because the paradigm had shifted to airline travel. It discovered it had a mothballed fleet of vintage rail cars. So it fixed up those cars to re-create the era of 1920s luxury and began offering coast-to-coast high-end rail travel. The company took an asset with little apparent value, added value to it, and produced a greater r
eturn on that asset. It sweated its assets.
Southwest Airlines did the same when it found itself losing revenue. Instead of buying better airplanes or new equipment, it looked for assets—some of which were intangible—to help them produce better value for their customers. What was born was a new process for moving bags using existing equipment, which led to the ten-minute turnaround. By sweating its assets, Southwest discovered unrealized value inside the organization.
Inventing Accountability
Accountability is a function of alignment; they go hand in hand. If you find there’s no alignment, there will likely be no accountability. If there’s no accountability, there’s a pretty good chance there will be no alignment.
Accountability most likely has not been missing from your organization in the past, even though you may believe it has. Here’s why: Something can’t be missing if you haven’t perceived it in the first place. But going forward, there’s a new slate for accountability.
To create accountability, you need to get comfortable with the idea that there’s nothing wrong; there’s nothing to fix.
If you don’t understand accountability, it’s not missing.
Accountability is invented at the point that people
declare their alignment to a mission and assert their
commitment to the result that’s desired.
Getting Clear on the Mission
Accountability is a function of what people say is important to the outcomes for the organization. This requires both employees and leaders to be clear about the company’s mission, and in many cases, that’s highly unlikely. In a study of employees and managers I read several years ago, it was reported that only 5 percent of all employees—managers included—knew the mission of the organization they worked for. A lack of accountability naturally followed. After all, it would be difficult to hold someone accountable for contributing to your mission if he or she weren’t clear about the mission in the first place.
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